The Making of a Connoisseur

I have been enjoying Earnest Samuel's two-volume biography of Bernard Berenson immensely. I became fully aware of the connoisseur of renaissance painting and history after being given a collection of personal letters written between Berenson and the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper.

The "Letters from Oxford" are hilarious, malevolent, and full of peerless wit. I re-read them for a fifth time while in the hospital for the birth of our daughter. But I digress.

Boston's literary and cultueral flourishing of the late 19th century has pressed its stamp on much of the world (the names of buildings, cultural institutions, celebrated architecture) that I grew up in and have returned to inhabit as an adult. Names like William James, Santayana, Isabella Stuart-Gardiner, Charles William Elliot have always had vague associations with New England high culture in my mind but I knew relatively little about their social milieu as it actually existed.

That, coupled with a tendresse for Venetian painting perhaps expalins my fascination with the book. Berenson became a wealthy man as well as a figure of artistic renown for his ability to catalogue and evaluate renaissance paintings. I suspect his almost complete obscurity today is a consequence of the way in which technology has deprecated these skills and the practical purposes of cumbersome art books.