Being Bernard Berenson

Being Bernard Berenson

Bernard Berenson, the Making of a Legend

Controversy swirls around Bernard Berenson today as it did in his middle years, before and between two world wars. Who was this man, this supreme connoisseur of Italian Renaissance painting? How did he support his elegant estate near Florence, his Villa I Tatti? What exactly were his relations with the art dealer Joseph Duveen? What part did his wife, Mary, play in his scholarly work and professional career? The answers are to be found in the day-to-day record of his life as he lived it--as reported at first hand in his and Mary's letters and diaries and reflected in the countless personal and business letters they received. His is one of the most fully documented lives of this century. Ernest Samuels, having spent twenty years studying the thousands of letters and other manuscripts, presents his story in absorbing detail. Berenson helped Isabella Stewart Gardner build her great collection and performed similar though lesser services for other wealthy Americans. It was merely an avocation and a useful source of income; his vocation was scholarship. But after 1904, when the book opens, his expertise was in ever-greater demand: a purchaser's only assurance of the authorship of an Italian painting was the opinion of an expert, and in this field Berenson was pre-eminent. Increasingly he was drawn into the lucrative world of the art dealers; inevitably Joseph Duveen found it essential to enlist his services, at first ad hoc, then by contractual agreement. Samuels charts the course of Berenson's long association with Duveen Brothers, detailing the financial arrangements, the humdrum chores and major contested attributions, the periodic clashes between the stubborn scholar and the arrogant entrepreneur. The portrayal of Berenson's relationship with Mary is especially intriguing: a union of opposites in all but brains and wit, bonded--despite love affairs, jealousies, recriminations--no longer by passion but by shared concerns. Impinging on their lives are those of a huge circle of friends and acquaintances in America and the beau monde of Europe. Both as biography and as a chapter of social and cultural history, it is a compelling book.

Hidden Lives / Secret Gardens

hidden lives / secret gardens is a synthetic history about gardens and human sexuality. Written in an accessible style for the garden enthusiast, the serious landscape designer, and those interested in the lives of international celebrities, the book explores the very roots of Modernism as begun in Florence, Italy in the very first year of the twentieth century. For the past twenty-years, R. Terry Schnadelbach, FAAR, Professor of Landscape Architecture, University of Florida, has researched the Modernist era in landscape architecture. He authored a book, Ferruccio Vitale, Landscape Architect of the Country Place Era, on the Florentine landscape architect, who brought to America both the formal garden as well as its first Modernist landscapes. In hidden lives / secret gardens, Schnadelbach exposes the engaging and intertwined lives of a group of expatriates, their secluded hillside villas and secret new gardens that ushered a new direction in garden design. Three successive new gardens at Villas Gamberaia, La Pietra and I Tatti were among the earliest Modernist landscapes and were an inspiration many landscape professionals in Britain and America. While hidden lives / secret gardens manuscript focuses on the revival of the Renaissance aesthetic in Florence and paints a picture of each garden's history, it explores the new and emerging field of sexual psychology through the hidden lives of the Villa's owners and designers, revealing their artistic life styles, their commercial and sexual mores.