Artful Itineraries by Fisher Paul;

Author:Fisher, Paul;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2013-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Three The Contriving of the Connoisseur

Bernard Berenson as Mythomane of Art

DOI: 10.4324/9781315054100-3

Looking back on the beginnings of his career in the 1940s, Bernard Berenson described himself in the 1880s as a mythomane—as a person who liked to make up stories about himself.1 This French term, if it was appropriate to the young Berenson who traveled in Europe in 1887 after leaving Harvard, also applied to the elderly and established connoisseur who in 1949 published yet another “sketch” of his life and work. Throughout his career, that is, Bernard Berenson self-consciously created not only a reputation as an expert historian of Italian art but also an authorial persona that permitted him this cultural power.

In 1949 Berenson could look back on a mythical moment when he had conceived of his life vocation. This moment, styled as an epiphany or a conversion, took place at a “rickety table” in Bergamo where Berenson can portray himself as mapping out his future for his friend, the aesthete and art collector Enrico Costa. “‘You see, Enrico,’” the young Berenson says, “‘nobody before us has dedicated his entire activity, his entire life, to connoisseurship. … We shall give ourselves up to learning, to distinguish between authentic works of an Italian painter of the fifteenth or sixteenth century, and those commonly ascribed to him.’”2 This speech, “constructed” in feel, more accurately represents the secure hindsight of 1949 than the carer uncertainty Berenson felt in 1889, two years out of Harvard and four years before he published his first significant art-historical article. Like Henry James, Bernard Berenson constructed authorship and authority sequentially, as his career developed, as well as retrospectively, as in this later version of his career initiation. But unlike Henry James, Berenson strove to create an authority that was not only literary but also scientific, able to “distinguish between authentic works of an Italian painter … and those commonly ascribed to him.” Berenson as connoisseur probed not the problems of representation I have examined in Henry James's art criticism but rather questions of the authenticity and authorship in works of art. But like Henry James's, his career, far from being the simple trajectory mythologized in Sketch for a Self-Portrait, incorporates a number of complicated cultural strategies and exposes the complex cultural politics of the late nineteenth century in America.

Berenson's construction of authorship, that is, proves “complex” especially because of his uneasy relation, as an ethnic Jew, to the Anglo-Saxon cultural establishment on both sides of the Atlantic. Berenson's early mentors in art-historical studies, such as Charles Eliot Norton at Harvard and Walter Pater at Oxford, epitomized such establishments. Though Berenson significantly threw off these authorities to side with “scientific” art historians like Giovanni Morelli and Jean-Paul Richter—who may have also represented a more cosmopolitan or at least more Continental viewpoint—he started his career in Boston and returned to Europe in 1887 stocked with Bostonian notions of art and backed by Bostonian capital.

Berenson's move from the Jewish ghetto of the North End to Harvard demonstrates an ambition to “climb” socially or culturally that shapes his subsequent career.

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