Bernard Berenson, connoisseur- connoisseurship

Berenson, Bernard (Bernhard Valvrojenski) known to friends as "BB," "Doris" (code name by the firm of Duveen)( 1865- 1959) Place died: Settignano, Florence, Italy (Villa I Tatti)

Consultant to the major American museums and collectors in the early 20th century. His father emigrated to Boston from Lithuania with his family in 1875, changing their family name to "Berenson." A Jew by birth, he converted to Christianity and was baptized in 1885. He attended Harvard University, where he studied under Charles Eliot Norton. Through his connections with Norton he met the Boston collector Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840-1924). He moved to Oxford, England, where he became part of the circle of the collector esthete Edward Perry "Ned" Warren (1860-1928). At Oxford he encountered another influential Renaissance scholar, Herbert Horne. Through Horne, Berenson met the art historian Jean Paul Richter. Richter urged Berenson to read the writings of Giovanni Morelli, who tremendously influenced Berenson's method. In 1889, he met the famous connoisseur/art historian Giovanni Cavalcasselle and began publishing various studies on art, using the connoisseurship approach to art based upon the writings of Morelli. 1890 He met Morelli personally; in England he met a married woman, Mary Smith Costelloe, who subsequently left her husband and small children the following year to follow Berenson; he also began dealing in art, scouting pictures for Richter, the London dealer Otto Gutekunst (ca. 1865-after 1939) and Warren. Berenson acquired his first works as a dealer/facilitator (Impressionist works and a Piero di Cosimo) for his friend, the British collector James Burke, in 1892. His book Venetian Painters, largely a rewrite of Mary Berenson's notes, appeared in 1894. The book, tracing the history of Venetian painting over four centuries, became the first in a series of four studies on Italian schools (painting styles). Berenson stated his method in an 1894 essay, "The Rudiments of Connoisseurship (A Fragment)," which later appeared in The Study and Criticism of Italian Art."

http://www.dictionaryofarthistorians.org/berensonb.htm

Bernard Berenson: The Making of a Connoisseur, Per Ernest Samuels
http://books.google.es/books?id=FdhmgQxW0lcC&lpg=PP1&dq=berenson&hl=ca&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q&f=false
Bernard Berenson, the making of a legend Per Ernest Samuels, Jayne Samuels
http://books.google.es/books?id=fzdlbNBUsJsC&lpg=PP1&dq=berenson&hl=ca&pg=PA88#v=onepage&q&f=false

Berenson: A Biography
Sylvia Sprigge
0 Ressenyes
Kessinger Publishing, 2007 - 312 pàgines
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