Bernard Berenson by Rachel Cohen

Author:Rachel Cohen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2013-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

Belle da Costa Greene, 1911, photograph by Clarence White. Biblioteca Berenson, Villa I Tatti—The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, courtesy of the President and Fellows of Harvard College.

Generally, when asked, Belle da Costa Greene would give her ancestry as Portuguese, and the “da Costa” in her name was meant to support this assertion.35 She was a mystery, part of her allure for many. But in fact, her father was Richard Greener, the first African American man to graduate from Harvard, and her mother was Genevieve Ida Fleet, a music teacher from a successful African American family in Washington, DC. The brilliant Richard Greener was passionate about art and its history and, even a little earlier than Berenson, had dreamed of going to Europe to study art when he graduated in 1870. He became instead, in succession, the University of South Carolina’s first African American professor and librarian; the dean of Howard University; the secretary of the Ulysses S. Grant Monument (J. P. Morgan was its treasurer); and eventually US consul to Vladivostok. It was, however, a life of struggles, and Belle Greener saw her father treated demeaningly and dismissed from his hard-won positions. Her mother wanted to be taken for white, which was divisive in a household where the father was known for his racial pride. The marriage came apart, and as an adult, Greene almost never saw her father.

Living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, the remaining Greeners came to be identified as white in the censuses, and their name changed, too. The story of Belle Greene’s early education is cloudy—there seems to have been a summer library course at Amherst, possibly a job at the New York Public Library—she surfaced at the library at Princeton, in 1902. Like her father a gifted librarian, she drew the attention of Junius Morgan, J. P. Morgan’s nephew, who held a position at the Princeton library and was looking for someone to bring order to his uncle’s massive collections. Junius Morgan apparently felt confident, in 1905, that the twenty-six-year-old Belle da Costa Greene was the woman for the job, and her subsequent career bore him out.

It was through her job with Morgan that she found a place in the world. There she built a rich and varied collection that conserved an enormous number of valuable texts and made them available to scholars. Perhaps her most famous acquisition was the entire discovered archive of the Coptic monastery of Saint Michael in Egypt, now known as the Hamouli manuscripts. Greene worked with great autonomy; in the case of the Hamouli manuscripts, it was she who negotiated the price, decided to have them restored at the best facility in the world, the Vatican Library, and located the experts to catalog them. Owing in significant part to her choices, the Morgan Library remains one of the great collections of manuscripts and books in the world.

By the time she met Berenson, in 1909, she had been working for Morgan nearly four years, and she lived in a world densely related to Morgan’s.

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