My dear BB ...: the letters of Bernard Berenson and Kenneth Clark, 1925-1959 9780300207378, 9780300216066, 0300216068

Table of contents :
Cover page
Halftitle page
Title page
Copyright page
Dedication
Epigraph
Contents
Acknowledgements
Preface
One Hopes and Expectations 1925-1926
Chronology
Two Life at I Tatti, the Lists and the Florentine Drawings, Marriage and Parenthood 1927-1929
Chronology
Addendum
Three The Exhibition of Italian Art, Italian Politics, Windsor Drawings 1929-1931
Chronology
Four Oxford, the Ashmolean 1931-1933
Chronology
Five The National Gallery, Surveyor of the King's Pictures, Predicaments and Crises 1933-1939
Chronology
Six War and Separations 1939-1945. Seven Picking up the Threads 1945-1947Chronology
Eight Reading and Writing, Talking and Travelling 1948-1953
Chronology
Nine Television, Journalism, Altamura, Conoscing 1953-1958
Chronology
Ten Farewell 1959
Afterword
Appendix 1
Appendix 2
Appendix 3
Dramatis Personae
Selected Bibliography
Index.

Citation preview

The Letters of Bernard Berenson and Kenneth Clark, 1925–1959

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The Letters of Bernard Berenson and Kenneth Clark, 1925–1959 Edited and annotated by Robert Cumming

yale university press New Haven and London iii

Introduction and commentary copyright © 2015 by Robert Cumming. Letters by Bernard Berenson copyright © Biblioteca Berenson, I Tatti – The Harvard University Center for Renaissance Studies, courtesy of the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Unpublished letters by Kenneth Clark copyright © The Estate of Kenneth Clark. The letters by Kenneth Clark are reproduced by permission of The Estate of Kenneth Clark c/o the Hanbury Agency Ltd, 28 Moreton Street, London, sw1v 2pe. All rights reserved. Plates 1–20, 38, 40, 41 copyright © Biblioteca Berenson, I Tatti – The Harvard University Center for Renaissance Studies, courtesy of the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Plates 21, 22, 24–37, 39 copyright © 2014/15 The Estate of Kenneth Clark. Plate 23 copyright © Robert Cumming. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Designed by Paul Sloman Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ International Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Berenson, Bernard, 1865-1959 [Correspondence. Selections] My dear BB ... : the letters of Bernard Berenson and Kenneth Clark, 1925–1959 / edited by Robert Cumming. pages cm ISBN 978-0-300-20737-8 (hardback) 1. Berenson, Bernard, 1865–1959–Correspondence. 2. Clark, Kenneth, 1903–1983–Correspondence. 3. Art historians–Correspondence. I. Cumming, Robert, 1945–editor. II. Clark, Kenneth, 1903–1983. Correspondence. Selections. III. Title. n7483.b47a4 2015 709.2’2–dc23 2014040807 A catalogue record for this book is available from The British Library

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This book is dedicated to the memory of Umberto Morra Much loved friend of Bernard Berenson and Kenneth Clark and of many others

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Nobody really exists in himself, but exists through encounters with others; everyone differs according to his various friendships . . . Bernard Berenson, 16 June 1931 (as recorded by Umberto Morra, Conversations with Berenson)

If asked which has given me most pleasure in my life, art, writing, and friendship, I think I would answer friendship. Kenneth Clark, Another Part of the Wood

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Contents

Acknowledgements

viii

Preface

xii

1

Hopes and Expectations, 1925–1926

1

2

Life at I Tatti, the Lists and the Florentine Drawings, Marriage and Parenthood, 1927–1929

19

3

The Exhibition of Italian Art, Italian Politics, Windsor Drawings, 1929–1931

55

4

Oxford, the Ashmolean, 1931–1933

97

5

The National Gallery, Surveyor of the King’s Pictures, Predicaments and Crises, 1933–1939

123

6

War and Separations, 1939–1945

221

7

Picking up the Threads, 1945–1947

239

8

Reading and Writing, Talking and Travelling, 1948–1953

277

9

Television, Journalism, Altamura, Conoscing, 1953–1958

379

10

Farewell, 1959

467

Afterword

478

Appendices

489

Dramatis Personae

507

Selected Bibliography

552

Index

556

vii

Acknowledgements

The seed from which this book grew was planted in the early 1970s. I was in my mid-20s, and in the process of changing a career in the legal world to a hoped for new career in the art world. As part of the transformation, I was advised that it was necessary to spend time in Italy. The Fates benignly decreed that I should do so in the ancient Tuscan hilltop town of Cortona. In those days it was still a genuine market town, slightly run-down, visited by relatively few tourists and quite different from the fashionable holiday destination that it has now become. It was a leap in the dark but the small expatriate community of writers and artists who were mostly Anglo-American, and some of the Italian locals, looked kindly on me, my friends and the girl I was to marry, and they took us under their wing. Principal among these generous souls, some of whom became lifelong friends, was Umberto Morra, ‘Il Conte Rosso’, who lived in the imposing but unostentatious villa he had inherited from his mother, at Metelliano, tucked away behind a high wall at the foot of the hill on which Cortona was perched. He was then in his early seventies, elderly, lame but with a twinkle in his eye and a mobile gargoyle-like grin, and was regularly visited by many distinguished and familiar names in the art and political worlds from all over Europe. I gradually came to realise that Umberto Morra was one of the unsung heroes of the Italian anti-fascist intelligentsia of the pre-war years: a man of letters who had been Director of the Italian Institute in London after the war, of noble lineage but of consummate modesty and impeccable integrity, and in old age still of considerable influence. Clearly much loved, and with the gift of making friends, his goodwill was a great blessing to a young unknown foreigner for, once our rapport was known, it bestowed on me a certain respect by association in the eyes of the local community. I also learned that Morra had been an intimate member of the Berenson household, and a much valued friend of ‘K’. Morra took an interest in my developing career and, as well as being a regular guest at his table, I went to stay with him one summer and so sampled at first hand the full measure of his spartan living conditions. The fare was simple, prepared and served by his faithful manservant, Mario. Lunch and dinner were always viii

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preceded with a glass of Punt e Mes, which he called ‘Carpano’, a dark bitter vermouth from his native Piedmont, an implied tribute to his military father, and concluded with cake and vin santo, an appreciative tribute to his adopted Tuscany and his artistic, beautiful, mother. These regular visits to Cortona came to an end when, on leaving Cambridge at the end of my study of art history, I was offered a job at the Tate Gallery, as a lecturer in their education department, and became engaged to Carolyn, who worked in the Modern Picture Department at Christie’s. I corresponded with Umberto Morra until his death in 1981 but always harboured in my mind the idea that one day I should write a book about him and try to gain for him, in the English-speaking world, the recognition that he justly deserved but which, with his modesty and self-effacement, he always deflected. The possibility of making this a reality occurred in 2007 when Carolyn and I had an opportunity to visit I Tatti.We asked in advance if we could see any archival material relating to Morra and the Berenson household. What we discovered was one rather small file, containing but a few letters. It was a great disappointment. However, as we sat looking at this sparse material, a familiar voice seemed to say: ‘Well, I don’t know what you expected! I spent a lot of my time here at I Tatti, and of course you do not exchange letters with people that you see every day. Also, as you know, I set no particular store by material possessions, and once I had answered a letter I put the letter I had received in the waste paper basket. I didn’t bother with archives. However, I don’t want you to feel that you have had a wasted journey. May I suggest that, as you are here, you ask for the Clark files?’ We did so and were rewarded by several well filled folders which contained not just Clark’s letters to Berenson but some of Berenson’s letters to Clark. The seed that was planted in the early 1970s began to sprout. Although the proposed book on Morra was thus superseded, as if with his encouragement, our interest in Morra was an element which stimulated the theme of the Convegno, organised at I Tatti in 2009, to mark the fiftieth anniversary of Berenson’s death. The Convegno was devoted to exploring the lesser-known members of the Berenson circle, and Carolyn and I were asked to participate with a paper on Umberto Morra. This is included in Appendix 1 of this book. With the benefit of hindsight I wish I had asked more questions of Morra about his life at I Tatti; but most people, as they get older, regret not having enquired more when they were younger, and perhaps the fact that I did not pester him with endless interrogations about Berenson was something that he welcomed. Who knows? It was only later that I realised that the age difference between Morra and myself was the same as that between Berenson and Clark, and that Morra was something of a mentor and father figure for me, my own father having died when I was a teenager. Clark and Berenson have had a considerable influence by their writings, and through Clark’s television series Civilisation. From the first, I could see the point

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of what they were saying, and their passionate first-hand response to works of art has always seemed to me indispensable, to be learned from and to be worth sharing with others. Thus, when eventually I joined Carolyn at Christie’s, with a blank piece of paper and an idea to establish an educational enterprise to teach future dealers, auctioneers, curators and collectors about art and the workings of the art world, with the emphasis on the first-hand study of works of art in museums and galleries and in the sale room, I was, albeit unconsciously, treading in their footprints. This book has been a genuine labour of love, a means of acknowledging the beneficial influences of Clark and Berenson and of thanking Umberto Morra for his friendship and his guidance. The book is therefore dedicated to him. En route, many people have taken an interest. Prominent among these are William Mostyn-Owen who worked with Berenson, was a member of the household and was at Christie’s; also Ronald Vance, George Deem and Lyndall Passerini, who were members of the Cortona community. Carolyn and I are fortunate to enjoy the encouragement and friendship of Jane Clark, Alan Clark’s widow, and of Clark’s daughter, Colette. Lino Pertile, Joe Connors and all the staff at I Tatti have been unfailingly helpful, notably the present Archivist, Ilaria della Monica; it was her predecessor, Fiorella Superbi, who first handed over the Clark files. James Stourton, David Ekserdjian and Francis Russell read the entire manuscript in draft, made many helpful suggestions and corrected numerous errors. They have shared their information and experience with unstinting generosity. David is a wizard at solving difficult clues about works of art and elucidating obscure references. His contributions and suggestions have been too numerous to acknowledge individually, but they have been invaluable. James’s knowledge of Clark and his era is without equal. Numerous others have read selected chapters in draft and been equally helpful and generous: Jon Whitely, Jonathan Conlin, Charles Saumarez-Smith, Hugh and Janie Roberts, Catherine Porteous, Jane Martineau, Caroline Elam. Thanks also to those who have allowed their brains to be picked or who added to our explorations: Stuart Lyons, Martin Mcaughlin, Benedetta Origo, Peter Rumley, Caroline Moorhead, Jane Ferguson, Ivo Vincioni, Louis Jebb. The errors and infelicities, are, however, mine alone. Thanks are also due to the staff of the London Library: without their ability and willingness to find and acquire books, and without their e-library, the research for this book would have been infinitely more laborious and difficult; to Brian Allen for introducing me to Gillian Malpass at Yale University Press, who was enthusiastic about the book from the start; and to Katharine Ridler, an attentive copy-editor. Principal and profusest thanks are due to my loving companion and collaborator from those very first days in Cortona, Carolyn. We have sat side by side in the archives at I Tatti and Tate Britain transcribing the letters and puzzling over them, always with shared enjoyment. Carolyn is far better at deciphering

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sprawling and spidery handwriting than I am, and her attention to detail and proof-reading skills far outclass mine. At home, and with friends, we have had the pleasure of discussing how it all fits together, the right order for the letters, who or what is being referred to, and how certain aspects of our own lives and interests correspond with the lives of those who appear in the letters. It has been like piecing together and solving an enormous jigsaw-cum-cryptic-crossword and we hope that in the end the pieces have come together accurately, and most of the clues have been correctly solved. It became a matter of honour to try to unravel as many of them as possible, and establish identities for people and works of art. Inevitably, some names and works of art resolutely refused to reveal their identities in spite of our best efforts, and of those whose brains we picked. They are therefore passed over without comment and not footnoted in the text. However, if any reader is successful in identifying them, an email to mydearbb@ outlook.com would be greatly appreciated. Not long after we were married, Umberto Morra sent a letter in which he wrote: ‘I enjoy seeing you engaged in a work that suits you – that complies with your intellectual aspirations and occupies the centre of your interests. I think that is a mainspring of one’s life. Besides, Cortona made you meet the person that is now your chosen companion. Please accept, for your wife and yourself, all my best wishes – and do not forget me!’ We think he knew that a seed had been planted and, forty years on, we hope that he is pleased with what has grown from it. Robert Cumming 7 June 2014

Preface

Who were Bernard Berenson and Kenneth Clark? Four decades or more ago it was unnecessary to ask such a question. They were household names. ‘Mr Bernard Berenson. The Sage of Art Critics’ ran the headline in the The Times for its obituary in October 1959. His death takes from the scene one who has achieved in his lifetime the status of a legend. To the villa near Florence in which he spent so many and such fruitful years came men and women from all parts of the world to visit one whose claim to fame was not only founded on a sureness of judgement unique in all that touched the classical schools of Italian painting, but also enlarged by a devoted application to the art of life. For although it may be true to say that especially in the field of artistic attributions Berenson’s judgement was more generally respected than that of any other critic of his time, the attraction he exercised upon others was pre-eminently that of a sage, a humanist, and a stimulator. ‘Eloquent art historian who drew audience of millions’ proclaimed The Times in May 1983 when Clark died. Authority, author, television performer and lecturer, he had become in recent years, not least as a result of the television series Civilisation, the art historian most widely known to the general public in this country and overseas . . .The most formative period of his education is probably his two year sojourn with Berenson in Florence . . . He spoke of his debt to Berenson as ‘difficult to describe and impossible to repay’. For those who, forty years ago, were in their late teens and twenties, no introduction is probably required. Berenson and Clark’s best-selling books were an inescapable component of a young person’s exploration of art and history. For subsequent generations, however, even those who have chosen to make a specialist study of art history, Berenson and Clark are now too often unacknowledged: their personalities and their writings, their significant and influential roles, not xii

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just in the sphere of art but in the world at large, are, for the moment, wrongly neglected. This correspondence is remarkable for several reasons. It is rare that both parties keep such meticulous archives. The exchange starts immediately after their first meeting and continues, only interrupted by the war, until a few months before Berenson’s death: thirty-four years, with a letter one way or the other every few months and sometimes every few weeks. They were good correspondents: they had worthwhile things to say and they were inquisitive and spontaneous. It is readily evident that the letters were not written with a view to future publication but as an exchange between two people who, in spite of their age difference, had much in common which they were anxious to discuss; and they enjoyed gossip. In editing and annotating these letters the aim has been to allow the correspondents to speak with their own voices, without interposing extraneous interpretations and opinions. Thus, the correspondence is presented chronologically and divided into chapters that encapsulate coherent episodes in their lives. At the beginning of each chapter is an introduction outlining the principal happenings in that period to provide a context for the letters which follow. The footnotes flesh out detail and elucidate passing references, filling in background information where such is necessary for a full and proper understanding of the letters. The edited presentation is, therefore, biographical and factual rather than critical or judgemental. The writer Iris Origo, who was close to both Berenson and Clark, in her famous essay on biography (A Need to Testify, 1984, Chapter 1), commented that: ‘Three insidious temptations assail a biographer: to suppress, to invent, and to sit in judgment.’ Such a complete and spontaneous correspondence has an inescapable immediacy and evolving continuity that neither biography nor autobiography can ever have. These letters are an authentic testimony as to who Bernard Berenson and Kenneth Clark were, spoken in their own words and written without retrospection or anticipation. Any suppression, invention or judgement is theirs, of the moment, and is part and parcel of their characters. A biography or autobiography is inevitably a carefully worked static image, created at a particular moment, shaped by the mood and perception at the time of writing. A correspondence, written over decades, presents a moving picture, a series of impressions like the brief flickering, changing images of an old family ciné film or photograph album. If this correspondence has the ability to conjure up an authentic impression of the writers themselves, it also has the ability, with equal credibility, to capture a vignette of the world they inhabited; and it is a fascinating record of a friendship, with all the ebbs and flows which are implicit in any deep and lasting relationship. Reading this correspondence is akin to eavesdropping on an intimate conversation. In such circumstances it is better not to interrupt but simply to

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listen, to note what is being said, or not said, to ponder why and to surmise where it will lead. Only when the conversation has concluded is it sensible to comment – which is why there is an Afterword. Many people populate the pages of these edited letters.The more my wife and I explored them, the more we realised how intricately they were all connected together, a real-life Dance to the Music of Time, fascinatingly close to that which Anthony Powell portrayed so tellingly in fiction, and for the same epoch, in his epic cycle of novels. Some names will be familiar to some readers, depending on their age and interests. Rather than interrupt the flow of the letters with too many elaborate footnotes, or reduce personalities to a meaningless single sentence, there is a separate section, a Dramatis Personae, with biographical entries. There the reader will find, in Part 1, information on the lives of Bernard Berenson and Kenneth Clark, outside the chronology of these letters (1925–59), and of the intimate members of their respective families and households. Such individuals are footnoted thus in the main text: Umberto Morra. Those in Part 2 are footnoted thus: Iris Origo. For anyone for whom Clark and Berenson are unknown, it might be best to read through Part 1 of the Dramatis Personae before starting on the letters. Something should also be said here about I Tatti, for this Tuscan villa was the stage where many of those who feature in the Dramatis Personae made entrances and exits and acted out their parts. I Tatti is a country house and estate, to the north-east of Florence, near Fiesole, on the road to Settignano. To get there today you take a bus from the centre of town, descend after half an hour’s journey at Ponte al Mensola, cross the stream and incline towards the hills where Berenson loved to walk and talk, to think and to look. Bernard Berenson and his wife to be, Mary Costelloe, had determined that they would live in Italy, and sought a suitable abode near Florence. They found I Tatti, a run-down house and estate, but in a favoured south-facing position, quiet and secluded, but not isolated. It was owned by an expatriate English aristocrat, John Temple Leader, and they rented it from him. In 1907 they bought it outright from his heir, Lord Westbury. The house was restored and extended; Anglo-Italian Renaissance-style gardens were created; works of art were collected; a library was assembled; the estate was rejuvenated. There they lived and worked until the end of their days. It was a twentieth-century version of a Renaissance humanist court, and the visitors to it were many. I Tatti continues into the twenty-first century as a tranquil place of scholarship and learning, the Harvard Center for Renaissance Studies. Berenson and Clark maintained comprehensive archives of all their papers. When Clark died, much of his archive was deposited with Tate Britain in London. This included the correspondence from Berenson after 1945. For reasons too complicated to record here, Berenson’s earlier letters to Clark found their way into the I Tatti archive. All the correspondence between Clark and Berenson

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in the archives of I Tatti and Tate Britain are included here. Very few letters are missing. All Clark’s letters to Mary Berenson are included. Hers to him have not been found. All Berenson’s letters to Jane that exist have been included, and hers to him where pertinent. Clark’s spelling could occasionally be wayward, and where it is entirely personal it has been left unaltered with [sic]. Berenson, in his hasty scrawl, frequently used abbreviations, and these have been left as he wrote them. Otherwise, for all of them, clearly unintentional slips of the pen and simple errors of grammar and spelling have been corrected during editing. Handwritten additions, alterations or corrections to typed letters have been treated as an integral part of the typewritten text and not differentiated. A gender-neutral vocabulary has been used whenever possible. However, there are occasions when the context, customary current practice or tradition predicates otherwise. Thus, the term ‘old master’ is used when referring to pertinent paintings and drawings. Publications quoted in the editorial text and footnotes are cited by author and abbreviated title, and are identified in the selected Bibliography.

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One Hopes and Expectations 1925–1926

Kenneth Clark and Bernard Berenson first met in the summer of 1925. Clark, aged twenty-two, had just completed his third year of a history degree at Trinity College, Oxford, and was awaiting the results of his Finals (he was awarded an upper-second class degree). In the Long Vacation he had set out on a tour of Italy with his friend Charles Bell, the Keeper of Fine Art at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, who was more than three decades older, ‘a tiny little man, with a slightly humped back . . . and pale magenta face.The red rims of his eyes encircled small and very strong lenses’, as Clark retrospectively described him (Clark APW p. 104).They started their Italian journey in Bologna, in September, and travelled by train to Florence where they stayed with Janet Ross, a friend of Bell, who lived in a crumbling crenellated villa outside Florence called Poggio Gherado, said to have once been lived in by Boccaccio. Mrs Ross, known affectionately to friend and foe alike as ‘Aunt Janet’, was then in her eighties and a formidable character. Poggio Gherado was within walking distance of the Villa I Tatti and a visit had been arranged there so that her two visitors could meet ‘Mr Berenson’. Whether or not Berenson and Bell had met previously to this occasion is uncertain but they had certainly been in correspondence since before 1914, and Berenson had given a painting to the Ashmolean in 1913 in honour of Bell’s redecoration of the Rafaello Gallery. Bell had been to Poggio Gherado on many occasions and the probability is that he had been to I Tatti several times. Be that as it may, the immediate outcome for Clark was an impetuous invitation from Berenson, on the spot at the end of luncheon, for him to go out to Italy to work with Berenson on a new edition of his most important work of scholarship, The Drawings of the Florentine Painters, Classified, Criticised and Studied as Documents in the History and Appreciation of Tuscan Art, with a Copious Catalogue Raisonné (1903). Berenson was in need of a new assistant and his hope was that Clark would be able to join him straight away. The invitation, although highly tempting, was not without its complications for Clark, and it was to be fourteen months before he was able to take up residence at I Tatti and start work in earnest. His immediate intention had been 1

1925–1926

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to stay on at Oxford for another year at least, carrying out research for a proposed B.Litt. thesis on a subject which had been suggested to him by Bell and which appealed to him greatly: the Gothic Revival. Although it was an unfashionable topic, it had engaged his wholehearted enthusiasm and Bell, who would be the supervisor of his studies, had generously given him a quantity of his own notes which he, Bell, had already made. He had taken Clark under his wing and encouraged him to spend as much time as possible in the Ashmolean Museum. Bell treated the Ashmolean as his private collection and discouraged visitors yet he gave Clark entry to the print room and put him to work on the Raphael and Michelangelo drawings, to examine them and critically assess the comments and judgements of established published scholars. Such work was congenial to Clark, and Bell also made him tackle something less immediately captivating – German engravings. Clark knew that to abandon his thesis would disappoint Bell and displease his parents. For a young man of Clark’s temperament who aspired to aesthetic experience and to study works of art in a scholarly manner, there were, in 1925, few opportunities for formal study of the history of the visual arts in Britain. The Courtauld Institute, Britain’s first university department devoted exclusively to the study of art history, did not open until 1932. The Germans had pioneered art historical studies as an autonomous academic subject in their universities since the late nineteenth century but few of their publications were translated into English and study at a German university for someone of Clark’s background and upbringing was not a practical prospect; and he did not speak German. Nor was he tempted by the idea of study in the United States where, following the example of the Germans, history of art as an autonomous subject was already well established at Harvard and Princeton. Thus, in spite of the complications, the offer to work with Berenson at I Tatti proved to be irresistible. (Although Clark never did pursue his proposed B.Litt. thesis to completion – his acceptance of Berenson’s offer caused him to abandon it after drafting three chapters – he continued with his studies of the Gothic Revival and published them as a book, to considerable acclaim, in 1928.) The young Clark did not lack self-assurance, any more than he lacked money, but his preferred relationship with the world at large was a benign, half-amused, half-curious and self-deprecating aloofness. This did not always endear him to other young people and he had not been wholly enamoured of undergraduate life at Oxford, or of Trinity which was one of the smaller colleges: although socially smart, it was noted for its sportiness and it was not intellectually glittering. A notable contemporary of his at Oxford, although not a particular friend, was Evelyn Waugh and their Oxford was that which is conjured up in Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. Clark’s inclinations were not towards the over-exuberant sporting ‘Hearties’ but, at the same time, he was not attracted by the flamboyantly precious ‘Aesthetes’ such as Harold Acton. In his gossipy autobiography, Memoirs

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of an Aesthete (1948), Acton makes no mention of Clark at Oxford but remembers him as a ten- or twelve-year-old schoolboy at Wixenford (now Ludgrove School) where they were fellow boarders from the ages of eight to thirteen, commenting that it was obvious to his peers, even then, that Clark had a distinguished career ahead of him, for he possessed a benign self-assurance and seemed to have all the makings of a future archbishop or cabinet minister. Clark’s youthful self-assurance and aloofness would not have been a discouragement for Berenson: aloofness was one of his own notable characteristics. Equally, the rich, the well-bred and the good-looking held a perpetual fascination for him, as did clever, articulate, Oxford-educated Anglo-Saxons. Berenson made rapid judgements on character and personality, and formed strong likes and dislikes. He also had an unerring ability to spot talent and potential attainment in young people. Thus, the prospect of having the unattached young Clark at his beck and call to do the donkey work on the Florentine Drawings, at no expense, and at the same time to have his stylish presence on hand to enliven formal dinners and to embellish the informal daily walks with intelligent conversation was an opportunity not to be missed. He was willing, with Mary’s approval and support, to wait for Clark to get his affairs organised and finally arrive at I Tatti. In 1925 Berenson celebrated his sixtieth birthday at a time when life expectancy was not much more than three score years and ten. His reputation in professional artistic circles was formidable. He was established as the expert on Italian art, and his judgements on authentication and quality were not to be questioned lightly. In both the commercial and scholarly art worlds his name and opinions carried huge weight. At the same time, he was a household name and his reputation in general cultural circles and popular imagination was widespread. His four slim volumes on Italian painting, the first of which had been published in 1894, were serious and pioneering publications, enshrining not just a personal view but a methodology and a framework for explaining and justifying the importance and the supremacy of looking at pictures and of aesthetic experience. No student of art, and no self-respecting traveller, would set off for Italy or visit the great galleries of Europe to look at Italian painting without having read or studied them. Berenson explained aesthetic response through two principal concepts, ‘life enhancement’ and ‘tactile values’. His influence was even noted in the pages of widely read fiction. When the impressionable young Miss Honeychurch set forth from the Pensione Bertolini in Florence, in E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View, she was determined to explore the treasures in Santa Croce in the full knowledge that she must look at works of art according to Mr Berenson’s method even if she did not yet fully understand what it was and where to find it: ‘of course, it contained frescoes by Giotto, in the presence of whose tactile values she was capable of feeling what was proper. But who was to tell her which they were?’

1925–1926

4

In agreeing to live and work at I Tatti, Clark was to enter a household where the relationships were complex. Berenson craved female company and affection, and he also required someone to organise his life for him. In 1925 he had been married to Mary for just on twenty-five years (they wed in 1900, although they had met in 1890 when Mary was already married to Frank Costelloe) but with the arrival in 1919 of Nicky Mariano, who immediately became an indispensable member of the household, Berenson soon became the centrepiece of a ménage à trois. When Clark first came to I Tatti, Mary, who was slightly older than Berenson, had lost her looks, was beginning to lose her health and was increasingly losing her influence over her husband although she held on tenaciously. All Clark’s early correspondence, in which he discusses his plans and arrangements prior to arriving at I Tatti, is with Mary. Other than his initial letter, his sustained correspondence with Berenson commences only in May 1928. Nicky Mariano was, in 1925, in her late thirties: her calm and methodical temperament was the exact opposite of Mary’s, and she increasingly became the staple of Berenson’s affection, as he more and more looked to her to organise his life. In this latter task she was assisted by her sister Alda, who with her husband Egbert (Bertie), Baron Anrep, and their son Cecil, joined the I Tatti entourage within a year of Nicky’s arrival.They increasingly became an essential part of the running of I Tatti, Alda taking over the Library from Nicky in 1930 and Bertie helping to run the estate, eventually becoming the General Manager. Clark came to establish a close relationship with Nicky Mariano but the rapport was not instant. In her memoirs, published in 1966, she remembered him thus: when Kenneth arrived after Christmas to stay for a fortnight, what so often happens when somebody has been praised in superlative terms happened to me. I found him not too easy to talk to, rather standoffish and cutting in his remarks, also not free from conceit for one so young. But soon I realised that much of all this was a mask for shyness and that there was much more kindness and softness of heart in Kenneth than appeared in his outward manner . . . (Mariano pp. 143–4).

Chronology

1925 12 September

Clark and Bell are taken by Mrs Ross to dine at I Tatti

13 September

Clark and Bell lunch at I Tatti Berensons depart for Munich, Salzburg, Vienna and Budapest

December

Berensons return to I Tatti

1926 January

Clark visits I Tatti to work in the Library for 2/3 weeks

Spring

Berensons visit Sicily and Naples

August/September

Berensons at their summer retreat, Poggio al Spino

October

Clark spends two months in Dresden Berenson and Nicky Mariano go to Turin and Milan Clark joins them in Milan. Together they tour the Trentino, Bergamo and Brescia

November

The Berensons and Clark visit Trento and Padua Clark commences work at I Tatti

5

1925–1926

6

10th Oct. 25 21 Beaumont Street Oxford

Dear Mr Berenson, I must apologise for the time I have taken to consider your extraordinarily generous offer. As I anticipated my parents were very strongly opposed to my working in Florence & giving up all thought of a business or political career for the, to them, narrower field of art. Above all they objected to my sacrificing my last year at Oxford which they believe will be of great value to me. After a great deal of discussion & persuasion I have secured the following conditions, which will, I am afraid, be totally unacceptable to you. They insist upon my completing this year at Oxford, but would allow me to go out to you during the winter holidays.The disadvantages of this arrangement are obvious; but I believe it is not without advantages also. If I come for a month ‘on approval’ you will be able to see whether I am likely to be any use to you. I am afraid that you will find that you have overrated my abilities. But if I should promise to be of use I could then spend the rest of my time here in acquiring a better knowledge of German & Italian, & of Renaissance history. Should you then renew your offer I could accept it without such qualms as to my own incompetence. Poor Charles Bell1 was ill all the time we were at Florence & only recovered in time for me to take him home. He is still far from well & oppressed with overwork in the museum. I am very sorry that I have had to write such a temporising letter, & bitterly regret that I may have had to throw away what will always seem to me a wonderful chance. I will never be able adequately to express my gratitude to you for your splendid offer. Yours sincerely, Kenneth Clark. [On the back is written in Mary Berenson’s handwriting:‘I have said that tho’ B.B. wd. have liked him to come at once, he can very well put in his time with mastering Italian & German & getting thoroughly acquainted with the Italian drawings at Oxford. What a nice clear handwriting he has!!’]

1

Charles Bell

1925–1926

7

The Toft,2 Bournemouth Tel: 922. [dated at end of letter]

Dear Mrs Berenson, I should have answered your most kind letter before, but almost as soon as it arrived I was attacked by the fever always known as ’flu, which later turned to jaundice. I am at present at home trying to recover from that disease. It is a slow & depressing process, & I very much resent the waste of time involved. Your letter was in many ways a delightful surprise, for I had no idea that Mr Berenson would be prepared to keep his offer open for a year. It seemed very absurd that I, who was so obviously the beneficiary of the arrangement should be the one to make terms. However the fact that you will not be back till December, & will be away in the spring rather lessens the disadvantages of my delay. Unfortunately it has become necessary for me to make a further condition. My father is very indignant that I should go out to Florence without having spent some time at home & the earliest date at which I can leave is December 27th. It may well seem to you & Mr Berenson that such a short visit is not worth making.To me, of course, a few days in the library or in Mr Berenson’s company are worth a very great deal. But I am very much afraid that my continual postponements will exhaust your patience. I should, of course, be delighted to take out Mrs Ross’s3 Christmas present if it was not essential that it should arrive before Christmas day. I am afraid I have no London address except a club which will not keep things. But if it was sent to this address I could take it. I hear from Aunt Janet that she is still very worn out & has made one or two efforts to get up but without success. Our visit must have been a terrible strain, & of course she would not give in & rest as long as we were there. Once more, thank you so very much for your letter, & please forgive the inadequacy of this one. My disease seems to have rotted my brain as well as sapping all my vitality. Yours very sincerely, Kenneth Clark 4 xi 25

2

3

The Toft was Clark’s father’s house in Bournemouth. His parents used to winter in the South of France, but in the early 1920s they bought a large comfortable house overlooking the sea in Bournemouth in order to spend the winter months there. It later became a hotel and is now part of a complex of flats. Janet Ross

1925–1926

8

16 xii 25 The Toft, Bournemouth.Tel: 922.

Dear Mrs Berenson, It was most kind of you to write about my father’s loss;4 it was certainly a most disagreeable business; & it was most generous of Mrs Waterfield5 to credit me with such philosophic socialism; she has never met me or she would have been disillusioned. I arrive in Florence on the 28th, somewhere in the region of 5 p.m. if I catch my connection at Viareggio. If you are still able to take me in I shall drive straight to i Tatti;6 but if it is in any way inconvenient to you I believe Aunt Janet would not mind putting me up for a bit. I am looking forward to it immensely, & cannot help marvelling at my luck. I know so many people far abler than I who would give anything for the privilege of working with Mr Berenson. If I don’t hear to the contrary, then, I shall appear on the evening of the 28th. Yours sincerely, Kenneth Clark

20.1.26 21 Beaumont Street, Oxford

Dear Mrs Berenson, It seemed to me that the unyielding surface of club note-paper & a scratchy pen would be poor media through which to express strong feelings, so I postponed

4

5 6

A reference to the ‘Welsh Dam Disaster’ (recalled inaccurately by Clark in APW p. 87). Clark’s father had been the proprietor of an aluminium company in Wales. In 1920 an improperly built dam burst and a nearby village was destroyed. Clark’s father undertook to compensate the workers, rebuild the houses and salvage the company. In about 1925 he sold the company but in so doing sustained substantial personal financial loss. John Walker, in his memoirs, says that it cost Clark’s father the greater part of his fortune and quotes a figure of £1 million. He also says that Clark interrupted his plans to go to Italy in order to join the board of directors to help try to re-organise the business. He suggests that without Clark’s support his father would have been ruined, although Clark never claimed any credit. Lina Waterfield Clark, uniquely, always wrote either ‘i Tatti’ or ‘the Tatti’. Everyone else, including the Berensons, always wrote ‘I Tatti’.

1925–1926

9

writing to you till I returned here. Really my feelings of gratitude to you and Mr Berenson are very strong; for your kindness in having me at i Tatti, for all I learnt there, in short for the most delightful three weeks I can remember. Walking in the hills, shuffling Bellinis in the library or simply browsing among the books were all a great joy to me; & above all to be with people who understood & frequently shared my enthusiasms was a new & enchanting experience. It is very pleasant to share an enthusiasm but here they are mainly indulged in alone & secretly, like a bath, for fear, I suppose, of a gust of ridicule. For all this, then, please accept my thanks.As to the tragedy of the keys: I am distressed that you should have been put to so much bother; and I am very sorry for Parry,7 for it was quite as much my fault as his. When I think of the trouble I have given, I hardly like to confess that I had a most comfortable journey, revelling in my little world of light & hooks & knobs, sleeping the sound dreamless sleep of the unjust by night; & by day living in the magic of red-gauntlet.8 The keys arrived in Oxford as soon as I did & I was put to no inconvenience. Nothing very important has happened in London since I left, save that they have cleaned the Piero St Michael9 & now his armour & white wings shine in silvery air. I always thought he was a great beauty, and yesterday he took my breath away. I spent hours at the N. G. looking at Titians & Bellinis & feeling some of them for the first time. Mrs Waterfield crossed on the same boat & we had tea together yesterday. She was full of her exiles & I was unable to rid myself of a picture of St Leonard’s terrace looking like the frontispiece to Max’s Rossetti.10 Charley [sic] Bell is, as usual, overworked writing an article on Cotman, with another impending – on plumbagos,11 of all gloomy subjects. As I have not yet seen my parents I can’t write anything further about the chances of my returning. If Mr Berenson is convinced that I can be useful (until I get swelled head, which may take 18 months – but perhaps less) I may be able to persuade my parents to let me come. But I shall certainly not feel myself justified in coming if I find that it is going to cause them real distress or serious

7

8

9 10 11

Parry was the Berensons’ loyal, long-serving Welsh chauffeur. He had gone out to Florence in about 1900 to seek work as a mechanic and was employed by Berenson as being the only person in Florence who knew how to fix a broken-down car. He refused ever to go into a church or museum in spite of Mary’s urging him to do so. Redgauntlet was one of Walter Scott’s Waverley Novels. Clark was probably reading the novel on the train. Possibly he is obliquely referring to the magic of train travel. The Great Western Railway (which would have taken him from London to school at Winchester and University at Oxford) called its early express passenger trains ‘Waverley Class’ and named individual trains after particular novels, Redgauntlet being one such. Piero della Francesca, Saint Michael, National Gallery (NG 769), acquired in 1867. Max Beerbohm’s Rossetti and his Circle was published in London in 1922. Logan Pearsall Smith lived at 11 St Leonard’s Terrace, Chelsea, London. Drawings in graphite, in this instance English portrait drawings.

1925–1926

10

disappointment. I hope I have made you understand how much I want to come & how grateful I am for the offer. Please remember me to your brother;12 I needn’t tell you how much I enjoyed his company & how much I learned from him. And please give my love to Miss Mariano;13 the thought of having her as a companion in my work is one of the most delightful parts of an enchanting prospect. I did love it all. Yours very sincerely, Kenneth Clark

14 ii 26 21, Beaumont Street, Oxford

Dear Mrs Berenson, Thank you very much for your letter; I am most grateful for your advice & will do my best to follow it. I saw my parents for a few hours on Wednesday & they seemed perfectly amenable, though they will doubtless be less so when the time for action arrives. If I can convince them that I shall not be tied in any way I am quite sure that they will have no objections or even qualms of disappointment. Taking it, then, as fairly certain that I shall come, I shall try to learn all I can do which will be useful to you. This includes taking photos. With a Sanderson half plate, a good Zeiss lens, pan chromatic plates & a little practice I should be able to take details of any picture in almost any light. These details could be the actual size of the original, as the Sanderson has a very long extension, & at times this would be valuable though, of course, a half plate does not take in much. I am afraid anything much bigger than a half plate would be rather too cumbersome for carrying to out of the way places or up ladders. I write these details because it is doubtful if it would not be more convenient if the camera etc belonged to Mr Berenson & not to me. Supposing I go at the end of two years I mayn’t have much use for a large scientific camera, whereas he will. The cost of the whole outfit, including lens’s, stand, etc would probably be about £20. If you think it’s better that you should buy it, would you allow me to use it during the summer term in order to get some practice? But if you would rather it belonged to me I am quite prepared to buy one. It may produce some amusing results, & we shall be able to Yashiro-ise14 anything we like.

12 13 14

Logan Pearsall Smith Nicky Mariano Yukio Yashiro (1890–1975) had preceded Clark as Berenson’s assistant for the Florentine Drawings. In 1925

1925–1926

11

Oxford is plunged in gloom. There has been one fine day this term, and I have become so depressed that at one time I seriously meditated running away. I should have done so long ago were it possible to work on my Gothic Revival anywhere else. It goes on quite well, & I have already accumulated more material than I can use. Last week I spent in writing an essay on Ruskin for a society here which helped to clear up my ideas, for Ruskin is in a most curious relationship to the Gothic revivalists. The result has been to leave me very exhausted & quite unable to express myself. That is why this letter is incoherent. Much of the time I look out at the rain & fog & groan at the thought of i Tatti. I was not surprised to hear that they had resolved to operate on Nicky. I hope it was quite easy & that she is getting better. I have been meaning to write to her – not that I have anything of interest to tell her, but invalids welcome any letter – but I have been either so busy that it was impossible, or so depressed that it would have been worse than useless. Please excuse this letter, Yours always Kenneth Clark

31. iii. 26 Golf-Hotel Sospel15 Alpes Maritimes

Dear Mrs Berenson, Now that my parents seem not merely willing but anxious for me to go to i Tatti, I must write and bother you with definitive arrangements. Oxford goes down before the end of June, & if you do not object I feel I ought to spend a few weeks at home before abandoning my family. I think you suggested that I might stay with you till we all returned from England at the end of October; of course that would be delightful for me if you still think it best. The question arises: would it be better for me to bring out my car in July

15

he had published a scholarly monograph on Botticelli with copious black and white illustrations, including many details. According to Clark (APW p. 259), he was the first scholar to publish photoraphic details to increase an understanding of pictures. Clark’s father enjoyed gambling and frequented the Casino at Monte Carlo where he met with regular and extraordinary luck. According to Clark, after one such successful evening of roulette, he bought a small, recently created golf course at Sospel, behind Mentone, and then built a hotel there. In the early 1920s he gave the hotel to Clark: ‘I was fond of golf and I much enjoyed the drama and complications of hotel management’ (APW p. 188).

1925–1926

12

or in October. I do not want to encumber your garage with an extra car; still less with a chauffeur. If you think my car would be useful to me during August & September – as well it may be, if I am visiting out of the way towns – then perhaps it may be possible to find some lodgings for my chauffeur. It sounds preposterous that anyone of my age should have a chauffeur at all, but he will be able to be valet to me when I am on my own; & I am afraid I cannot drive far without one, as I am a fool with the inwards of cars & when they break I am lost. I shall be grateful if you will write & tell me what arrangements will be most convenient to you. Nothing has happened to me which could be of any interest to you in a letter. I wish I could say that I was learning something which might make me rather more useful to Mr Berenson; but I am doing a little – filling in any few bad gaps which I have often bridged with rather flimsy bluff, including Santayana16 & Dante. I have had a most gloomy letter from Aunt Janet; I hope she was not quite as ill as she thinks she was. Of your brother’s letters on English prose I have only received one, though he tells me he has written many more. I read it swollen with conceit & dithering with delight. And the hope of others gives me that violent interest in the post which I haven’t had since I first went to school. This letter ought to reach you before you leave for Constantinople. I hope the trip is a success. Love to Nicky & Aunt Janet. Yours ever, Kenneth Clark

7 iv 26 Golf-Hotel Sospel Alpes Maritimes

Dear Mrs Berenson, As usual your letter solves all my difficulties; every suggestion it contains suits me perfectly & is exactly what I should have suggested had I been free to do so. I had always felt that I could be of no use to you without a good working knowledge

16

George Santayana (1863–1952), although Spanish-born, was raised in the usa and was a contemporary of Berenson’s at Harvard and a close friend in their early years. A prolific writer, he published books on philosophy and aesthetics and a best-selling novel. Initially he taught at Harvard but after 1912 he lived entirely in Europe.

1925–1926

13

of German; & I was so worried by this difficulty that I have been trying to summon up courage to ask if I might have a couple of months off to live in a good family in Dresden, which has been recommended to me by some friends. Dresden is a good central ‘headquarters’ & I might stay with the family & make expeditions from there. Of course it would be delightful to take a journey with your young German – Neumayer – but I should need to have definite lessons in the language. Personally I cannot just ‘pick up’ a language but need to work hard at it. Perhaps Neumayer might be able to take a trip towards the middle of September when I have learned the rudiments of grammar, & conversation would be more valuable to me. I shall begin taking lessons next term in Oxford & presently am wrestling with a grammar. Lord! what a tongue. I have attempted to learn it many times & always broken down when I came to the irregular verbs. However that was in cold blood & very different to being in the country. I am really delighted that you are prepared to let me go to Germany. And the rest of your plans seem to me ideal. I only met Pinsent17 once or twice liked him very much & would like to share his extra floor extremely. But that is a matter for him to decide. If he seems prepared to risk having me for a month or two I shall be delighted. If not I shall have to wait until rooms appear, which, I am afraid will put you to some inconvenience but will be very agreeable for me. As to London: my parents are taking a flat18 there, for which they pay the rent & I buy the furniture – a very good arrangement as far as I am concerned as they are very seldom in London. As to German galleries: I should, of course be very grateful to Mr Berenson if he would tell me which of the smaller ones to visit & give me introductions. I could take my (or rather, his) camera & take photos of anything he wished, though I should imagine that this is not allowed in most German galleries. If all these plans work out I shall have the time of my life & it won’t be wasted neither. Yours always, Kenneth Clark

17 18

Cecil Ross Pinsent It was a service flat in St Ermin’s Hotel in Westminster. Still in existence, it is a large, middle-ranking, red-brick establishment with more than 300 rooms and suites, known affectionately to London residents as ‘St Vermin’s’. Arranged round three sides of a tree-lined courtyard, it is built on the site of a 15th-century chapel dedicated to St Ermin. The hotel building was erected in 1889 as a block of mansion flats. By 1900 these had been converted into the hotel with redesigned interiors and extensive reception rooms with rich plasterwork.

1925–1926

14

10 vii 26 Shielbridge Acharacle, S.O. Argyllshire Station. Glenfinnan, N.E.R. Telegrams, Salen, Argyllshire19

Dear Mrs Berenson, You very kindly said that you would give me some instructions & introductions for Germany. I leave for Dresden at the end of the month. The family I am going to stay with seem promising & speak very little English; & there is a teacher of German next door to them. I hope I learn a little, though I am very silly at languages, through never having been taught to use my mind when I was at school. I am not taking my car, because it is needed at home. The family car is broken & they can’t get on without one. However I am sure I will have my time full visiting those towns & galleries which are easily got at by train. Please tell me if you want me to take my big camera. I should doubt if I shall go to obscure enough places, & I suppose one is not allowed to photograph in any German galleries. I have heard vague reports of your movements from Aunt Janet, & one blood-curdling story about a scene in the streets of Naples, which, I hope, she exaggerated. I am afraid she must be disappointed that neither Bell nor I can come out to see her this summer. Poor Bell has been very ill all summer; for a month he was really bad, with a sort of asthma which would have killed anyone else. But, as he says, he is indestructible & he is now recuperating at Weymouth. It is not very easy to work during one’s last summer term at Oxford. I am afraid I did very little; but the Gothic revival essay has gone a good way & I am working at it here. I am still interested in the subject & really believe it is ‘fool proof ’ – as indeed it needs to be. I look forward to my two months in Germany; but much more to seeing things with you in London, in October. I do hope you are all well; Aunt Janet wrote that you were ill in Naples. I am extremely well & very different from the poor thing you saw in January. Yours always, Kenneth Clark

19

Clark’s father was keen on shooting, stalking and fishing. In the early 1920s he bought a 75,000-acre estate with two lodges on the remote Ardnamurchan peninsula on the far west coast of Scotland, west of Fort William. Ardnamurchan Point is the most westerly place on the British mainland.

1925–1926

15

[Attached to the letter is a note in Mary Berenson’s hand with a list of some eight German names and addresses, and some twenty German towns such as Nuremberg, Weimar and Stuttgart.]

Raditsky Strasse 8 Dresden A 14-ix-26

Dear Mrs Berenson, Of course I should have written before & reported progress. I have written so many letters describing Dresden (including one to your brother) that I had better not do so again. I think my time here has been a great success; certainly I have enjoyed it very much, though there have been moments when I would have given a good deal to speak to someone who understood me. I believe I have learned as much German as could be expected in so short a stay – of course I speak very slowly & inaccurately, but can convey most ideas & almost any information. I understand an educated person speaking not too fast, & I can follow a play if I know it before hand. As to reading. Learned works are certainly difficult & I couldn’t read one without a dictionary. Even less could I read a newspaper. But an ordinary book e.g. Gregorovius ‘Vanderjahre’20 is quite easy. I have read Wölfflin’s21 Grundbegriffe which is tough, & Brinckmann’s book on Michelangelo’s drawings which is a very nasty book.22 So I think I can say that I can read German art-books, though still rather slowly. Unfortunately I have spent a lot of time reading the plots of Wagner operas. The opera is so good here that I thought it would be a pity not to see it, & it was a good opportunity to study the Ring – in London one is always too busy or too tired, & of course the production is not in the same class. I worked in the [Kupferstich-Kabinett] gallery every day for three weeks so got to know it quite well. Now I have worked for a fortnight in the print room which is very agreeable & full of interesting things. The people there have been very kind & helpful. Lehrs23 is a charming little man & very learned, I should

20

21 22 23

Ferdinand Gregorovius (1821–1891) was a German historian who specialised in the medieval history of Rome. His best-known work is Wanderjahre in Italien, an account of the walks he took through Italy in the 1850s (he took up residence in Italy in 1852). A devout Lutheran, Gregorovius was born in East Prussia and studied theology and philosophy at the University of Königsberg. He was a friend of Nicky Mariano’s father. Heinrich Wölfflin Albert Erich Brinckmann Max Lehrs (1855–1938) was the long-serving director of the Dresden Kupferstich-Kabinett (1896– 1904 and 1908–24; in 1904–8 he worked in Berlin). His principal work of scholarship was on 15th-

1925–1926

16

say, though immersed in the monographist24 E. S. & other rather unimportant people. Singer25 is kind but not a very impressive scholar – of course I have no means of judging his ability, but he writes rather many introductions to auction catalogues. I found the Italian attributions were influenced by recent scholarship. Naturally it was not for anyone of my years to make suggestions; but I made one Rembrandt discovery which I had not the good sense & modesty to keep to myself. All directors hate anyone making discoveries, most of all a young & ignorant student. However they have been very polite about it. The Rembrandt drawings here are a magnificent lot & it would be well worth weeding out the obvious duds. There remain the German drawings which are very numerous, of course, but contain splendid Durers Cranachs Grunewalds, Hubers etc. I have five days left for them. What a delightful occupation it is! I should really rather hunt through collections of drawings than anything else I can imagine. I went to Berlin for a few days with a friend & saw the chief things of all kinds. I am afraid the new Greek statue26 seemed to me very ugly – but of course that tells you more about me than about the statue. How wonderful the Tel-el-armena27 things are; & the German pictures are also a revelation. But I was slightly disappointed by the Italians, especially by the later Venetians. After Dresden with its splendid Veroneses & Titians – the late portrait of a man is surely the most sacred of all Titian portraits28 – Berlin Venetians seemed very dull; & what a lot of gloomy north Italians. However this is ungrateful; obviously a collection which contains the School of Pan29 and the Bellini ascension [sic],30 to say nothing of the Mantegnas & Botticellis, was an experience which left me breathless.

24 25 26 27

28 29 30

century German and Dutch engravers. He went blind and his writings, which were then dependent on memory, were completed with the help of his daughter. Clark means ‘monogrammist’. Hans Wolfgang Singer (1867–1957) wrote Die Meisterwerke der Königel: Gemälde-Galerie zu Dresden (Munich and New York, 1913). Probably the so-called ‘Greek Goddess’, a freestanding female statue 2 m high, dating from the 6th century bc in the Pergamon Museum, Berlin. It was acquired in 1924. Amarna (commonly known as el-Amarna or incorrectly as Tel el-Amarna) is an extensive Egyptian archaeological site that represents the remains of the new capital city built by the Pharaoh Akhenaten of the late Eighteenth Dynasty (c. 1353 bc) and abandoned shortly afterwards. On the east bank of the Nile, it was excavated by the Germans in the early 20th century. In the Berlin Museum, the greatest treasure to come from there is the head of Queen Nefertiti. The only portrait in Dresden that fits Clark’s description is a portrait of an unknown man carrying a palm branch of 1561, in the Gemäldegalerie. Painted by Luca Signorelli (c. 1450–1523). It was destroyed during the Second World War. Giovanni Bellini’s (c. 1430–1516) Resurrection, which shows Christ rising from the Tomb and ascending into Heaven, is in the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin.

1925–1926

17

As I hadn’t time to look at the drawings when I was there I am going back to do so on Thursday. I met a man I know in the print room here. He is named K. Parker31 & though not brilliant is very keen indeed. He has seen a great many drawings & knows a lot about German & Dutch, I should say. He edits a paper called Old Master Drawings which I am afraid has rather a lot of sharks among its contributors. But Parker is certainly not a shark. I have managed to get a good deal of information out of him & am going to Berlin with him. He knows the people in the print room & at Munich which is very useful for me. Next week I go to Munich. It would be absurd to stay there less than a week, so shall certainly have time to see Herr Wolf & the other people you gave me introductions to. Also to work through all the Italian drawings. I shall return to England about Oct. 5 & spend five days packing & settling accounts. Then motor to Plymouth & take my car by sea from thence to Bordeaux. This saves time & a long, dull drive, leaving me only a short pleasant drive through Provence. I don’t know how long it will take to drive from Bordeaux to Milan – surely not a week, so I shall be in Milan before the 20th. I am sorry to think I shall not hear Toscanini conduct all the Symphonies32 – it would be a great experience. But I don’t see how I can get there in time. As I have never been to Venice I am moved by the prospect of visiting it. I hope Mr Berenson will be up to it – I am very sorry to hear he has not been well. On reading this letter through it seems very ill expressed & in places ungrammatical. Please don’t tell your brother or he may feel it is not worth wasting time on such a pupil. My only excuse is that it is late at night after a stiff day’s work. Yours sincerely, Kenneth Clark.

31 32

Karl Parker Arturo Toscanini (1867–1957) was especially celebrated for his interpretations of Beethoven and Wagner. He was the artistic director of La Scala, Milan, from 1921 to 1929 and conducted all Beethoven’s symphonies at La Scala in October 1926.

18

Two Life at I Tatti, the Lists and the Florentine Drawings, Marriage and Parenthood 1927–1929

Living and working at I Tatti required as much in the way of diplomatic skills as scholarly expertise. Berenson presided over what was, in essence, a modern-day version of a Renaissance court with all the rituals, jealousies, frustrations and temptations that court life inevitably entails. By temperament and upbringing Clark was well suited not only to survive court life but actually to thrive on it. The hub of daily activity at I Tatti was the Library. There was a constant succession of assistants, mostly young, at work on one or another of Berenson’s projects, or dealing with the routine and voluminous correspondence. The task which principally preoccupied Berenson in the 1920s, and had done so increasingly since the turn of the century, was the additions to, and revisions of the ‘Lists’. They were just that: lists of the names of Italian artists, from the bestknown to the minor, together with the paintings that could be attributed to them and their location. In the early years they were something that he and Mary had worked on together, and initially they were addenda to his four essays on Italian art: the Venetian Painters, the Florentine Painters, the Central Italian Painters the North Italian Painters. By 1925 the Lists had become an enterprise in their own right; Mary was no longer involved and assistants were employed to do the donkey work. Their publication gave him enormous authority and power in the scholarly and commercial art worlds. The Lists required extensive research – not so much in archives in pursuit of documents but through journeys to places to examine and re-examine works of art at first hand, to search out hitherto lost or undiscovered works; and also through the acquisition of photographs in order to establish an archive which could then be used for making visual comparisons. It was by means of visual examination and comparison that Berenson believed that decisions about attribution were best made.The scale and complexity of the task should not be underestimated, nor its originality and pioneering nature. Every year, inevitably, the Lists grew longer as new information and new evidence came in; revisions were constant and attributions had to be changed from time to time.

19

1927–1929

20

The Lists were not catalogues. Berenson offered no discourse or commentary either about the artists or individual works – these were to be found in his four essays on Italian art and in other books and articles. Notable among these was the publication in 1927 in book form of Three Essays in Method (originally published in Italian in the magazine Dedalo), in which he explained in detail, by means of three case studies, his way of examining and assessing pictures as to both style and content in order to arrive at an attribution of authorship. For any young student of art interested in Berenson’s methods (as was Clark), the publication was something of a handbook and, as Clark grew more confident in his own observations and opinions, he liked to feed Berenson morsels of information and photographs of the type that would please him and fit in with his methodology and its needs. In the Lists, however, Berenson simply made a pronouncement without any justification: this artist painted this; that artist painted that. Nonetheless, the constant demands that the Lists imposed on him were burdensome. They were an obsession. He drove his assistants hard and if they made a mistake or failed to answer his requests with speed and accuracy they would suffer the whiplash of his tongue and his temper. Berenson’s Lists were exclusively devoted to paintings. The Florentine Drawings was a related but different undertaking. First published in 1903 in two large volumes, it bore the lengthy but self-explanatory title: The Drawings of the Florentine Painters, Classified, Criticised and Studied as Documents in the History and Appreciation of Tuscan Art:With a Copious Catalogue Raisonné. If the attribution of ‘old master’ paintings is hazardous and difficult, the attribution of such drawings – many of which are mere sketches or experiments or even sleights of hand by assistants in a busy and competitive studio – is truly a minefield. Berenson was well aware of this but also conscious that the publication was his scholarly masterwork. During 1925–6, Berenson was in the middle of a major revision of this magisterial work and it was on this that he most wished Clark to work, not purely as an assistant but as a collaborator. It was a monumental task and the minutiae it contained in its 500,000 words almost overwhelming. In the original edition of 1903 he had analysed nearly 3000 drawings. There were now another 1000 to add; and all the 4000 had to be studied or restudied, photographed, annotated, catalogued, and all the recent scholarly literature, most of it in German, needed to be digested. Michelangelo gave the most difficulty, partly because of the quantity of recent German scholarship about the artist. Asking an untested young man to work with him in this capacity was a commitment of considerable faith and trust. In the end the project took far longer than ever anticipated and the revised edition was finally published in three volumes in 1938. Clark’s announcement of his wish to get married soon after he started work in earnest at I Tatti was sudden and unexpected. Jane Martin, who was a doctor’s daughter from Tunbridge Wells, had been at Oxford at the same time as Clark.

1927–1929

21

At Oxford she had become engaged to Janet Ross’s great-nephew, Gordon Waterfield, a friend of Clark. When Waterfield went off to Egypt to work as a journalist, he asked Clark to look after Jane. Jane and Clark grew close and agreed that they wished at some point to be married, so her engagement to Gordon was broken off. Clark claimed that he and Jane were never formally betrothed and that in late 1926 he sent a telegram to her, from Italy, ‘asking her to marry me on January 10th 1927, to which she agreed’ (Clark APW p. 165). Whatever the ins and outs of this unusual manner of proposing, the undeniable fact is that they were married on the due day and remained married until Jane died in 1976. The Berensons, who had been told by Clark at Christmas 1926 that he and Jane were engaged, were not pleased by the news. There were several strands to the Berensons’ annoyance. Berenson himself had been counting on having Clark’s time and attention exclusively for his own use. Mary saw Clark as ‘I will not say another Nicky, but another very congenial and reliable and satisfactory prop for our declining years’. It also seems that they considered Clark had stolen another man’s fiancée (whom they knew and liked) and this incurred their severe disapproval. Mary was especially indignant and although she did not overtly reveal her antagonism to the young couple, she took against them. She later described Clark as a ‘queer mixture of arrogance and sensitive humility’ and regarded Jane as a ‘complication’, ‘neither dressy nor smart’ and with ‘nothing to say’ (Strachey p. 258, letter of 12 January 1926; p. 263, letter of 27 January; p. 275, letter of 8 February 1929). Janet Ross, however, showed her disapproval openly, until told to behave decently by Berenson (Clark APW p. 168.) Nonetheless, the Berensons allowed the newly wedded Clarks back into the fold and for Jane to join in the life and work at I Tatti. Indeed, apparently oblivious of the Berensons’ covert disapproval, the Clarks were, within a month of their marriage, installed at the Chiostro di San Martino, a rented apartment within the precincts of the fifteenth-century Church of San Martino, about a ten-minute walk from I Tatti. In April 1927 they travelled together in northern Italy on their way back to England, where they spent the summer in Oxford. In the autumn they returned to the Chiostro for a prolonged stay until the following spring. When they returned to Italy for this second stay their circumstances had changed. Jane was pregnant. A boy, Alan, was born on 13 April 1928, in London, after a long and difficult labour owing to the large size of the baby’s head. Clark later claimed that it was on the same day that he delivered the manuscript of his first book, The Gothic Revival, to his publisher. A few months after the birth they moved from their unprepossessing tiny service flat in St Ermin’s Hotel, which did not have a proper kitchen, into an equally unprepossessing but larger rented house with space for a baby and servants, and a kitchen for a cook, in Tufton Street, Westminster.

1927–1929

22

Clark continued with his commitment to the Florentine Drawings but often he was left to work on his own. The Berensons were enjoying a golden period financially. Early in 1928 a new five-year contract with the art dealer Duveen, to whom he had been committed since 1907, came into force under which Berenson would receive an annual retainer of £10,000 and ten per cent of the cost of all purchases made on his recommendation. This arrangement replaced the old labyrinthinely complex contract of 1912 under which some payments were linked to profits, and whose terms had given rise to endless misunderstandings and disputes. It was also, internationally, an era of expansion and commercial confidence and this ambience encouraged the Berensons to embark on an extensive programme of travel entailing long journeys: by car at a leisurely pace in their comfortable Lancia, with their chauffeur Parry, across Northern Europe via Vienna, Prague, Dresden, Berlin, Hamburg, Stockholm, Oslo ‘to do nothing but look at works of art and listen to music’ (Samuel ML p. 355); by train on the Orient Express for a two-month archaeological expedition to Turkey, returning via Athens and Salonica; and by boat to Beirut for a twomonth expedition in Syria, Palestine and Egypt. There was the annual summer retreat to ‘Poggio al Spino’, a small and simple house near the Consuma Pass, in the hills about an hour south-east of Florence, amid dense cool woods of birch and conifer, where the principal members of I Tatti retreated nearly every summer to escape the heat of the Val d’Arno and the throng of visitors; and the ritual Christmas visit by Berenson, without Mary, to Edith Wharton in the South of France. The lengthy visit to England by way of Holland in the summer of 1927 was an opportunity for Berenson and Clark to work together in the British Museum Print Room, at the Ashmolean and at Windsor Castle. The researches which Berenson required meant that Clark had to spend time in libraries but it also necessitated travel to inspect drawings at first hand in collections inside and outside Italy. The minutiae of library work with books was never really to Clark’s taste, but the chance to gain through Berenson’s influence an entrée to those collections difficult to see, to examine works of art at first hand and to extend his knowledge and range of contacts, appealed greatly to him. He managed to juggle his researches, the demands and joys of early married life, parenthood, establishing a family home, travel and the selfcentred demands of his patron, with considerable dexterity, but in May 1929 Berenson wrote unexpectedly, and somewhat peremptorily, to tell Clark that he no longer wished him to be his collaborator on the Florentine Drawings. The decision, which evidently caused much heart-searching on both sides, was made more protracted because Berenson’s letter, it seems, got lost in the post. However, two important invitations were already in the pipeline for Clark: to join the executive committee of the forthcoming Italian exhibition at the Royal Academy in London and to undertake a catalogue of the Leonardo da Vinci drawings in the Royal Collection at Windsor.

Chronology

1927 January

Mary Berenson goes to Berne, Switzerland, for a cure Berenson’s Three Essays in Method published by the Clarendon Press, Oxford

10 January

Clark and Jane Martin are married in London

February

Clarks arrive at I Tatti and stay at Chiostro di San Martino Mary Berenson in Berne, Switzerland

April

Clark and Jane visit Venice, Turin, Parma, Bologna, Modena and the Clark-owned hotel at Sospel in the South of France

May

Clarks return to Chiostro di San Martino

Summer

Clark rents house in Oxford to work on The Gothic Revival Berensons visit Venice,Vienna, Prague, Dresden, Hamburg and Berlin; Crown Prince Gustaf of Sweden in Stockholm; Oslo Mary Berenson goes to England Berenson and Nicky Mariano visit north-west Germany and Holland Berenson, Mary and Nicky visit Paris and then spend a month in London, renting a house in Lower Berkeley Street. Berenson studies prints and drawings with Clark at the British Museum, the Royal Library at Windsor, and the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

August

Clarks visit the family estate at Ardnamurchan

Autumn

Clarks return to I Tatti (Chiostro di San Martino)

November

Berensons go to Paris where Berenson works with Clark and Nicky Mariano on drawings in the Louvre

23

Christmas

Berenson and Nicky Mariano visit Edith Wharton at Hyères in the South of France. Mary Berenson returns to I Tatti

1928 Spring

Clarks return to London from Italy

13 April

Alan Clark born The Gothic Revival delivered to publisher (Constable).

June/July

Berenson’s father dies aged 83 Mary visits London Berensons at Consuma Clarks move to 65 Tufton Street, Westminster

August/September

Clarks visit Scotland Berensons visited at Consuma by Duveen with a visit to San Sepolcro Berenson and Nicky Mariano undertake a two-month archaeological trip in Turkey, based at Constantinople

November

Berensons return to I Tatti by way of Athens, Salonica and Emilia Romagna

1929

January

Clarks in Rome where Clark attends a lecture by Aby Warburg at the Hertziana

Spring

Clark starts to catalogue Windsor drawings Berensons and Nicky Mariano visit Syria and Palestine

May

Berenson writes to Clark to terminate their collaboration on The Florentine Drawings

June

Berensons return to I Tatti Berenson works on the Lists; Mary works on her ‘Book of Travels’ (published in 1938 as A Vicarious Trip to the Barbary Coast)

24

1927–1929

25

[Undated but they were married on 10 January 1927] St. Ermins1 Westminster s.w.1. Victoria 3441

Dear Mrs Berenson, Although we were married yesterday this is the first free minute there’s been to write in, and & we want the first letter to be to you because it is due to you more than anyone that we are as we are – that is to say a good deal happier than I’ve ever thought possible on this widdershins2 planet. We shall never be able to thank you properly for sympathy, insight & generosity. I hope you won’t regret it; at present it seems to me impossible that you should. Jane says you will think her a deaf mute; but I tell her you don’t have that effect on people. We were married in a hideous church3 – not even Gothic Revival. But it only took fourteen minutes, so I can’t grumble. Everyone seemed satisfied except the pew opener who refused to believe that two such drab & youthful people could be bride & bridegroom. No organ, no champagne & only half-a-dozen handshakes: I call that a success. Unfortunately Jane is still very run down, and is suffering from a terrible tooth. I think she needs a rest & a change & we will probably go to Sospel4 together & have Lothian5 meet us there. There is a great deal to see here with the Flemish6 exhibition on. But what with clothes & callers Jane will get no rest. You see, I adopt a husband like tone at once. Please thank Nicky for her postcard. We will write to her as soon as our feet are clear of duty letters of thanks. Love to you all, Yrs ever, K.

1 2 3 4 5 6

Clark’s mother gave the service flat in St Ermin’s Hotel to Clark on his marriage to Jane. See Ch. 1 n. 18. A Lowland Scottish term meaning to go against sense; contrary. St Peter’s, Eaton Square, built in the early19th century and an austere example of the Greek Revival style. See Ch. 1 n. 15. Possibly a chauffeur called Lothian. The large and ambitious Exhibition of Flemish and Belgian Art 1300–1900 was the major event at the Royal Academy in 1927.

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Chiostro di San Martino7 Settignano. 8-ii-27

Dear Mrs Berenson, I should have written before to tell you about our arrival here. It has all been surprisingly successful – perhaps ‘surprise’ is the wrong word, because we didn’t expect anything but great kindness from everyone at i Tatti, and so far the whole thing – the house, the servants, even the bells – has far passed our expectations. We have been up to i Tatti to lunch & dinner, & though Jane was naturally shy at first, it would have been impossible to be embarrassed in such an atmosphere. Nicky alone would have prevented that, & Trevy8 could hardly exist in an atmosphere of formality. Most charming of all was BB. Jane finds, as I do, that he is not in the least awe inspiring, & that however much one may admire his wonderful intellectual qualities, he is essentially friendly and lovable. This is a great thing, because one either sees that side of him or one doesn’t, & too many people don’t – why I can’t imagine. It was also very pleasant to find dear Morra9 there. He & Trevy have dined here twice & are coming again; they make a perfect combination & no one could feel shy with them. As for Mrs Hyde:10 we are both won round to her; of course she was alarmingly unlike the rest of us, & as you know the word ‘smart’ is a red rag to me. But she is really such a good sort, so nice to Jane & such fun with BB that we like her. I hope she’ll come down here for a meal some day. Aunt Janet behaved as we expected. She could hardly have been ruder, but as she neither looked at, nor spoke one single word to, Jane during the whole interview, Jane was saved the responsibility of replying, & so could hardly incriminate herself. After all that she must have heard about Jane it is something that she allows her into the house. The Chiostro is just as I had anticipated. Enchanting but chilly. Still the weather can’t continue and we don’t really suffer. Our servants, on the other hand, surpass anticipations. The old french maid is of a sort one imagined only

7 8 9 10

The Chiostro was rented by Mary for guests. Clark said there was a plaque in the bedroom saying that St Andrew the Scot had died there in 682 (Clark APW p. 167). Robert Trevelyan Umberto Morra Charlotte Pruyn Hyde (1867–1963) was born in Glen Falls, Upper New York State, into a successful paper-making family. In Boston she met a Harvard law student, Louis Hyde (1866–1934). They married in 1901 and in 1906 he joined the paper-making business. They built a new house in the Renaissance style and in the 1920s and 30s formed a collection of furniture and works of art. They travelled regularly to Europe where they became friends of the Berensons, who advised them on their purchases. They gave their house and collection to the City of Glen Falls as an art museum.

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27

existed in old plays – charming & extraordinarily willing. She has taken a great fancy to Jane, & this is reinforced by the fact that Mrs Price11 lunched here today & was obviously quite satisfied with her tenants. And the cook! My pen pauses in reverence as I write his name – really the best cooking I have ever encountered, & I come straight from some of the most pretentious tables in London. I dreaded his first bills – but they were very reasonable – Marie says far less than Mrs Price’s. Jane was touched and delighted by your letter which must have crossed one from her in which she tried to say how kind everyone had been. I needn’t tell you how much pleasure it gave her. She isn’t answering it herself as all she could say has been said already in her first letter. As I write a letter is come from Aunt Janet asking us both to lunch. It adds a note of triumph to our chorus of praise & thanksgiving, though I don’t doubt that the letter was wrung from her by Nicky. We both look forward to seeing you very much indeed.You are, of course, the chief author of all our happiness. Yours affty. Kenneth

3 May 1927 Chiostro Di San Martino Settignano Firenze

Dear Mrs Berenson, We were sad to find you had all gone, but I am sure you deserved a holiday. We are both very brown & well & pleased with ourselves; our stay at Sospel was delightful & our drive back most instructive. We saw the Turin Gallery quite thoroughly & the Gualino Collection (thank you so much for the introduction). The Pollaiuolo & Filippino are both pictures which no photo can convey; & of course many of Gualino’s things are enchanting, especially some of the small things – the Veronese, the Foppa & the Rubens landscape. What of his Piero della Francesca?12 We were not prepared for it & found it beautiful, though not

11 12

Mrs Price was the owner of the Chiostro. Clark said that the apartment came fully equipped and with Mrs Price’s maid (presumably Marie), plus a cook and a housemaid. Riccardo Gualino (1879–1964) was a successful industrialist who became Chairman of Fiat and founder of Snia Viscosa which manufactured artificial silk. Immensely rich and a prodigious and voracious collector, he built a princely residence in Cereseto near Turin in a Lombard Gothic style. Gualino was an anti-fascist. Mussolini confiscated his castle and his assets but after his fall Gualino

1927–1929

28

quite his silveriest or solidest. Most of the pictures improved on acquaintance, especially the wonderful Byzantine madonna. But the meeting of Joachim and Anna, which I was disposed to take seriously in reproduction, looks, in the original, like a fake – and is now kept in a box-room. By wonderful good luck they were doing Cosi fan Tutte the second night we were in Turin, & E-leo took us in his box; we’d neither of us been in a box at an opera before & were as proud as peacocks; & the performance was perfect. E-leo said the best thing the Theatre has yet done, & I certainly can’t imagine Mozart better played or sung, though the scenery by Komisayevsky13 was a little too Moscow-Arty-ish. When one considers what Courtauld14 is doing in London & Gualino in Turin it becomes a moral duty to buy artificial silk. E-leo was charming to us & I really like him though his theories on art are daft. Unfortunately we could not help with the lists as the Accademia is entirely dismantled & shut up. Pictures are being restored & reframed & consequently are without numbers. From Turin we went to Parma, stopping at Piacenza – which contains fascinating churches, doesn’t it. We had out the Byzantine M.S. at Parma15 & went through it all carefully; & also the Baptistery roof by a good light.16 Poor Moschini’s successor is going to re-hang the Parma Gallery completely, so any search for numbers was fruitless. We then motored to Bologna – stopped & saw the gallery & cathedral at Modena, & this morning saw the Bologna gallery & a few churches. I loved it; I have to see things twice before I feel I’ve seen them & it was fun showing Jane things. I prophesied in front of the pictures in feeble imitation of BB; but she was not impressed & discovered a lot for herself. We are delighted to be back. The garden is lovely & I am sure the drains are cured; I was sorry to trouble you with them at such a busy time. Mrs Stoop17 is

13

14 15 16

17

re-established himself and his fortune. Today there is a room in the Galleria Sabauda in Turin which is dedicated to the Gualino Collection and includes Veronese’s Venus and Mars with Cupid and a Horse, and Rubens’s Landscape with a Pushcart. The Pollaiuolo referred to is Tobias and the Angel, and the Filippino Lippo is The Three Archangels and Tobias; the Piero della Francesca, which Clark queries, may be a reference to a work by Nicola di Maestro Antonio d’Ancona, San Gerolamo nel deserto.The first volume of a catalogue of the Gualino Collection by Lionello Venturi was published in 1927. Fyodor Fyodorovich (‘Theodore’) Komissarzhevsky (1882–1954) was a Venetian-born Russian theatrical director and designer, particularly notable for his ground-breaking productions of plays by Chekhov and Shakespeare. A colourful figure of European theatre, he placed great emphasis on costume and stage sets. Samuel Courtauld The Parma Gospel Book in the Biblioteca Palatina in Parma is a Tetraevangelion (the Four Gospels) believed to have been compiled in the latter half of the 11th century. The Baptistery of Parma dates from 1196. The outside of pink Verona marble is octagonal. The most striking interior feature is the painted domed ceiling. Sixteen rays come out of the centre of the ceiling, each corresponding to sixteen arches which form alcoves each containing a painted scene. Mrs Frank Stoop was a colourful London hostess who was married to a Dutch-born stockbroker. Patrons of musicians and modern art, the Stoops lived in a small house in Hans Place, Chelsea, and

1927–1929

29

in Florence – perhaps she was the last straw – if she can be compared to a straw – which decided you to go away. We both send love to Nicky & BB. Yours ever, K.

8 iii 28 St Ermins Westminster

Dear Mrs Berenson, We are never very good correspondents and since we returned we have been busy comforting our parents. They have now gone & left us free to write letters. We had a very peaceful journey back; I did not really anticipate anything else, but the thought that it might be rough or that the baby might be born in the Wagon lit had oppressed me for so long that when we arrived at Victoria with Jane safe & sound I felt I was in a dream. Jane enjoyed the journey, & was not even very tired. The worst part was leaving San Martino. We had been so happy there & had come to look on it as a home. I have certainly never been so sorry to leave any place. It was with difficulty that we prevented ourselves from weeping as we drove away. Here I work till lunch & from tea to dinner at my book; that only leaves about two free hours a day in which to see things & people, & those are chiefly taken up with looking for a house. We have not yet found anything. I found my mother very frail after her operation, but I suppose she will be the better for it ultimately. At present she is nervous & seems ready to pour cold water on anything. We have not yet seen Logan18 owing to the parental incubus; and hope to ring him up tomorrow. The only Londoner that we have seen is Ashton19 whom we met by chance. He looks much the better for his rebuff; it has cleared his skin. It is perhaps as well that the lady refused him, though she is very beautiful, & very pleasant (not at all common) for I do not see how she would have stayed with him for long; & he wants domestic serenity. [Here added in another hand: (She

18 19

collected works by artists such as Degas, Cézanne, van Gogh, Picasso, Matisse and Modigliani. In 1933 the Stoop Collection was given to the Tate and forms the core of their holdings of international modern art. The Stoop and the Clark families had intermarried, although distantly from Kenneth Clark. Logan Pearsall Smith Leigh Ashton

1927–1929

30

is the actress Hope Johnstone20 married, who was engaged to Leigh Ashton)]. I hope your cure has really done you good. I am sure you will have enjoyed the rest & change. Jane is very well & sends her love. Yours affectionately, Kenneth Clark.

14 April. 28. St Ermins Westminster s.w.1 Victoria 3441

Dear Mrs Berenson Thank you all very much for the telegram. Here are full particulars of the event. The baby arrived at 11.15 yesterday morning; I had taken Jane to the nursing home at dinner time the night before, very cheerful & in no pain. I believe the thing went off as well as is possible considering the infants size, for it is said to be a large baby. Jane is always much upset by anaesthetics, so did not recover very quickly yesterday; but I believe she is much better today, though still stiff & weak. As for the baby, no one seems to bother about it, so I presume it is perfectly normal. It seemed to me abnormally ugly, but people with more experience assure me that it’s beautiful. School of Baldovinetti, anyway, and very close to the one in the André picture.21 I am thankful that it is all over, though I had the minimum of worry, Jane was so cheerful & well to the last minute; & of course my ignorance helped to keep me from pessimism. I shall be seeing Jane this evening & will write again to tell you how she gets on. Poor dear, it must be a ghastly business. Quarter of an hour after Jane’s baby was born I took my book22 to the publishers, & they were very polite about it. Please forgive a short letter. I have written ten, & five or six remain to be written. My love to everybody. Ever yours affectionately, K. C.

20 21 22

Charles Hope-Johnstone Baldovinetti (1425–1499), Madonna and Child, Musée Jacquemart-André, Paris. The Gothic Revival: An Essay in the History of Taste was published by Constable in September/October 1928.

1927–1929

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5. May ’28 St. Ermins Westminster s.w.1. Victoria 3441

Dear Mrs Berenson, Thank you very much for all your letters. I have written to Mrs Carmichael but I am afraid she will get things very muddled. I wish I was there to stand over her. For about three days after the baby arrived Jane was wretchedly ill; then she suddenly recovered & has been very well & happy ever since. She returns to the flat on Monday. We shall stay in London till after the Holford Sale,23 & then go to Tunbridge Wells for ten days. The baby is very well. Authorities, such as Jane’s doctor, say he is a prize baby, & he certainly seems much heartier looking than the ordinary babe of three weeks old. But his parents are quite as infatuated as parents are supposed be, & he may be quite a commonplace child, after all. Jane feeds him, not without sorrow as he is strong & greedy. Constables, after expressing enthusiasm for my work, have sent it off to an architect to see if there are any architectural blunders in it. There probably are. In any case he has had it a fortnight, & has shown no signs of having read it. Meanwhile my morale is failing & I find it impossible to write the last ten pages of the last two chapters – which I didn’t give Constable, not from lack of material, but from lack of will. In fact I begin to know how Cyril24 feels, presumably, all the time.

23

24

The Holford Sales of 1927/8 were arguably the high points of the London market in the inter-war years. The collections, accumulated by Robert Staynor Holford (1808–1892), comprised the finest pictures, manuscripts, books, silver and furniture. For several generations the Holfords had been Lords of the Manor of Westonbirt in Gloucestershire where they lived quietly but Robert, in 1838, became unexpectedly very rich through the rise in value of shares in the New River Company, and the recovery of gold bullion buried by an uncle in the Isle of Wight during the threat of the Napoleonic invasion. With this fortune he started to collect on a vast scale . His grandfather had also made an immense fortune by supplying London with fresh water through a canal. The original Elizabethan manor house was demolished by his father, who built a lavish new house in 1823, and a few years later he started the celebrated Arboretum which became one of Robert’s principal passions. To accommodate his growing collection Robert built Dorchester House in Park Lane, London, in 1851–3. His only son George (1860–1926) shared his father’s passion for gardening but not for art and literature. A military man and a close friend of and Equerry to the future Edward vii, he married late in life and had no children. When he died in 1926 the principal part of the estate passed to his nephew, the Earl of Morley, who sold Westonbirt House, Dorchester House and the collections in 1927/8.The family gave the Arboretum to the nation in 1956. Christie’s sold the Italian pictures from the Holford Collection in July 1927 and the Dutch and Flemish pictures on 17 and 18 May 1928. The 1928 sale created a sensation. It was viewed by some 10,000 people and raised £364,094, then a world record for an auction-room two-day sale. Cyril Connolly

1927–1929

32

Your news of Cyril will distress his supporters but cannot surprise those who know him. He has always been liable to bursts of worldliness – we used to call these phases ‘Champagne paganism’ – & they are usually followed by periods of some intellectualism – called his ‘Sebastian van Storck’25 phase. Both phases are equally unproductive of written work, but ‘champagne paganism’ has the added disadvantage that it makes Cyril contemptuous of intelligent conversation. His friends usually find it best to withdraw till this disturbing period is passed: there is no way of helping him through it. What a wonderful assortment of people have stayed at i Tatti – I would like to see them all in a row. (ro not rau). I have found a picture in a dealer’s here which, I think, will amuse you. It is a head of a girl which belonged to Charles i (his seal on back), fully described in his Catalogue as by Giorgione. It also belonged to George iv who gave it to a Lord in Ireland, where it has been ever since. I have wheedled a photo out of the dealer, (not for BB., but for myself) & will send it to you as soon as I get it. It is a lovely brilliant thing, & I have no idea who painted it.26 What do you think of Desmond’s27 new paper? The prospectus is like that of a school magazine. I hope it survives for a year, as I have sent him some articles – but he’s probably lost them, anyway. I went down to Oxford to see Charly [sic] Bell28 a week ago. He had just had another relapse & was in bed, so terribly thin & white that it was impossible to believe that he could go on living. But his eyes darted about indomitably, & I don’t despair of his being cured. He is as full of passion as ever & sent the warmest message to all of you. Please thank Logan for his telegram. I shall write to him when I hear from Constable. And please give our love to Nicky & BB. Ever yours affectionately, K.

25

26 27 28

Sebastian van Storck was the subject of a short story (1886) by Walter Pater, the Oxford philosopher and aesthetician (Berenson was an admirer of Pater so he would have understood the reference), about a rich and distinguished youth in 17th-century Holland, much driven by intellectual curiosity who comes to the conclusion that all material existence and human emotion are mere illusion, and that reality lies only in detached and absolute thought because nothing exists except in the mind. This conclusion, and the desire for peace, led him into melancholy and to death – a death caused, however, not by suicide but by the saving of the life of a young child. Unidentified Desmond MacCarthy Charles Bell

1927–1929

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11 Church Road Tunbridge Wells29 20. May 28.

Dear Mr Berenson, The last five weeks have been rather a nightmare with little leisure for anything agreeable; but the worst of it seems to be over now. Jane is really better, the baby is very robust, the house in London is almost painted, & Constable’s have finally made arrangements about my book. We have come down here for a few days rest, & I feel like a slum child at the sight of the hills & hedges. When we get back to London I shall be free to go about the business of the Florentine Drawings, & I shall be glad to get back to them. Chatsworth & Windsor will be a great delight, & so will the Edinburgh Gallery which I have quite forgotten. Please thank Mrs Berenson for her letter & the Edinburgh notes. I will write to her soon. One of these pictures I believe you know, but I thought you might not have a photo of it. Incidentally the dealer to whom it belongs – Max Rothschild30 – says that you once called it a Bartolommeo della Gata.This surprises me very much, as, in the original it looks exactly like an Alunno – if an old picture, or rather as much of it as is old. However my idea of B. della G. is pretty sketchy & founded only on the three pictures. The other head is a very interesting thing. It is painted in tempera & of astonishing brilliance, with an atmosphere like a Vermeer. It is part of a larger picture which was in Charles i’s collection, escaped his sale & was given by Queen Victoria to an Irish Lord, who cut it up. The two other parts were in a house which was burnt down. The original picture was described as Georgioni [sic], his mistress & another lady.The remaining fragment has Charles i’s seal on the back. This pedigree is certainly genuine, but that does not, of course effect [sic] the authorship of the painting.Various shots have been made at it – Dosso, Cariani, Palma & so forth, none quite convincing.The dealer to whom it belongs deals chiefly in dutch things & is quite ignorant of Italian. He may send you the picture, but in case not I thought you would like the photo – which of course he does not know is for you. I never mention your name in dealers’ shops.

29 30

Jane Clark’s parents’ house. Max Rothschild ran the Sackville Gallery specialising in old master pictures at 28 Sackville Street, London.

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Russell31 is selling some of his drawings – all the late ones except the Venetians – & I am going up tomorrow in case one comes within my reach. I doubt it, as his collection has been well boomed. I also fought my way into the Holford32 sale which was quite interesting sociologically. The price of second rate Dutch pictures makes the Italians look cheap. We hear from Mrs Russell33 uncertain reports about your plans. It seems that you really may get to Constantinople. Whatever you do we are quite free to fall in with your plans, & even if we arrived in Italy before you were back there is plenty to see there. I am afraid Cyril Connolly was a disappointment at i Tatti: of course he is that everywhere, but he really justifies his existence of providing an unending topic of conversation. I forgot to ask if you have a photo of the Holford Leonardo drawing sold at Sotheby’s last week.34 If not I can let you have one. It is a great beauty. There is a wonderful exhibition of Tiepolo drawings in London35 – A sketch book which Tiepolo presented to a convent & which subsequently belonged to Canova.The man who owns them (a share) has done a catalogue of them with real photos, which you might like to have, if he has not sent it to you. I hope you will forgive my squalid notepaper, bad writing & bad spelling, but I am writing with difficulties. Jane joins me in Love to you all, Yours affectionately, K.C. P.S. I am sending the photos separately.

31

32 33 34

35

Archibald George Bloomfield Russell (1879–1955), an art critic and art historian specialising in William Blake, was a collector and connoisseur of old master drawings. Drawings from his collection were sold by Sotheby’s in London in 1928. He later turned to collecting butterflies and moths. A long-serving officer of arms at the College of Arms in London, he was Lancaster Herald from 1922 to 1954. See n. 23. Alys Russell Included in Sotheby’s Old Master Sale of 17 May 1928 was a small silverpoint study of a horse and rider by Leonardo da Vinci which had belonged to the Holford family. It was purchased by John Nicholas Brown of Newport, Rhode Island, for £2500. In due course it was inherited by J. Carter Brown, and was sold by Christie’s, London, in July 2001, for £8,143,750. There was an exhibition of Tiepolo drawings at the Savile Gallery in May 1928. The gallery was started by Richard Edward Arnesby Wilson with Mark Oliver in 1927. It closed in the 1930s, a victim of the Depression.

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65 Tufton Street36 s.w.1. 15th June ’28

Dear Mrs Berenson, After a great deal of labour we are now settled here. We have practically no servants, & I still do most of the housework. But carrying and carpentering which has occupied my time for the last fortnight is almost over. When I got your kind letter suggesting that Mr Berenson might not be ready for the Drawings till next spring, I should like to have replied at once. But a letter to Mr Berenson was long over due, so I said in that what I should also have said to you – that I shall be out in Florence this winter ready to help him if I can. I owe him a great deal, & I should like to try & be of use to him. But if you do not think I can be of any use to him please tell me so. I shall not be surprised, but rather sorry. This house is very much to my taste. The decorations are quite unadventurous, & of a kind most unpopular just now – mahogany furniture & large gold picture frames of the kind called Edwardian. But I grew up among such surroundings & would not be comfortable in the shiny rooms now fashionable. I always used to think it odd that Ruskin could have lived surrounded by hideous Victorian furniture, but I sympathise with him now. Jane is very well, despite a great deal of work & worry. Our first experiment in servants was a failure, the cook refusing to attempt an omelette, owing to the complicated nature of the dish. She maintains that she is always considered a first-class cook, & such is the standard of cooking here that she probably is. All the english seem to expect is something out of a tin with hot water poured over it. Both she & the housemaid are under notice & so far we have discovered no reputable substitutes. We envy our son. He is fed regularly & abundantly, & sleeps in the intervals. He is extremely well & warms our hearts by flourishing his arms & gurgling.We cannot allow that any other baby has done these things. He was christened on friday, Barbara37 being one of the six people present. He hicoughed gently while we gave solemn promises that he would shun the flesh. Next week I really hope I shall be able to take up my work, so called. I much look forward to looking at drawings again – other than my own, which hang

36 37

Tufton Street is a stone’s throw from Westminster Abbey and within walking distance of the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square and the Tate Gallery at Millbank. Barbara Halpern

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in my study. They include an enchanting Correggio38 & a ravishing Beccafumi which I managed to snatch out of the teeth of the dealers here. Soon I shall believe I own Leonardo’s & Michelangelos.39 Jane joins me in love to you all. Yrs. K.

15th July 1928. As from Sixty Five Tufton Street s.w.1 Victoria 3201

Dear Mr Berenson, I am sending you a photograph of a picture which I have bought. I am afraid the photograph is not very good & of course gives no idea of the colour, which is good. I hope you like the look of the picture. It hangs on our living room mantelpiece & gives us great pleasure. Jane has had a bad cold, & London has been very hot, so we have taken refuge in the country for a week. We have arranged to stay in Windsor from August 13th to 20th, & afterwards we go to Chatsworth. Edinburgh & Glasgow we shall visit on the way to my home in Scotland in September. I should like to manage a week in Oxford, but not in this weather. In the meanwhile I shall have plenty to do correcting proofs of my essay, which is now in the press. It is very bad, very disappointing, & I wish I had locked it up for twenty years. However having it published will be a chastening experience, & I suppose, good for a dilettante like myself. Macbeth has found all the photographs ordered from the B.M. but three. I am afraid we took our references on the wrong option for the purposes of photography. We should have taken the numbers of the cases as well as the

38 39

Correggio, Mother and Child, drawing related to Allegory of Virtue, Musée du Louvre, Paris. Berenson considered it to be a work after Correggio. Clark did buy a drawing which was later attributed to Michelangelo. Lot 124 in the Oppenheimer Sale of Old Master Drawings, 10 July 1936, at Christie’s, was catalogued as ‘Andrea di Michelangelo’. The drawing was of The Virgin and Child, and the lot includes two other drawings. The reserve was £80, and Clark bought it for 100 guineas (£105). In a letter to Frederick Hartt in June 1972, Clark explained that he had bought it at a moment when many so-called Michelangelo drawings were attributed to various actual or invented pupils or followers (see Ch. 5 n. 119) and that the drawing had been attributed to one such. Later Johannes Wilde, A. E. Popham and Philip Pouncey accepted it as authentic. Berenson thought it was School of Michelangelo. Clark also says that it suffered damage during the war (see Ch. 5 n. 84).

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press-marks. Fortunately the three which Macbeth can’t find do not seem very important. Perhaps I shall be able to find them. Most of our time in London has been spent on household work. Servants are unbelievably silly in England. In the intervals I have tried to write an epilogue to my essay, & failed hopelessly. I have also read a little – the first time for some years – & enjoyed very much the sensation of some wretched person trying to make facts clear & entertaining to me, instead of my trying to do so for someone else. (For whom, I wonder.) We look forward to seeing Mrs Berenson in August, & showing her our son, who really does seem to be a success. Jane joins me in love to you all, Yours. K.C.

[Undated letter] Sixty Five Tufton Street s.w.1 Victoria 3201

Dear BB, Your letter made me blush40 – most letters do, but I was more than usually careless about those photographs. I had them packed & addressed when we moved house.41 They got lost in the move & have only recently reappeared – when I was too ashamed to send them. However here they are + a drawing of Russell’s42 that will interest you, I think. Shame apart, I was delighted to get your letter & hear that the end of those cursed lists was in sight. As a bourgeois myself I am very complacent about bourgeois instincts, and am glad that yours have survived. The lists will be an everlasting blessing, especially for people like myself who, though fond of the attribution game, would like to try another approach to the study of art. The Gothic Revival is finished, proofs & all; & it makes a pretty book. Logan enjoyed finding misprints in it all last weekend, & Jane is making it an encyclopedic index. It is too late now for apotropaios43 (if that is the word); I can only hope people will realise the size & difficulty of the subject.

40 41 42 43

Letter missing. See letter of 20 May 1928. See n. 31. Greek for ‘warding off evil’.

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We go to Windsor on Monday for a week, & I hope to spend one day of it at Lockinge.44 I once glanced at the drawings there & found nothing except the Raphael.45 But the Holford Leonardo46 was discovered in a most disreputable scrapbook so I have hopes. I had a piece of luck the other day. You know the pitifully repainted Correggios in the Louvre – allegories of Virtue & Vice. I’ve found the drawing for the woman & child to the right of Virtue – perhaps the most repainted part of all. Unfortunately my drawing is rather damaged, but quite unbedeviled & the exquisite loveliness of the figure shines quite clearly through the blotches of damp. It shows, too, some very interesting variants from the painted figure.47 I got it for £7. What fine things Russell (AGB)48 has got. I dined with him a week or two ago, & was glad to see a large heap of photos ready to be sent to you. Either way do you know a drawing of a horse reduced to measured proportions in the Metropolitan which is ascribed in an old hand to Verrochio?49 I think it is right – at least the handwriting agrees perfectly with all the other specimens of V’s hand known to me. I have not seen a photo of it at i Tatti. My family are extremely well, & the infant, very fortunately, seems to enjoy travelling. I have heard from Charley Bell who sounds rather more vigorous than he did; but, poor man, his rather silly assistant is leaving him & he himself is thinking seriously of retiring. So his great life’s work of preventing people seeing the drawings in the Ashmolean may be ruined. Much as I love him, it will be a good thing for Oxford & students generally when a more liberal spirit rules the Ashmolean. I shall do my best for you at Edinburgh & Glasgow; & the week after next I hope to go to Chatsworth. Then I shall write again & report anything I found. Did that poor lady in Florence ever finish typing the list of Drawings? Jane sends her love to you both, Ever yours affectionately, K.

44

45

46 47 48 49

Lockinge House in Berkshire was owned by Arthur Thomas Loyd who had inherited the house and estate on the death of a second cousin, Lady Wantage (born Harriet Loyd), in 1920. The house, a brick-built Georgian mansion built in the 1750s, was demolished in 1947. It had a distinguished library, whose librarian had been Arthur Strong (see n. 76 below). Raphael, Group of Four Figures, now owned by the Getty Museum, California. It is a study for Raphael’s Disputa. The drawing was published by A. G. B. Russell in The Vasari Society, 2nd ser., pt v, Oxford, 1924, p. 9, no. 6, and by Oskar Fischel in the Burlington Magazine (October 1925), pp. 174–9. See n. 34 above. See n. 38 above. See n. 31 above. Andrea del Verrocchio, Measured Drawing of a Horse, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, acquired in 1917.

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Nov 1, 1928 Pera Palace Hotel Constantinople

Dear Kenneth Your letter wh. we received a day or two ago delighted us, it reminded me that again I must approach you with a confession that I shall not be ready to go to work on the drawings before next June. We are planning to spend Apr. & May in Palestine & Syria. Fr. Dec. to Apr. I shall have my time taken by the last revisions of the list. When we return fr. the near East I shall begin to turn my attention to the drawings but even then I shall be giving half my time to proof-reading and tinkering & re-writing. Then next autumn we mean to go to Spain. The upshot is that for a whole year I shall not be able to do much on our joint task. I do not need tell you how glad we should be to have you living at the Villino50 and how delighted to see you & to enjoy yr. society. Only you must consult your own convenience & not come out expecting to work with me on the drawings. I am sure you know how much I regret having engaged you in a partnership wh. I was so far fr. ready to enter upon. I had no idea the lists would take me so long for I calculated on the work I used to be able to do & had no idea of how little I can now do each day. I am most grateful for all you have done hitherto & I hope you will go on and see the French collections. Lille & Bayonne are the great depositories but at Rennes there is a good lot & almost certainly there are others at Nantes and Dijon and Orleans and Grenoble etc. etc. Indeed there is no telling what one may find in the French provincial museum or library. I expect more from libraries than museums. I look forward to see photos of drawings you write you have procured & I hope you will have one of the medal you have found.51 I am writing by open windows with the thermometer at 68 in the shade. Constantinople is a fascinating place wh. it will be hard to leave. I have learnt more here than I expected to – if only I don’t forget it.

50

51

When the Berensons purchased I Tatti they acquired, along with 57 acres, several rustic houses, including the Villino at Corbignano, just across the road from I Tatti, and well placed on an elevated west-facing hillside. Over time it was modernised and became the principal guest house for visitors to I Tatti. See n. 68 below.

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Our next address will be Hotel Petit Palais Athens. We may stay there till the end of the month. With much affection to you both Ever yrs. B.B.

Nov. 7th ’28 Sixty Five Tufton Street s.w.1 Victoria 3201

Dear BB., Your letter reached me in Edinburgh, whither I had gone to visit a newly found collection of drawings.52 I was very glad to get it & to hear definitely what your plans are to be. Of course it is disappointing that you will not be able to work on the Florentine Drawings for almost a year, but I can hunt other drawings in out of the way places & look through collections of reproductions & do other things which require more time & less intelligence than you need to give. Also I hope that every year makes me better able to work with you. We are most grateful to you for renewing your kind offer of the Villino. Certainly we cannot let the whole winter pass without seeing Italy; but we are most unwilling to cart our infant about unless it is absolutely necessary to do so. At present our plan is this: to go out to Rome for a month or so, without the baby; &, if it is convenient, to see you on the way home. We could visit the French collections in the spring, &, if you go to Spain in the autumn, we should much like to join you there. Of course work for the Florentine Drawings cannot consume all my time, & I should very much like your advice on how the rest of it may be profitably employed. I learn what I can by reading & looking but such purely assimilative work can never be as valuable as a systematic work towards a definite aim. Many plans have occurred to me, the most ambitious & the one which seems to me most worth doing is some study of the conflict between classicism & baroque which seems to have absorbed the Italian spirit during the late 16th & early 17th century. I should like to put Raphael & Michelangelo into two slots at the top

52

Perhaps a reference to the 2000 drawings which the Royal Scottish Academy had gifted to the National Gallery in Edinburgh in 1910.

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& see them come out Poussin and Rubens at the bottom. Baroque perhaps has been overwritten, but Classicism has never been touched. Do you think it is worth attempting? It contains, as you will see, the possibility of working at many ideas which you yourself suggested to me. I have managed to collect a good deal of new material for the Drawings. Some was at Windsor, some at Oxford, some at Edinburgh; the best of all a lovely Verrochio design for a marble monument which I found under the rubric ‘metal work’ in the Victoria & Albert.53 Parker54 & I have also made a most interesting discovery – the attribution (or signature?) Agnolo di Donnino in a contemporary hand, on the base of a ‘David Ghirlandaio’ in the B.M.55 I did not know the name, but Thieme Becker56 & Vasari57 tell me that he was a friend of Cosimo Rosselli’s who spent all his time making drawings. There was absolutely nothing at Glasgow, only a couple of Soglianis in the newly discovered Edinburgh drawings. Jane & I took a special journey to look through them, felt rather aggrieved, though outside the Florentines there was a very fine Giorgionesque drawing. Good stuff. Perhaps the most interesting thing I have found is the fact that the little Castagnesque Last Supper at Edinburgh measures precisely the same as the Castagno Crucifixion in the N.G.58 I was led to compare the measurements by the extraordinary resemblance between them in colour & technique. Both have the same rather unusual harmony of grey & claret. Unfortunately the Edinburgh panel is rather common place in conception & the types are what Crowe & Cock59 called ‘vulgar’. They are also extremely

53 54 55

56 57 58 59

Verrocchio, Design for a Monument , 1470s , V&A acquisition number 2314. See Ch. 5, letter 7 February 1934, n. 44. Karl Parker Possibly London, British Museum, drawing no. 1860,0616.46. The BM catalogue entry states: ‘A nude man, standing almost to front, his right arm raised, looking down. Metalpoint, heightened with white (partly oxidised), on orange-brown prepared paper. . . . inscribed in ink on the verso in the lower right corner: “Agno di DĿnin.” . . . This was catalogued as Raffaellino del Garbo in the 1860 Woodburn sale. Karl Parker suggested, on the basis of the inscription, that this and other drawings attributed by Berenson should be given to Agnolo di Donnino. . . . Agnolo’s name is inscribed on several other drawings in the group’. A German Lexicon of painters in more than 30 vols, published 1907–62. It contains more than 250,000 biographies written by several hundred worldwide specialists. Giorgio Vasari’s The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, considered to be the first work of art history, and a narrative compilation of artists’ biographies, was first published in 1550. The Edinburgh Last Supper is now attributed to Botticini, as is the National Gallery’s Crucifixion (NG 1138). Both were formerly considered to be by Andrea del Castagno. Sir Joseph Archer Crowe (a former consular official) and Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle (a connoisseur forced to flee Italy after the 1848 Revolutions) collaborated together in a remarkably seamless partnership to write the first modern history of Italian art to be published in English, A New History of Painting in Italy from the Second to the Sixteenth Century (London, 1864–71, 5 vols). It was a pioneering work of scholarship, founded on documentary evidence and acute first-hand observation.

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like a Resurrection60 which belonged – may still belong – to Duveen,61 & which I, of course, have never seen. If the Duveen panel was exactly the same size as the other two (it has the same proportions) there would be some excuse for following the matter up. I wonder if you know the Edinburgh picture. In any case I’ll include a photo of it in the large bundle I send (with my book) to i Tatti. Mention of my book reminds me of Mrs Berenson’s very kind & sympathetic letter, for which please thank her. I have had some very encouraging reviews. Unfortunately the Times Lit. Sup. reviewer was an ardent high church man & half his review is given up to a very unhistorical defence of his principles.62 The book could hardly have gone to a more unsuitable person. Some friends & people whose judgement I respect have been so kind that I feel well rewarded for writing it. Jane & Alan are well. The latter is cutting teeth, but preserving through it all health & great jolliness. Jane joins me in love to all, Ever yours affectionately, K.

Nov. 28. 1928 Hotel Grande Bretagne-Lampsa Athènes

Dear Kenneth We shall be delighted to have a visit fr. you both. We can talk over yr. scheme of work, wh. as vaguely indicated in yr. letter sounds most alluring. Of course you would have to take a great deal of time to carry it thro. The result could scarcely fail to be fruitful as well as fascinating. To return to our drawings please put Besançon on yr. List. And in Rome have a good look at the Corsini drawings. There are some in the Vatican Library & there may be more in still other libraries.

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61 62

Francesco Botticini (c. 1446–98), The Resurrection, c. 1465–70, formerly attributed to Andrea del Castagno, tempera on poplar panel, purchased by the Frick Collection, New York, 1939. The measurements are virtually identical to those of the National Gallery and Edinburgh pictures; see n. 58. Joseph Duveen Clark’s book was treated to a long review in the Times Literary Supplement (tls) on 8 November 1928 by David Leslie Murray who was the Editor of the tls.

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While on Rome I want you to see Toesca.63 He can be helpful. Steinmann64 you know already I believe. Agnolo di Donnino has already attracted my attention* [In margin: *At least I hope that I am not imagining it. Notes at home should be consulted] & I remember the inscription on the verso of a Dom. Ghirl. in the B.M. I wonder whether we have an exact reproduction of his inscriptions. We must at all events find out. It is hard to tear oneself away from Athens. The Acropolis is a perpetual surprise. But we sail day after tomorrow from Brindisi and go straight to I Tatti. With affection to you both Yours B.B.

Hotel Hassler, Roma [in another hand ‘1928?’] Sixty Five Tufton Street s.w.1 Victoria 3201

Dear BB., I have yet to thank you for your letter, with its extremely kind comments on the Gothic Revival.65 At least it will be the only book I shall ever write which contains something unknown to you. I have been amused at the reviews, half rebuking me for admiring the Gothic Revival too much, half for admiring it too little.Your complaint, that it was too ‘behaviouristic’, alarmed me, especially as I am not very sure what ‘behaviourism’ is. I am afraid all it means is that my eyes are focused by our old enemy, the time-spirit. However it is a great thing to know more-or-less how the t-s is affecting our vision, & the next book I write I shall do my best to exalt free will. You may have heard that our time here has ended sadly with Jane getting a bad attack of influenza. Fortunately we had worked quite hard before she caught it, & though an infinity of things remain unseen, I have nothing actually on my conscience. I have found no new drawings. The Corsini gallery remains

63 64 65

Pietro Toesca Ernst Steinmann (1866–1934) was the Director of the German Institute, the Bibliotheca Hertziana (see n. 66), in Rome and was an authority on Michelangelo. Letter missing.

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unchanged from your catalogue; & there appeared to be absolutely no 15th c. drawings anywhere else. Toesca has been most helpful with introductions & advice. Even more valuable was the introduction to Steinman[n] & the Hertziana.66 That is as I contemplated the rows of pale & serious German youths bowed with research, I was overcome with my own idleness & ignorance, & determined on a more laborious life. Incidentally practically every one of those youths was writing on Baroque; so that finally extinguishes any idea I can have of approaching that field. Besides the Baroque is made to stink in the nostrils here. Constables seem keen that I should write a short ‘vue generale’ of paintings to synchronise with the Italian exhibition67 next year. It certainly would be good fun to do; I should enjoy trying to fix my present ideas & sensations, & I should enjoy the literary stunt of compression. Besides it’s the sort of thing which can only be done by the very ignorant or the very learned and I am never likely to be the latter. And it will in no way interfere with the pursuit of more serious work. We hope to arrive on Sunday, but will send you a telegram. We look forward to it very much. Yours ever, Kenneth.

March 15th ’29 Sixty Five Tufton Street s.w.1 Victoria 3201

Dear BB., Much to my surprise I have been asked to help with the Italian exhibition. Your objections were, I think, [to] the transporting [of] delicate pictures & to

66

67

The Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute of Art History in Rome was founded with a gift from Henriette Hertz in 1913 and originally called the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. It is one of the 3 of the 80 institutes in the Max Planck Society (Max Planck Gesellschaft) not in Germany. Its focus is the study of Italian art and architectural history. On 19 January 1929 Aby Warburg gave a lecture on his Mnemosyne which Clark attended. The Mnemosyne Atlas was Warburg’s last project. It took the form of 40 wooden panels covered with black cloth, on which he had pinned nearly 1000 images of objects and works of art of all eras, which he had accumulated from books, magazines and newspapers. He then arranged them into 14 different themes. The Exhibition of Italian Art; see Ch. 3.

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the political colour of the exhibition. I think it is unlikely that the exhibition will come off but if it does it will not attempt to be representative, but will consist entirely of pictures in England with a few travellers from America. It is improbable that the committee will try to get anything from Italy. Of course it will be a bad exhibition, but I can see no harm in it. Personally I find the amount of slush poured on these exhibitions degrading rather than helpful to the study of art, but if the thing is going to run in a reasonable way, I should like to do anything I can to help it. However I have neither accepted or rejected an offer to be on the committee because no committee has yet been formed. I have written an article on my small medallion, because whether the Portrait of Valerio Belli is by Raphael or not, it & the documents connected with it are undoubtedly of interest to students.68 I have not yet received a good photo of it, but will send you one as soon as I do so. Your advice has been continually in my mind, & has led me to reject all offers to write articles of any kind, & to concentrate on collecting material for a study of Classicism; it has also led me to avoid Bond Street. I find the classical revival so absorbing that I have laid aside my Reynolds & Ruskin, which contained too large a proportion of theory to fact. I am enclosing a prospectus of our History of Art Society. I do not ask you to approve of anything with which Read69 is connected, but if there is anything foolish in the prospectus, I should be most grateful if you would point it out to me. I send out a catalogue of the Savile Gallery.70 It may amuse you, though despite the names of Ghirlandayo and Verrochio there is nothing in it for us. The attributions are not by Borenius.71 I saw several mentions in reviews of a Rafaellino del Garbo at the Leicester Galleries72 & hurried round to see it. But it was a Pieter Coecke. I am sorry to say that Jane has not been well ever since her influenza (or Genii or whatever it was) in Rome. She is up for a few days feeling wretched & then

68

69 70 71 72

The attribution to Raphael is disputed. See Christa Gardner von Teuffel, ‘Raphael’s Portrait of Valerio Belli: Some New Evidence’, Burlington Magazine, vol. 129, no. 1015 (October 1987), pp. 663–6. Herbert Read See n. 35 above. Tancred Borenius The Leicester Galleries (Ernest Brown & Phillips) started in 1902 in premises near Leicester Square, London. The driving force was Oliver Brown (1885–1966), who became a partner in 1914 and dedicated his life to the gallery. In the first half of the century it was one of the country’s leading venues for promoting modern French art and young British artists. By and large they did not deal in old masters. Clark was a keen follower of the gallery, often buying things for less than £5 (roughly equivalent to £1000 today, according to www.measuringworth.com).

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goes to bed again. It is very sad for her. I hope our visit to Sospel73 next month will cure her. I hope you are all well & have braced yourselves for your travels; & I hope you will find a lot of Strygowskian74 churches with inscriptions saying they were built in the 12th century. Jane sends her love, ever yours affectionately, K. [This letter contains a carbon copy of the proposed History of Art Society. Clark was to be the Secretary, the Committee to be composed of W. G. Constable (National Gallery), E. M. O’R. Dickey (Professor of Fine Art, University of Durham), R. Gleadowe (Slade Professor of Fine Art, University of Oxford), Roger Hinks (British Museum), Herbert Read (Victoria and Albert Museum). The immediate aim of the society was to publish original books in English on the history and science of art, especially works which embodied original research or ideas, publication of which through ordinary channels would be difficult or impossible; and to provide for the translation into English of important works on the history of the science of art which had already appeared in foreign countries. Five hundred subscribers were envisaged at one guinea a year, who would receive without further cost the publications of the Society.]

I Tatti Settignano Florence

Baalbek May, 1929 Dear Kenneth, I think I must let you know that after having thought it over as well as I know how, I have decided that we had better give up our plan of collaborating on

73 74

See Ch. 1 n. 15. Josef Stryzgowski (1862–1941), a German art historian who had a theory about the influence of early Christian Armenian architecture on the medieval architecture of Europe. Berenson did not agree with the theory. See also Ch. 8 n. 69.

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the new edition of the Florentine drawings.75 In the first place I feel I have no right to keep you hanging on for the ever retreating day when I shall be ready to devote my whole energies to preparing this new edition. At the present rate, it may be years. Then when the day does come, I shall need not a collaborator but an assistant who will be at my beck and call to fetch and carry, to look up texts etc etc. It would be absurd to expect you to leave house and wife and child and friends to devil for a cantankerous old man. I have no clear idea of what you have done already. I understand that you have gone over the Uffizi drawings. For this and any other work of the same nature that you have done already, including corrections and amplifications at Windsor, if you choose to let me have them, I shall give you full credit.You told me that you had made efforts to get to Chatsworth and you will get there no doubt. When you do, I would ask you to let me have any corrections you can make. If on the other hand you see Florentine drawings I missed – I saw only what Arthur Strong76 was pleased to show me – or have other attributions to suggest, I would advise you to publish them on your own account. That would leave me free to accept any of your discoveries that seem right to me. And you could do the same with Lille. I want you to believe, dear Kenneth, that it is to save our friendship that I am giving up our working together. And I am eager that our friendship should in no way suffer. I hope to see you not less, but more and I shall be very keen to know what progress you are making in preparing the history of Classicism in England. I hope you will not let any other interests lure you away from that fascinating undertaking. Let others decide which tenth late drawing is by Pulcio di Ceaccio and which other is by Ciaccio di Pulcio, let others waste their worthless time increasing their pannaches [sic] sitting on committees. Let still others feed the maw of the monster called the reading public.You, you should devote your gifts

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On 9 February 1929 Mary had written to Alys Russell: ‘Nicky is very troubled about the business of Kenneth’s collaboration with B.B. over the [revision] of the Florentine Drawings. Houghton says that K would like to get out of it and B.B. would like him to, but none of us . . . dare to put in our oars. B.B. feels sure that K cannot help him, as he needs careful scholarship and not the pretty writing à la Leonardo in Life and Letters. K has said to me that he loathed the pettifogging business of correcting notes and numbers and there will be a lot of that to do if he means to help B.B. But all he wants out of it is, I fear, whatever kudos he will get from the association. He has an ungenerous self-centred nature, and B. B . needs devotion . . .Will he ever get it from a man? . . . I do not interfere . . . I expect it to end in a deplorable quarrel’. Edmund Houghton was a neighbour of the Berensons’, of the same generation. He went on motoring trips with them and encouraged Cecil Pinsent’s architectural talents (Pinsent was briefly engaged to Houghton’s daughter). Arthur Strong (1863–1904) was a distinguished librarian and Arabic scholar who had been the librarian at Chatsworth in the 1890s where he made notable discoveries among the paintings and drawings. He was not of a friendly disposition towards Berenson because he thought his wife had once been over-cordial with him.

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for scholarship and your gift for words to a task which will prove one of those contributions to the history of ideas and taste which by their mere existence advance culture. [This is an unsigned carbon copy of a type-written letter on I Tatti writing paper. It is headed ‘Copy’.]

Sixty Five Tufton Street, s.w.1 Tuesday 11. [June] 1929

Dear Mary Your very charming letter has just arrived and I feel I must write at once to thank you for it. Please wear the slippers – I promise you a pair every Christmas! I will answer Nicky’s letter when we get to the peace of the country on Saturday. She can have the house any time that suits her this summer for as long as she likes – I only hope we shan’t miss her by being in Scotland. K has not yet had BB’s letter from Baalbec. He is only waiting till it arrives to write to thank him for all he has done. He feels he owes everything to him and to you all at I Tatti and to the real home spiritual and in every way that you gave him after Oxford for the first time in his life. If BB will accept it he is hoping to dedicate to him his next book which is to be on the Classical Revival as you know – even the title B.B. suggested. K has long felt that B.B. would naturally rather be entirely free from any ties in his work, but he knew B.B. would tell him so when it suited him and he respects and is too fond of him to have thought of suggesting this himself. Collaboration was always too grand a word anyway for so young a disciple! However he will say all this himself and to B.B. but we have talked about you all so often and so gratefully that I couldn’t help trying to express to you something of what we feel, myself. How lovely that you are writing a book about your travels – that is splendid news. Please hurry up! We go to the seaside on Saturday, then Chilling77 which will be great fun, then Scotland 21st July then Nicky I hope, then Vienna – and if possible look

77

Big Chilling was Logan Pearsall Smith’s house on the Solent.

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in on you going or coming. Alan is very well indeed. Gordon’s young woman is very nice. In haste much love to you all Jane

I Tatti Settignano Florence June 15, 1929

Dear Jane Returning I found your teddy bear rug & despite the heat I have been caressing & hugging it ever since. I keep it on the arm of the chair whilst I sit & work betw. tea & dinner. And many a blessing fr. it shall be wafted to you as I experience its comforting cockling. I do not understand what could have become of my letter to Kenneth? Nicky, she assures me she posted it along with one that has already reached you. If K. does not get it soon please let us know & Nicky will send the copy she made. Meanwhile I must tell you how touched I am by the way you speak of the letter for it seems that Nicky must have given you the substance of it. Of course I shall be proud of K’s dedication of his Classical Revival. Affectionately B.B.

Pope’s Hotel, Littlestone, Kent 20th June ’29

Dear BB, There is still no sign of your letter, but Nicky has told us more or less what it contains, & I feel I can’t put off writing until a copy has arrived. The only thing I don’t know is whether you have given up the idea of revising the drawing book altogether, or whether you only feel you would rather do it at your leisure

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& don’t want to keep me waiting too long. If the former, I should naturally be sorry, for the new edition would have benefited scholars & delighted aesthetes till our threatened relapse into barbarism is complete. But if the latter, then I do wholly sympathise with your feelings. I found the Florentine Drawings a wonderful training & a happy excuse for working with you, but you, I am afraid, must have found it rather an irritation, keeping you from original work in more attractive fields. If the book had dragged on for a few more years it would have become a sort of skeleton for us both. As things are the time I spent at work on it was one for which I can never be sufficiently grateful. I think Jane, in a letter to Mrs Berenson, told her how much we both feel this debt of gratitude. We learnt much besides the history of Florentine art – especially I learnt how little I know, which I could not have learnt so easily in London. I hope that even in this lax atmosphere I shan’t forget the high standards of the Tatti. All the work I do in the history of art will have foundations in what I learned with you: but you actually suggested my writing about Classicism, so of course the book must be dedicated to you, if you approve of it when written. I hope that although I am not working for you, you will not mind if I occasionally ask your advice about my work. Unfortunately all I can offer in return is to send you photographs of anything I think would interest you! As it happens I should like your advice at once. A man named A. H. Pollen78 (you – certainly Mrs Berenson– have met him) has a drawing presumably by Leonardo for the Madonna del Gatto.79 He wants to publish a book on Leonardo’s early & Madonna drawings to include – he says not to ‘star’, but I gather that is what he means – his own. He has asked me to write the book. I have refused saying that any material I had collected on Leonardo was collected for the Florentine Drawings, but that argument doesn’t apply now. Obviously there are other arguments against doing it, chief of them that he will try to get me to boom his drawing & not write an impartial book on the whole subject. The

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Arthur Hungerford Pollen (1866–1937), from a wealthy and eccentric aristocratic English family, trained as a barrister but became a successful businessman. In 1900 he became interested in the problem of aiming naval artillery after witnessing a practice firing at sea, and persuaded the Admiralty to cooperate in the development of his proposals. Eventually, a different system was adopted. Pollen bought at auction a tiny drawing by Leonardo of The Virgin and Child with a Cat and offered Clark a fee to write a book about Leonardo’s drawings of Virgins and cats. Clark declined the offer. Pollen’s father, John Hungerford Pollen (1820–1902), was a High Anglican parish priest who converted to Roman Catholicism. Skilled as a painter and decorator, he became, through Cardinal Newman’s influence, Professor of Fine Art in Dublin and executed elaborate decorative schemes, much influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites and the Arts and Crafts Movement, for churches and houses connected with the Catholic aristocracy, including ceilings for Philip Kerr (Lord Lothian) at Blickling Hall, Norfolk. The drawing is now in a private collection in New York. It was sold by Pollen’s widow at auction when it was bought by the Swiss collector Martin Bodmer.The Bodmer Foundation sold it in 1999. It was included in the exhibition Leonardo da Vinci, Master Draftsman at the Metropolitan Museum, New York, in 2003.

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chief argument in favour is that he is going to have the book printed by Bruce Rogers80 which would certainly be beautiful, & if I don’t do it Chesterton81 will. Chesterton on Leonardo is a terrible thought & would be the waste of a well printed book. I have brought this question into this letter, as I must give Pollen an answer as soon as possible. But everything else I’ve got to tell you I shall write when I have received a copy of your last letter. Ever yours affectionately, Kenneth.

June ’29 Sixty Five Tufton Street s.w.1 Victoria 3201

Dear BB., A copy of your letter has arrived, & I must thank you for it as well as I know how. I am really touched by all that it contains, & chiefly by your saying that it is to save our friendship that you are giving up our working together. I have tried to say something of what knowing you has meant to me in my other letter, & I shall not repeat it here. I hope that in my future work I shall be able to fill in the grandiose outlines you have sketched for me. I am only sorry that I should have been responsible for this wretched muddle with Constable.82 He must have completely misunderstood what I said to him, though I must take part of the blame, for it was indiscreet of me to say anything at all. He was asking me about my future plans, & how the Florentine Drawings was getting on, & I said that, though I hadn’t heard definitely, I believed that the plan of our collaboration was at an end. I know Constable well & I have written to tell him that he misunderstood me. In any case nothing in Mrs Berenson’s or Nicky’s letters led me to believe that you have given up the idea of work on the drawing book. I only mentioned this possibility in my first letter as it was I thought you might feel yourself better employed in original work than in the comparative drudgery of revision. As to the material I collected: I certainly saw most of the Florentine drawings in the Uffizi – of course there is no means of telling if I saw them all. My notes

80 81 82

Bruce Rogers (1870–1957) was an American book and type designer, considered by many to be the greatest book designer of the 20th century. His style was traditional and classical. Possibly G. K. Chesterton, who was interested in Leonardo da Vinci as a personality, and had written a poem, ‘Leonardo da Vinci’, in 1893. William George (‘W. G.’) Constable

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on them, for what they are worth are at i Tatti. The most important notes I have here are those on the Leonardo’s at Windsor which included a good few drawings not in your catalogue, & some unimportant connections. When I am next at i Tatti I can go through all my notes there & get in order any that would seem to be of value to you. As for the Windsor notes, I had better try to get photos of all the drawings not in your catalogue & send them with the notes. I shall certainly try to go to Chatsworth & Lille, & of any important Florentine drawing not in your catalogue I shall get a photograph & send it to you. You will be able to see from the photo if it is worth your while making a special expedition to see the original. And of course I shall do the same in any out-of-the-way collection I visit. Despite your generous suggestion that I should publish such drawings, I am not likely to do so. I seldom feel confident of an attribution & in any case I hate writing short articles. But if I am ever so interested in a drawing that I feel I must publish it, I’ll send you a photo of it plus my attribution before I do so. I am afraid my contribution to the revised F.D.s is quite insignificant. A few measurements put right by a centimetre, a few numbers & once or twice the sex of the subject correctly established. When I think of the hopes with which I began I cannot but be disappointed, but of course the truth is that such work demanded a longer training & greater aptitude than I could give to it. Which brings me back to your letter with its generous peroration. Indeed I hope I may eschew the other interests which you mention. For petty fogying attributions I have always been too ignorant, & heaven knows I shall never be lured on to another committee. The reading public is more of a temptation, but I have great examples – Gray, Gibbon, Flaubert – to keep me clear of it. Ever yours affectionately, K.C.

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Addendum [Extract from an undated letter from Clark to Umberto Morra in Rome, written when staying with Logan Pearsall Smith at Big Chilling in Hampshire for a month and ‘dreading our departure’.] As you may have heard I was inveigled onto the Italian Exhibition committee and I bitterly regret it. Besides annoying BB and causing some resentment among those of my elders and betters who are not on, it has meant a lot of co-operative work. It has however had an excellent result. It has pleased my parents who find it a recognizable form of success, and will acquiesce more quietly in my future inactivity. For as soon as this business is over we intend to leave London and settle in the country, there to practice those virtues of absorption, contemplation and non-production which BB has so much at heart for me. At present we are in great hopes of getting a beautiful trecento house in Hampshire which is just our size and if we buy it I think it will be worth a visit to England. You will have heard about my correspondence with BB on the Florentine drawings: indeed you will have heard of far more than I can tell you. BB’s letter was a model of tact and grace, and I don’t wonder he was annoyed at such a masterpiece being lost, and its whole effect ruined by Mary’s and Nicky’s letters. I look forward to my next visit to I Tatti, as I feel I shall be able to meet BB on much easier terms. I had got this far when we left Chilling and went to Scotland. This is never a period of the year we enjoy partly because of the climate which makes even reading difficult. I am preparing an article on BB for your new encyclopaedia, and have just reread the whole of his work. Like many great writers who have created new influential ideas, Nietzsche or Rousseau for example, he is very easy to attack and on many counts quite indefensible. But if one confines oneself to his positive contributions, they also are numerous, and I suppose could not have existed without a certain amount of perversity.

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Three The Exhibition of Italian Art, Italian Politics, Windsor Drawings 1929–1931

Clark knew that any involvement in the Exhibition of Italian Art (or the Italian Exhibition) would dismay Berenson. Nevertheless, the invitation to join the Selection Committee was irresistible. The exhibition was the brainchild of Ivy, Lady Chamberlain, who was the wife of the Foreign Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain. She and her husband were widely travelled and were passionate about the art of Italy and, like many people of that period, she had a great admiration for Mussolini. She first mooted the idea in the summer of 1927 and by Christmas she was chairing a small committee which included Sibyl Colefax and Sir Robert Witt. Mussolini responded to the idea with enthusiasm, appointing a capable and experienced Italian Commissioner, Ettore Modigliani, and, putting his personal authority behind the proposal, ordered museums and private collectors and inheritors in Italy to lend treasured masterpieces. Two years in the planning, the exhibition opened to the public at the Royal Academy, Burlington House, Piccadilly, London, on 1 January 1930 and ran until 8 March. Designed to be a sensational success, it fulfilled every ambition and attracted more than 500,000 visitors (attendance averaged well over eight thousand per day). The numerous honorary presidents and committee members boasted the names of all the great and the good of both nations, including Mussolini and Ramsay MacDonald and the premier princes, dukes, counts and earls and so on. The Executive Committee, which Clark was invited to join, comprised twentyeight of the most influential movers and shakers of the British art world. More than six hundred works were displayed with over 50 per cent coming from Italy, 25 per cent from British collections and 25 per cent from the usa and the rest of Europe. Although covering more than four centuries of art, the exhibition is most remembered for its display of Renaissance paintings, drawings and sculptures, among which were the rarest of the rare, such as Giorgione’s Tempest from the Accademia in Venice, and Botticelli’s Birth of Venus from the Uffizi in Florence.

55

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The Selection Committee (a sub-committee of the Executive Committee) included twelve distinguished and experienced names, so that Clark’s inclusion, aged twenty-seven, with little track record in any professional or formal artistic activity other than his work with Berenson and his book The Gothic Revival, was, arguably, a surprising choice and made him both the new boy and the baby of the group. Many, both in the uk and in Italy, opposed the Exhibition. King Victor Emmanuel was contrarissimo. There were those, like Berenson, who feared for the safety of the works of art and rightly so, for these precious and fragile treasures were put on a single ship, the liner Leonardo da Vinci, and transported from Genoa to Tilbury in boxes in the hold – they arrived on 20 December 1929 and the exhibition opened ten days later – and similarly shipped back again when the exhibition was over. Standards of conservation were different in those days but it did not require great imagination to contemplate the possibility of what might happen to these precious works of art if the ship was beset by storms in the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, the Bay of Biscay or the English Channel (it was) and that there was a real danger that all of them might end up at the bottom of the sea. Another objection, which Berenson shared and with justification, was that the proposed exhibition had little to do with making art available to the public and was a blatant nationalistic propaganda exercise by Mussolini to promote italianità and the power and supposed virtues of Italian Fascism. Although the collaboration between Clark and Berenson on The Florentine Drawings was terminated shortly after Clark joined the Selection Committee of the Italian Exhibition, there was awareness in the London art world that he had Berenson’s blessing and trust. Berenson had visited London in the summer of 1927 and he and Clark would have been seen together socially and working together.This observable friendship and collaboration must have been a factor in his appointment to the Selection Committee for the Italian Exhibition. The abrupt termination of the partnership on The Florentine Drawings could, with good reason, have ended their friendship and their correspondence. Yet the outcome was the opposite. Freed from the constraints that any working partnership can bring – such as obligations, demands, disagreements, resentments – it seems that each chose to move immediately and willingly to a more personal and more intimate level of friendship. Even at this early stage of their relationship there were too many interwoven threads of mutual friends and acquaintances, interests and enthusiasms, experiences and aspirations, for the tapestry to be unravelled or pulled apart. An especially strong thread was Edith Wharton, the celebrated American writer who had settled in France. She was the same age as Berenson and they had first met in 1903 when he had been given the ‘frozen mitt for which she was famous’ (Clark’s words, APW p. 203) but a carefully

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orchestrated second meeting in Paris in 1909 bore fruit: their friendship blossomed, was treasured by both, and the Christmases they spent together with other guests in the South of France brought much shared happiness. Clark was also ignored by her on their first meeting but he and Jane were soon welcomed into the fold and became intimates. Clark’s commission to catalogue the drawings by Leonardo daVinci at Windsor Castle was fortunate and timely, and came about through the good offices of the Royal Librarian, Owen Morshead, who initiated a series of catalogues of the drawings at Windsor (by 1958 a total of fourteen volumes had been published). He asked Clark to work on the first volume, which was to be devoted to the Leonardo drawings. The corpus of six hundred and more drawings – the largest single holding anywhere in the world – had never been fully researched or catalogued. Once contained in a single leather-bound portfolio which had belonged to the sixteenth-century sculptor Pompeo Leoni, they had, in the seventeenth century, been acquired by the passionate connoisseur and collector Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel. The exact circumstances of their royal acquisition are unknown but they are recorded in the Royal Collection at the end of the seventeenth century. Their subjects include portraits, figures, caricatures, horses and horsemanship, hydraulics, mechanics, anatomy and geometry. Not much scholarly work was carried out until the end of the nineteenth century and the researches carried out then were never brought to any final conclusion or published. Thus Clark was presented with the opportunity to benefit from, and to summarise, in a single publication such work as had already been done, to make his own original contribution and to establish himself as an independent scholar. With a son then aged two and more children contemplated, the Clarks, like many metropolitan young couples, faced the question of where to live. They concluded, as many do, that a house without a garden in central London was not suitable for a growing family and considered a life in the country. This proposition had its drawbacks, not least opposition from Clark’s parents, who refused to fund it. The compromise was a house in Richmond, conveniently situated near London, within easy reach of Windsor Castle. Whereas their first flat had, as Clark later recalled in his autobiography, ‘nothing to recommend it, not even a kitchenette’, and the house in Westminster was ‘a nasty . . . little house . . . bought as a stop gap’ (Clark APW pp. 167 and 186), this Richmond house, Old Palace Place, was a fine, substantial, four-storey eighteenth-century red-brick house with ten bedrooms, overlooking the Green and built round the remains of the old Tudor Palace of Sheen. It was their first dream house: a place to be proud of, in which to work comfortably, entertain elegantly and display a growing collection of treasures and works of art. Nonetheless, their time there turned out to be unexpectedly short. Although happily settled, and immersed

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in his work on the Windsor drawings, out of the blue came the offer of a job in Oxford that Clark found too tempting to refuse. The Wall Street Crash of October 1929 and the subsequent economic consequences appear to have had no immediate impact on either Clark’s or Berenson’s income or their way of life. The Clark family business had factories all over the world supplying a basic commodity, cotton thread, and the firm continued to pay dividends from which Clark benefited directly and he had support from his parents. Berenson’s investments in the stock market were affected but his 1928 renegotiated contract with Duveen provided him with a substantial fixed retainer, so that he was less reliant on a commission from Duveen’s purchases or sales, and he was also due substantial monies still owing under the old contract. His major problem was getting Duveen to pay him what he was owed in a timely manner: the art market was severely affected by the Crash and Duveen had more stock than cash and ready buyers. A further worry was whether or not Harvard would be willing to accept his proposed gift of I Tatti and its contents in the new economic climate. Inevitably, there had to be some drawing in of horns but, whereas Mary was willing to dip into capital to fund current expenditure, Berenson wished to preserve it for the future endowment. Berenson’s allowance to Mary’s daughters was cut, the butler and a gardener at I Tatti were let go, the library purchase budget was reduced to almost nil and there was less entertaining and travel, although in March 1931 Berenson undertook a major expedition to North Africa with Mary and Nicky, taking his own car and chauffeur, to explore the history and archaeology of Algeria and Tunisia, with a leisurely return journey via Cumae and Paestum in Campania. Italian politics also caused Berenson increasing concern. From the very outset, even at a time when many Italians welcomed Mussolini’s rise to power as a means of revitalising a country which was broken economically and socially, Berenson was unwaveringly – and in private outspokenly – anti-fascist, and he foresaw eventual disaster. Early in 1929 Mussolini made a pact with the Papacy, bringing the Vatican State into existence and in March he claimed 99 per cent of the vote in the general election. Berenson was fascinated by politics. He liked to put the daily unfolding of events into the broadest possible historical and cultural contexts.The conversation at mealtimes at I Tatti was often more about contemporary politics than about art, and Berenson was famous for his vituperative attacks on those he regarded as his enemies. Berenson liked to be more than a mere observer, however. In 1919 he had been a participant on the edges of the Paris Peace Conference, as a sort of unofficial American representative, during the negotiations when the leaders of the victorious powers got together to redraw the map of Europe after the defeat of Germany. Berenson thought at the time that they had got it wrong, especially Woodrow Wilson, and being himself a Jewish refugee from Lithuania to the

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United States, and a resident in Italy from the 1890s onwards, he was perhaps more acutely aware than most of the consequences. Although never publicly or actively anti-fascist, his quiet but earnest support for a small group of mostly young intellectuals who were opposed to the regime was important, which is one reason why his friendship with Umberto Morra was significant (see Appendix 1). Morra was a frequent visitor to I Tatti, becoming as one of the family, one of Berenson’s intimate confidants, and he was included in Berenson’s three-month trip to Spain, with Nicky and Mary, in September to December 1929. Completely trustworthy and discreet, with a noble lineage and connections to the Italian royal family, he divided his time between I Tatti and his family villa hidden away behind high walls in a hamlet just below Cortona in Tuscany.There he offered a safe haven to a group of young writers and intellectuals such as Alberto Moravia, who were determined ‘to keep the flame of liberty alight’ (see Appendix 1), providing them with a refuge where they could think and write and speak with freedom and security. Morra was of the same generation as Clark and they first met during Clark’s brief visit in early 1926, forming a deep and close friendship which lasted the whole of their lives, and introducing each other to their own closest friends. In the autumn of 1930 another young man who was destined to become a lifelong friend of both Berenson and Clark arrived at I Tatti for the first time: John Walker.Three years younger than Clark, he came with a strong recommendation from Paul Sachs as to his brilliant student achievements in the fine arts department at Harvard. With his charm, quick sense of humour and willingness to argue his corner, ‘Johnnie’ Walker was immediately welcomed into the I Tatti circle and put to work, as Clark had been initially, on Berenson’s current projects and the Lists. Walker came from a wealthy Pittsburgh iron and steel family. He had contracted polio at the age of thirteen which confined him to a wheelchair for many years, leaving him with a disability and pointing him towards a scholarly lifestyle. Berenson came to have a deep influence on Walker’s career, and the admiration that grew between them was mutual. Walker was instrumental in the negotiations which finally resulted in Berenson bequeathing I Tatti to Harvard, and Berenson hoped that he might be the first director. However,Walker applied and was appointed to supervise construction of the new National Gallery of Art in Washington, dc, where, in 1939, he became the Chief Curator and, in 1956, the Director (until 1969). Berenson called Walker ‘Cherubino’ because of his propensity to fall in love with a succession of young women: in 1935, while Professor of Fine Arts at the American Academy in Rome, he met his future wife who was the eldest daughter of the then British ambassador, the Earl of Perth. Clark and Walker, although from different continents and societies, were very much of the same temperament, with kindred backgrounds and interests, and the mutual esteem that developed between them was both personal and professional.

Chronology

1929 January

Clarks in Rome where Clark attends a lecture by Aby Warburg at the Hertziana

Spring

Clark starts to catalogue Windsor drawings Berensons and Nicky Mariano visit Syria and Palestine

June

Berensons return to I Tatti Berenson works on the Lists; Mary works on her ‘Book of Travels’ (published in 1938 as A Vicarious Trip to the Barbary Coast)

Summer

Berensons at Consuma Nicky Mariano holidays in England with her nephew Cecil Anrep Mary visits England Berenson revises text of the four essays, Italian Painters of the Renaissance, for a single-volume publication

September

Berenson stays with Edith Wharton at Hyères Berensons, Nicky Mariano and Umberto Morra make a three-month visit to Spain Clarks visit Vienna and Berlin

Christmas

Berenson with Edith Wharton at Hyères; Mary Berenson at I Tatti

1930 January

The Exhibition of Italian Art opens at Burlington House, London

Summer

Mary Berenson in Paris with Duveen Edith Wharton at I Tatti

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Berenson, Nicky Mariano and Edith Wharton tour Tuscany, meeting up with the Clarks and Alberto Moravia at the Villa Morra, near Cortona Clarks move to Old Palace Place, Richmond Autumn

John Walker visits I Tatti for the first time

Winter

Berenson’s The Italian Painters of the Renaissance and Studies in Medieval Painting published

Christmas

Berenson with Edith Wharton at Hyères; Mary Berenson and Nicky Mariano at I Tatti

1931 March

Berenson and Nicky Mariano in Tunisia and Algeria. They return by way of Cumae, and stop in Rome with Walter Lippmann and John Walker

Spring

Clarks in South of France, including a stay with Edith Wharton at Hyères and a visit to Sospel

May

Clarks visit Paris and Edith Wharton

Summer

Mary Berenson in Paris with Duveen

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10th July ’29 Sixty Five Tufton Street s.w.1 Victoria 3201 Dear BB., Toesca1 has asked me to write a short article on your work for his Encyclopedia.2 I am reluctant to take on articles of this kind, but I thought I probably came nearer to understanding you more than most people in England; & if I refused heaven knows who might have taken it on. I hope to think I did right in accepting. The article is to be short – ⅔ of a column – but it will have to contain some facts I don’t know. And at the risk of annoying you with an impudent questionnaire, I had rather get them correctly from you, than incorrectly from someone else. So will you be so kind as to let Nicky or Mrs Berenson tell me: when & where you were born, when you came to England, if (& when) you met Morelli,3 & when you bought i Tatti.Would you rather I didn’t mention the library? It is obviously the most important part of your work, but perhaps you would rather it was not insisted on in an Italian article. In any case I shall send you the article to criticise. Yours ever, K. P. S. Hadn’t you once a semi-official connection with the Gazette des Beaux Arts?4 So much of your work came out there that I feel I ought to mention it.

1 2

3 4

Pietro Toesca Enciclopedia italiana di scienze, lettere ed arti (‘Enciclopedia Treccani’), 35 vols, 1925–36. Considered to be the most authoritative Italian encyclopaedia ever published, it ranks with the celebrated Encyclopaedia Britannica 11th Edition of 1910–11. Toesca was the editor of the section on medieval and modern art. Giovanni Morelli The Gazette des beaux-arts was a French journal which established itself as an authoritative source of reference on art history. In 1928 it was bought by the Wildenstein family who owned it until its closure in 2002, after the death of Daniel Wildenstein.

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Poggio al Spino5 Consuma (Prov di Firenze) July 22, 1929 Dear Kenneth Since the arrival of your letters I have been far fr. well & very busy. There was the preparation for moving up here. It meant selecting material for two months work. At the same time we tried to get round more voluminous painters e.g. Titian, Bellini, Tintoretto, & Veronese on the spot, and we did. Finally Nicky left us – me bereft – two days ago. At last I can take up correspondence & finish all of your letters. I thank you scinisceramente for the answers to the contents of mine fr. Baalbec – Toesca wrote some time ago that he had secured you for his Enyclopedia. I hope it won’t distract & take too much time. How is the article about me? I am of course delighted that you & no other should do it. I confess I did not expect to be included. You ask for facts. Those not in the English Who’s Who you could find in the American one. I was born in Lithuania. I first came to England in January 1888. I first met Morelli in 1889, but never saw him more than three or four times. It was his books rather than his society that had much influence on me. We began to live at I Tatti in 1900 & bought it in 1906. I have had no kind of connection with any mag. except that I was one of the founders & guarantors of the Burling. Mag.6 If possible give or mention what my publications mean. The rest is of small interest – unless indeed it were treated at great length as a study in culture. Better not insist on my collections, not even my books. I have a nephew7 here just fresh fr. Harvard, and as green as grass. Mary is taking him to England. I wish you could see him. Affectionate greetings to you both Ever yours B.B.

5

6 7

Poggio al Spino (in English, ‘Thornhill’), the relatively small and simple house close to Vallombrosa, was a rented property which the Berensons leased from 1914 to 1938. Only selected close friends were invited there. A serious, long-surviving art history magazine in London, founded in 1903 by among others Berenson and Roger Fry, which has never compromised its strict scholarly principles. Probably Richard Arthur Berenson

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16th Aug ’29 Sixty Five Tufton Street sw1 Victoria 3201 Dear BB. I put off answering your most kind letter till I could send you the Encyclopedia article. I can’t say it is good or bad because it had to be so short that there was only room for bare facts, & only an arbitrary selection of those. A certain amount of compression is good & bracing for style, but the compression of an encyclopedia is cramping, & I shall not try it again. Another bloody lesson! My life is made up of them. However this one wasn’t so bad, for it gave me an excuse to reread all your work, & I must say I got more out of it than I ever got before. It seems to me that despite the great success of your little books they are not really at all easy to understand, & anyone who reads them without considerable esthetic experience must be constantly bewildered. However I suppose they skip the difficult parts & go on to the descriptions of pictures etc. Will you look through the article & tell me if you would like anything altered? I am afraid I cannot add much, as I have already overstepped my limit by about 150 words; except that you might add one or two things to the bibliography. We are just off to Austria for a few weeks, I very excited at the prospect of seeing Vienna for the first time. We hope to stop at Munich on the way back, & if possible make an expedition up to Frankfort which I had never visited. Has it ever been observed that Bellini’s Prudence,8 whose gothic figure people always have referred back to Riccio’s Eve, must have been inspired by van Eyck’s lost Lady at her toilet,9 which went to Italy as soon as it was painted & later belonged to Federigo Montefeltro. He even borrowed the celebrated convex mirror. The whole subject of the influences of northern art on Italian painting would make a good subject, despite the work that has already been done on it. Maclagan10 tells me that Planiscig11 has done some more on Classicism, & both he & Nicky have given me introductions to him. I hope also to have time for the drawings & I wish I knew how far you had got them in order. I seem to remember that you hadn’t got the numbers of many.

8 9

10 11

One of four allegories by Giovanni Bellini, painted c. 1490, now in the Accademia,Venice. The ‘lost van Eyck’ is known only as a detail, appearing as a picture in a gallery display in Willem van Haecht’s Archduke Albert visits the Kunstkammer of Cornelius van der Geest (1628). A copy of the supposed van Eyck is in the Fogg Museum, Cambridge, Mass. Eric Maclagan Leo Planiscig

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We have so much enjoyed our glimpse of Nicky, & only wish there had been time to make some expeditions with her.We managed to get to Hampton Court where the pictures had been rehung. Incidentally the recumbent Venus12 (like the Allori in the Uffizi) has been put in a good light, & it’s not, as we vaguely thought, a Lotto, a poor thing. Nicky’s stories of your Syrian expedition made us very envious, & very keen to see Mary’s book.13 I do hope she makes it very personal, as much like her letters as possible & as little like a guide book. We hope to go to Rome again next spring to get on with the Classical revival. The Hertziana14 is the perfect library for the purpose. We should love to come to i Tatti then, if you are there. I shall have said goodbye to the market place, but only by the drastic means of selling 65 Tufton Street & going to live in the country. Of course all this business of committees & so forth is ephemeral & corrupting; but if one has never done it, one always feels it might be worth doing, or at least one has a secret bitterness against those who do do it. However we have found a small house with a 14th century hall15 – all the corbel heads of which are intact, original windows etc. – & in this conventual atmosphere I hope to strain my muddy wits. What a pity we are just missing Mary. Jane sends her love, Ever yours affectionately, Kenneth.

[From Consuma but on I Tatti headed paper] I Tatti Settignano Florence Consuma Sept. 13.1929 My dear Kenneth I suppose you are getting home now. I hope you found Friedlander16 in Berlin. He wrote to tell me he’d be delighted to make your acquaintance.

12 13 14 15 16

Giovanni Cariani (c. 1485–after 1547), Venus in a Landscape, c. 1530–35 (RCIN 402912). Mary Berenson’s A Vicarious Trip to the Barbary Coast was published in 1938. See Ch. 2 n. 66. See Ch. 2 Addendum, letter to Umberto Morra. Max Friedländer

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What good news that you are leaving London & the temptation to snuffle about the gutters of Bond Street, the Burlington Club,17 Burlington House and all their coasts. Some day – I trust not too late – you will understand my horror of the spirit that controls those haunts, & how destructive it is to any intellectual work, as distinct from petty antiquarianism. So retire to the country by all means, gather companion-minds at your retreat & prepare a book de longue haleine.18 There is no harm in publishing discreet [sic] bits of it as they get done, & still less harm in publishing essays about points for wh. there is no room in the magnum opus. All provided you are not carried away from the main current. I have just had for the third time your notice about me from the Italian Encyclopaedia. I really cannot see what more you could do in the space allotted, & as for myself I can’t imagine anything more elogieux. It is a ticklish business writing about a living person whose life has been so strictly private & about whom there can be outside a tiny circle very small interest. We are packing & it is a day after tomorrow we start for Spain going by slow stages & stopping for ten or twelve days at several places in the south of France. We shall probably reach Madrid Oct. 10 or a few days later & remain there a fortnight. Should you find it possible to join us there we should all of us be delighted. I wonder have you seen Charles du Bos’s ‘Byron’? It is rather elaborate & scholastic but fascinatingly penetrating & at the same time constructive. The fragments of his (Du Bos’s) ‘Journal’ are even better.19 Post as for abroad & address Baring Bros. 8 Bishopsgate Within, London E.C.2. Affectionate greetings to you both Yours B.B.

17

18 19

The Burlington Fine Arts Club was a London club founded in 1866 for artists, collectors and connoisseurs, whose heyday was 1898–1912, although it continued to flourish between the wars (there were 424 members in 1924). Many of the notable figures in the art world from home and overseas were members (although Berenson was blackballed by Robert Benson because of some temporary falling out – they made it up later). It was the chief meeting place in London for likeminded individuals to get together to discuss works of art, and the Club organised good exhibitions of historical art which were open to the public. In Clark’s day it was housed in Savile Row, not far from the Royal Academy in Burlington House, Piccadilly. The Club went into liquidation in 1952. A work which requires time and effort. Charles du Bos. Extracts from his voluminous ‘Journal’ were published in France by Pléiade in 1928. His Byron ou le besoin de la fatalité (1929) was a psychological study of, among other things, Byron’s marriage and incest with his half-sister.

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[‘Nov. 25. 1929’ in another hand, possibly Mary’s] Sixty Five Tufton Street sw1 Victoria 3201 Dear BB. As usual I have to begin a letter by asking for forgiveness – which will have soon reached the biblical limit of seventy times seven. As you will have guessed, the truth is that I am completely taken up with the Italian exhibition, & as I know you disapprove of it, there is very little I can write to you about without shame.20 The exhibition has certainly not been a waste of time for me as I am doing a great part of the catalogue, & that is giving me just the training & general information that I missed by never taking a course in art at a university. When it’s all over I shall have a bibliography of useful references in my head, & I don’t see how else I should ever have become familiar with back numbers of l’Arte, the Jahrbuchs etc. The only other job I have in sight, & it is not at all certain, is to publish the early Italian drawings at Chatsworth. After refusing to let me see them at all, the librarian21 has gone to the other extreme & has invited me to stay there & make a final publication. I don’t think there is much scope for my making a fool of myself in this, as there is very little early stuff there which you haven’t seen.

20

21

The Exhibition of Italian Paintings opened at the Royal Academy in Burlington House on 1 January 1930 (detailed account in Francis Haskell, The Ephemeral Museum, ch. 7). The exhibition was alluded to, for the first time in public, by Sir Robert Witt in a letter to The Times on 13 February 1929 (not 14 February 1928, as stated by Haskell), although it had been under discussion in the art world for some time. The following day a long article appeared in The Times in which their art critic gave greater detail, while emphasising that the form, character and scope of the exhibition were as yet unformulated. The article mentioned the names of most of those who composed the organising committee: Clark’s was not included. The Berensons must have been aware that Clark was deeply involved with the exhibition. Charles Bell had written to Mary on 27 May 1929 telling her that Clark had been to see him to discuss the exhibition, expressing a wish that the Ashmolean might agree to lend: to which Bell had replied ‘Not if I can help it’, adding that he thought Clark’s ‘pimping for the exhibition’ was contemptible (thanks to Jon Whiteley, Honorary Curator, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, for this reference). See also Clark’s letter to Berenson of 15 March 1929 in Ch. 2. F.W.Thompson. In 1928–9 he compiled the first typescript catalogue of the drawings in the Duke of Devonshire’s collection, using the copious notes of Arthur Strong and his wife, Eugenie, with further advice he had sought from Campbell Dodgson, Archibald Russell and A. E. Popham.

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I don’t think I have seen any Florentine drawings not in the book. Did you see Koenig’s so-called Benozzo sketch book22 when you were there? You probably know he has bought the Bohler (Lucerne) collection,23 – which is a great economy of time for students.We also went to see Stoclet24 & were amazed at the things he has bought in the last few years. As far as my work on the Classical tradition goes, all I have done is to find a collection of very valuable material belonging to Kristeller,25 which he is willing to sell me. It includes a good many nozze, essays, & otherwise unfindable books. He is selling all his material & has a very good collection of photos of early engravings which might be of use to you. Also such books as Lauro’s Antiquae Urbis Splendor Romae 161226 which I imagine is rare. I am sending you a couple of photos and drawings at the Staedel.27 You probably know the designs for a cross – for nielli – I suppose – but I was told it had never been photographed. It seems well worth a photo – indeed I should have thought it might well be Mantegna himself.28 The other was bought as Ghirlandajo. I suppose it is N. Italian, but have had no time to look into it. You must have had a wonderful time in Spain. We hope to go to Italy in the spring, but not till April – never again will I visit the sculpture galleries of Rome in January. I should like to stay in Rome for some months, but it is hard to leave our son for so long, now he has begun to talk. Our future plans are still vague. My parents are very much against our living in the country, & indeed will not give us the money for a house there.The lack of books would undoubtedly be a great difficulty, especially in works which require continual reference to back numbers

22

23

24 25 26

27 28

Clark published an article in the Burlington Magazine in April 1930 on the drawings in the Italian Exhibition. In it he refers to the so-called Benozzo Sketchbook from the Koenigs Collection which was shown at the Exhibition but comments that the sketches in it are copies and not by the hand of Benozzo Gozzoli. In 1940, Koenigs gave it to the van Beuningen family, whose collection forms a major part of the Museum Boymans van Beuningen in Rotterdam. Julius Böhler (1860–1934) established a family art dealing business in Munich in 1880. His eldest son, Julius Wilhelm (d. 1961), went into partnership with Fritz Steinmeyer, founding a gallery in Lucerne in 1920. They survived the turmoils and pogroms of the 1920s and 30s and the family business continues today with a gallery on the shores of Lake Starnberg near Munich. Adolphe Stoclet Paul Kristeller (1863–1931) was born in Berlin. He studied art history there and at Munich and Leipzig. His expertise was in Italian Renaissance and German graphic work. A fine series of engravings of early views of Rome, much reprinted and issued in various combinations of plates, titles and dedications by Giacomo Lauro (c. 1583–1650). Originally published in four parts in 1612–28, the 165 plates were often bound together in one volume. One of the major museums in Frankfurt, founded in 1815 with a notable collection of paintings, drawings, prints and books. Kenneth Clark, ‘Andrea Mantegna’, Old Master Drawings, vol. 4 (1929–30), pp. 60–62.

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of periodicals. What ever you may say about the Burlington Club,29 it has an excellent library, & as it is practically always empty, I can work there undisturbed. Jane joins me in love to you all. Yours ever, K.C. P.T.O. In answer to Nicky’s postcard: I know no English travellers in Spain earlier than Borrow and Ford,30 who were both there c. 1840. Of course Moorish architecture was rampant in England at end of the 18th century – Beckford built a Moorish wing on to the first Fonthill, & it appeared in gazebos etc. earlier still – but I imagine the inspiration came directly from the east, probably as a result of the translation of the Arabian Nights – I forget the date, & have no ready means of finding it. The culmination was the pavillion at Brighton and Byron’s oriental poems.

Dec. 22. 1929 Sainte-Claire le Chateau Hyeres (Var)31 Tel: 2-29 Dear Kenneth. My very good wishes to you both for a Merry Xmas a Happy New Year. We got here a week ago having left Barcelona a few days before. Mary & Nicky have already returned to Florence. I expect to remain here till Jan. 10. as I can loaf here as I could not at I Tatti, & I need being away fr. works of art & my desk. No spot on the Riviera is lovelier & my hostess is our dear old friend Mrs Wharton. Plenty of talk, enchanting walks & drives & friends reading aloud. Thanks for the photos you send. I don’t recall them & it is likely that I have never seen them. I should not be surprised if the medallions for a crucifix turned

29 30

31

See n. 17. Richard Ford and George Borrow were travellers to Spain in the mid-19th century. Ford wrote a pioneering popular Handbook for travellers to Spain (1845). Borrow travelled extensively throughout Europe and North Africa (mostly on foot) and wrote a travelogue about Spain in 1843. Hyères, the southernmost point of Provence, east of Marseilles and Toulon, long appreciated for its benign climate, was visited during the 19th century by Queen Victoria and Robert Louis Stevenson and later by D. H. Lawrence. Edith Wharton’s house, Sainte-Claire Le Château, situated above the old town, was originally a convent, transformed into a residence in 1849. Wharton had bought the property in 1927 as a winter retreat and set about cultivating an extensive sub-tropical terraced garden. In 1955 the property was acquired by the town of Hyerès and dedicated as a public park.

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out to be by Carlo Crivelli himself.The headless full length female may likely be a Bart. Montagna in his late phase. Do look carefully for Florentine drawings at Chatsworth – close to Rosso, Pontormo, & Bronzino. And if you find any of [them] get me photos. I have not seen Koenig’s Benozzo sketch-book. Have you? Please send me as soon as ready a catalogue of the Ital. Exhib. And if there turn out to be anything of interest & unknown I hope you will be able to procure me photo’s. I return to I Tatti with the intention of finishing the lists before I undertake another considerable journey. This last was one of the most satisfactory. Spanish landscape is least appreciated by one who already knows Egypt, Syria & Greece as well as Italy. And no Spanish church is boring. There are more grave, more sublime works of art elsewhere but Spanish architecture is surely the most amazing in all the world. Ever yours B.B.

Sainte-Claire le Chateau Hyeres (Var) Tel: 2-29 Jan. 1. 1930 Dear Jane, With my best wishes for 1930 each & all of you. I hasten to thank you for letter of Dec. 21 which has just reached me. I look forward to finding the wooley boots when I get home. I expect the utmost comfort from them & I shall write again after testing them. K. must have before this have received the answer to his letter that reached me at Barcelona. There I was too done up each day to write. But I wrote soon after I got here. You must have heard that Mary & Nicky left me here with Mrs Wharton while they returned to Florence. Mary with all her offspring to I Tatti, & Nicky to Alda’s flat. Nicky returns here to fetch me & we leave for home the 10th. Ojetti32 wrote a few days ago from London where he had seen K. hard at work on the Italian Exposist. I asked K. to send me the catalogue of the fair & if these turn up any bird or beast of plumage rare no matter how insignificant or

32

Ugo Ojetti

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bedraggled I should be grateful for photo’s. And if new and revised editions of the catalogue are produced I want to have them. Truth to tell – if you want to hear it – Richmond would not seem particularly suited for myself say. It is too near town to resist any of its allurements, and yet far enough to waste one’s time coming and going. If country is too ‘squalido’ Oxford or Cambridge would attract me. I see life if I were yr. ages, in terms of two months of intensive Bond Street cum Bloomsbury & ten months of RATIONAL life far from the muddy crowd. I look forward to seeing you on your way to Rome.You will then tell me all about IT. Affectionately B. B.

[Undated but must be mid-March 1930] Sixty Five Tufton Street Victoria 3201 Dear BB. I write in deep depression, the result of influenza which ceased a week or so ago. We have just returned from Brighton, where it snowed. Last time Jane had ’flu she was cured by getting snowed up at Viterbo & frozen at Cortona & now God has thoughtfully provided the same remedy.We are quite cured but I am like the almost Biblical character who eat well and slept well, but when he came to a job of work went all over of a tremble. But I mustn’t write any more about our woes without thanking you for your New Year greetings & for the volume of introductions collected from your little books. I have got halfway thru letters to you in the past two months, & abandoned them all. Some had to be laid aside while I went to mop up a mess at Burlington House, & others were so full of grammatical mistakes & erasures that I became disheartened. They lie about my writing table like yesterday’s plates of half-eaten pudding, and depress me. Weeks ago I sent you a copy of the catalogue & illustrated souvenir,33 & I shall send you a copy of the final edition when it appears in a week or two. I did not catalogue the pictures from English & American collections, nor the drawings.

33

A relatively expensive (5 shillings) illustrated Souvenir of selected works from the exhibition was published in 1930 with an introductory essay on Italian art by Ugo Ojetti.

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The rest is mine. Of course such hasty work is full of omissions, & there are several infelicitous precis of descriptions due to an odius female secretary engaged by Constable34 for her training in scholarship, who infuriated me by her unusual combination of ugliness, inefficiency & conceit. As you will see attributions had to be chosen to allay ill feeling, but doubt is usually expressed in a note. Constable & I are doing a big memorial volume, & I hope to make it so accurate that whenever, in the future, I am accused of lack of scholarship, I can bat critics on the head with it. Certainly there is nothing in the exhibition which would be new to you. It does not aim at displaying novelties, & even if it did I don’t suppose any would have been found. But seeing the pictures in different surroundings & with different companions is really a great help to the beginner & I have profited by it. I must say I think you are wrong about Richmond. Our problem was to find a house with a garden & among country parks for Alan, yet near enough London for me to be able to consult the many books I can never hope to possess – sets of l’Arte, Jahrbuchs etc. and to work away quietly. In any case I have bought a most attractive house on Richmond Green,35 exactly the size & character we want. What with moving into our new house, & the difficulty of leaving Alan now that Jane’s mother has left Tunbridge Wells I doubt if we shall be able to go to Italy this spring. We may come out in the Autumn & go to Siena, Perugia, Urbino etc. Our visit to Rome must be postponed until next year. We are so sorry to hear that you have toothache. What a horrible affliction it is, making any use of the mind impossible. Please give my love to Mary & Nicky. We are so much looking forward to Mary’s book. I wonder how those terrible lists are getting on. Yours ever, Kenneth. Jane bids me add that she has not written to you because I was always doing so. Indeed my letters like Miss Gertrude Steins’ poetry are written in a continuous present.

34 35

W. G. Constable Old Palace Place; see Introduction above and n. 36 below.

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10 Sept ’30 Old Palace Place36 Richmond Surrey Dear BB., We are so glad to get Nicky’s letter & hear news of you. Unfortunately it reached us just as we were leaving for Windsor, & we have lived ever since in a nightmare of packing cases, floodings, fusings, mysterious smells, & all the usual accompaniments of house-moving. However I just had time to go around the castle looking for your Licinio, & find that it has recently been moved to Hampton Court,37 so recently that it has no number. I have asked Collins Baker38 for a photograph, & will try to keep him up to it. As to the Leonardos, I have indeed a mass of notes, but they were taken when I still hoped to copy them into the new edition myself, & they may be rather obscure – not in writing, but in economy of expression – to anyone else. If you could wait a month or two I could take my old notes down to Windsor, check & expand them & send you the result. But if you are in a hurry I can send you the rough notes, specimens of which I enclose. [Inserted in the margin: On second thoughts I won’t. I’ll bring them with me to Italy.] As far as I know every drawing noted is not in your catalogue, or, if in it, the entry has some small defect. There are a good many which you do not include, either because you did not wish to make the list unnecessarily full, or because you weren’t shown them – there may even be as many as a hundred. To my mind only a very few of these are at all doubtful – perhaps only four or five – but I hardly like to suggest you take so many on my recommendation. Of course you passed them all when we went through them together, but I don’t think we realised at the time that so many had been omitted from your list, & we went very fast. However if you [were] to wait a few months I can give you [it] with really good notes, as Morshead39 is proposing to publish a Catalogue with bibliographies & a postage-stamp photo of every drawing, & has asked me to help him over such questions as approximate date etc. This will mean my working right through the drawings thoroughly.

36

37 38 39

The house was originally two separate houses which had been knocked through into one. Clark kept the house until 1953, letting it and finally selling it to help fund the purchase of Saltwood. He claimed that he made no money on it and that the rent barely paid for the upkeep. It was divided back into two dwellings in 1983. Perhaps Bernardino Licinio (c. 1490–1549), The Painter and his Family (RCIN 402586) or a portrait of a man bearing a false inscription identifying him as the architect Palladio (RCIN 402789). Collins Baker Owen Morshead

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On our recent stay at Windsor I was too busy moving in here to do much work, but I had an interesting browse among the unclassified Antique Masters, and found some very amusing copies of lost drawings – one of a Michelangelo fun drawing for the big David (with a putto which appears again on the Berlin sheet & a faked monogram of Durer which suggests that D. must have used some such drawings for his Apollo-Adam drawings & engravings): also a copy of Raphael’s drawing for the Jonah in the Chigi Chapel, & of a very fine lost Pollayuolo battle of naked men.40 I found some fine unpublished originals, too, especially Venetian. We had a nice quiet summer at Chilling,41 & I managed to read the whole of Alberti’s works42 as a preparation for the Classical revival: also Ghiberti’s Commentarii,43 & several books on that period, including the whole of Voigt’s Wiederbelebung.44 What a good book is this last, written with such humanity – an entirely un-pedantic book, wrong on almost every detail I could check but none the worse for that. This is a pleasant Georgian-looking house of the ordinary red brick type, & holds us quite comfortably. I am glad to have a garden, however small, & a decent room to work in. It must originally have been an outhouse of Sheen palace & so parts of it are 16th century. Did I tell you that we discovered a complete Gothic mantelpiece dated 1655? – a perfect document for the first chapter of the Gothic Revival. Our plans are not quite fixed, but I think we shall be in Florence towards the very end the month. Will you be there? I do hope we shall be able to see. Thank you so much for the promise of your new book. Is it to be the medieval studies? I hope so, & I very much hope you have added an introduction on the whole subject.

40

41 42

43

44

A. E. Popham and J. Wilde, The Italian Drawings of the XV and XVI Centuries in the Collection of His Majesty the King at Windsor Castle, Phaidon, London, 1949, nos 811 (School of Raphael, Prophet Jonah) and 27 (Pollaiuolo, Battle of Naked Men). The copy of the Michelangelo has not been identified. Logan Pearsall Smith’s house on the Solent. Clark read the 19th edition of Leon Battista Alberti, Opere volgari, ed. Anicio Bonucci, 5 vols, Florence: Tipografia Galileiana, 1843–9, which contains most of Alberti’s vernacular literary works, including the treatise on painting. (My thanks to Professor McLaughlin of Oxford University for this information.) In 1447, towards the end of his life, Ghiberti wrote his never completed memoirs, I Commentarii. In three sections, the first is a theoretical assessment of classical art; the second is an art history, beginning with Giotto and an account of his own life, the earliest autobiography of an artist; the third is a discussion of the learning necessary for a sculptor, i.e. optics, anatomy and human proportion. Georg Voigt (1827–1891), German art historian who with Jacob Burkhardt was one of the founders of modern research into the Italian Renaissance. His principal work was Die Wiederbelebung des classischen Alterthums oder das erste Jahrhundert des Humanismus (Revival of Classical Antiquity or the first Century of Humanism) in which he argued that Petrach was the originator of Italian Renaissance humanism, thus leaving behind the medieval world and its intellectual structures, which had been epitomised by Dante.

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We both send our love to Nicky. Jane says she owes a letter, but she is really too busy with the house right now. She has worked very hard over it, & needs a holiday. She sends you many messages. We really are longing to see you again. Yours ever, Kenneth

[Undated but must be pre-November 1930] Old Palace Place Richmond Green Surrey Richmond 1384 Dear BB. After various delays I have managed to send off all I have of the Florentine Drawings text. I don’t think I ever had more, for I always remember it being quite fragmentary: on the other hand there are duplicate & even triplicate proofs of much of it which swelled the bundle. If these duplicates were to be of any use to you in revision I could send them – I also have a considerable fragment of the catalogue & will send that too when I have sorted it. To start with the most important of my news. Jane is much better, & is up & about without feeling unduly tired. We are having the most wonderful weather seen in England since Elizabethan times which is a great help.45 I have also various notizie about pictures. Balniel46 has persuaded Alendale [sic]47 to lend his Sasetta [sic]48 etc to the Burlington Club for the winter exhibition, so I hope we shall have a photo in time for the proofs. My American parson from (or called) Shenandoah has indeed got a book which belonged to Leonardo. It is the Problemata of Alexander Aphrodiseus49 which he bought in

45 46 47

48

49

October 1930 was unusually dry and warm, especially the third week. David Balniel Wentworth Henry Canning Beaumont, 2nd Viscount Allendale (1890–1956), came from a family who owned 30,000 acres in northern England and whose seat was Bretton Hall near Wakefield (he succeeded in 1923). The family fortune came from coal mines. He also inherited a fine collection of ‘old master’ pictures and jade which had been acquired in the 19th century. Bretton Hall was sold to West Yorkshire County Council in 1947. For many years it was an education centre devoted to the arts but is now a hotel and spa.The grounds and lakes are the setting for the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Sassetta, The Visit of St Antony to St Paul the Hermit. After the exhibition, Ellis Waterhouse wrote an article about this picture in the Burlington Magazine,vol. 59, no. 342 (September 1931), pp. 108–9 and 112–13. The picture was sold by Viscount Allendale to Duveen Bros in 1937 and was bought by the Samuel Kress Foundation who donated it to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, dc, in 1939. Alexander of Aphrodisias was a Peripatetic philosopher, active c. ad 200, and the most celebrated of the ancient Greek commentators on the writings of Aristotle. A Latin edition of 1488, Problemata Alexandri Aphrodisei, was produced in Venice by Antonius de Strata.

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Florence simply because it was an incunabula (1488) & only afterwards discovered various scribbles & notes at the end. There is absolutely no question that these are by Leonardo.The book also contains the first specimen of L’s signature I have ever seen.50 At present I only have two miserable photographs of the work, but I am having the whole book sent to England, & will send you proper photographs as soon as I can. Photos at Windsor are expensive & poor but I am having a good many taken & will send you prints as some of them are really rather important. Among them is what I imagine must be the only existing pure landscape by Raphael.51 The drawing had puzzled me for ages, being obviously Raphaelesque but so improbable in subject. However I left it out to be photographed, & quite accidentally Morshead noticed that it was a sketch for the background of the Morbetto of Marc Antonio.52 It is, of course, in reverse & has slight variations. Most of the other drawings are Tintorets & a tiny Titian. We are enjoying Richmond & find our new house most comfortable. Did I tell you that the Marques of Lothian’s53 address is 30 St James’s Place? Jane sends her love to you all, Yours ever, K. Moravia,54 who is lunching here today, started by enjoying England, and now begins to grow bored & is going to Ireland.

[Undated but must be November 1930] Old Palace Place, Richmond Green Dear BB. Now that I am more or less better again I want to write and thank you for your great kindness to me when I was ill.We would have had a sad holiday had I been ill in a hotel. As it was K enjoyed being with you again more than anything else we could have done and so did I in the intervals when I was up. We were very distressed to hear of your horrid accident with Fausto55 and so sorry to hear from Nicky’s postcard this morning that your leg is still sore. I do hope you will be better soon but it must have been a horrid shock.

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See letter from Clark, dated 10 ii 31, page 102. They turned out to be copies. Popham and Wilde, Italian Drawings of the XV and XVI Centuries, no. 801. Engraving by Marcantonio Raimondi after Raphael, The Plague (‘Il Morbetto’) Philip Kerr Alberto Moravia; see Appendix 1. Fausto was the Berensons’ pet dog.

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K says to tell you that he has seen the Allendale Sassetta and Matteo di Giovanni.56 They are being photographed for the Burlington Exhibition which opens on 8th December and he will of course send you them as soon as printed. The Sassetta is very dirty but both are in good condition. The subject of the Sassetta is the meeting of St Anthony and St Paul in the foreground; in the background St Anthony and a centaur. The Matteo di Giovanni is a fragment – the head of a bishop – apparently from a large altarpiece which Waterhouse57 has identified. K has forgotten what he said but hopes to send you the name on a card tonight. The catalogue of the Dark Age exhibition at the Burlington is not yet out. We are taking in Daedalo for your articles and are both enjoying them very much indeed. K has seen Lord Lee’s two new pictures. I expect you know the so-called Giorgione of Moses and the Burning Bush. The Botticelli Madonna and Child you probably know too. K thinks the latter may be genuine about 1485 or rather part of it may, but it apparently is not a pretty picture. Lord Lee says the picture had a moustache on when he bought it.58 We are beginning to settle down and like the new house very much. I do hope something will bring you to England soon after all. K sends love to Nicky and Mary. I shall write Nicky soon. Much love from us both Jane

56 57 58

See nn. 48 and 73. Ellis Waterhouse Moses and the Burning Bush, now attributed to Giorgione, rather than autograph, purchased by Arthur Lee and now in the Courtauld Gallery, London. Lee bought The Madonna of the Veil, a painting principally in tempera, in 1930 from an Italian dealer for a huge sum, $25,000. At the time it was widely accepted by many authorities as a genuine work by Botticelli. The directors of the Medici Society published the painting as a ‘superb composition of the greatest of all the Florentine painters’, while the eminent critic Roger Fry acknowledged that it was ‘by a master’. Clark doubted the attribution to Botticelli and suggested that it had ‘something of the silent cinema star’ about it, comparing the Madonna with the leading film star Jean Harlow. Post-war scientific examination showed that there were many reasons to disprove the picture’s authenticity, e.g. pigments not known before the 18th and 19th centuries had been used, and the supposed worm holes in the wood panel had been produced by a drill.The painting is now accepted as the work of the forger Umberto Giunti (1886–1970), a teacher at the Institute of Fine Art in Siena, who developed a reputation primarily for his convincing forgeries of fresco fragments. Lee donated the painting to the Courtauld Gallery in 1947. (Information courtesy of Juliet Chippindale, a National Gallery curatorial intern, in association with the Courtauld Institute ma course ‘Curating the Art Museum’. The material was published on 30 June 2010 to coincide with the National Gallery exhibition Close Examination: Fakes, Mistakes and Discoveries.)

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I Tatti Settignano Florence Nov. 29. 1930 Dear Jane & Kenneth. I was delighted to hear from you first fr. K. and and now fr. Jane. As she says nothing about her health I dare to hope it is much better. Neither Mary nor I have been up to sample of late. Mary really alarms me at times & it is in vain that I tell myself that she is being as bad as more than a few times before. And I was struck down just a week ago with a kind of cold I never had before & only now has it turned into a normal & odious & disgusting cold in the head. Before this last visitation I had already begun to frequent the drawings of the Uffizi for a preliminary look. I hope to have a few more hours with them before I leave Dec. 15 for Mrs Wharton’s at Hyeres-St.Claire du Chateau. Hyères will be the address to Jan. 12. No, I have no acquaintance with a ‘Burning Bush’ ascribable to Giorgione, nor the Botticelli Mad.59 just acquired by Lord Lea [sic]. If his Lordship would vouchsafe photos I should be grateful. I look forward to the photos of the Sassetta & Matteo that you found at Allendale’s & don’t forget to tell me what Waterhouse – who is he? – has to say about the Matteo. And thanks for the promise of photo’s of Windsor drawings & of the Leonardo book in America. I enclose a program of lectures on the Antique in English Culture to be delivered at Hamburg. What an excellent initiative. Don’t I wish courses were given on the same in both Oxford & Cambridge. For my part I have been greatly enjoying several treatises by Blochet60 of the Bibl. Nat. Paris, on the Islamic art in general & Islamic illumination in particular. He arrives at all my extremes but not along the road of style but thro’ an acquaintance of the historical and literary documents which is sheerly staggering. I confess my appetite has seldom had greater satisfaction, & I have never felt better nourished. It is also almost a pity that the Engl. book by him is without notes of any sort & seems to be self assertive & arbitrary. Unluckily it is besides not too well translated. (But please keep this criticism to yourself, for

59 60

See n. 58. Edgard Blochet (b. 1870) published many volumes on Arabic, Persian and Turkish art and catalogued the collections in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris.

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it was done by Miss Binyon61 and I would not for the world hurt her feelings). I am just finalising that masterpiece: Harold Nicolson’s Life of Lord Carnock.62 Do keep me informed of interesting emergings in the world of art & of letters, & let Jane take very great care of herself. Yours ever B. B.

Sainte-Claire le Chateau Hyeres (Var) Tel: 2-29 Xmas 1930 Dear Kenneth & Jane. I have just opened & read out your wish in the presence of Mrs Wharton. And she said ‘The dear things. I should love to see them again.’ Indeed I would you were here. We should enjoy ourselves all round for in her own house Mrs Wharton is simply enchanting, so gay, so un-preoccupied, so free for a walk & talk, any kind of a lark, or what I enjoy so much reading aloud – Now I wish to tell you that it has been naughty of you to leave me so long without news. I wrote several weeks ago to Kenneth & have had no answer. Then uncertain rumours reached me that neither of you was very well. And every day I meant to write & inquire, but it has been the season when each day all the ink there was in me had to be devoted to silly slob. Now I trust you will follow the wire with a witty & clear statement as to how you are standing the adventure of amphibian life in yr. native land. – Here I am doing nothing, truly nothing connected with my job. When I read it is von Bulow’s memoirs.63 We gossip and talk a great deal, Mrs W. Norton,64 Lapsley,65

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Cicely Binyon, née Powell, was a historian (and the wife of Laurence Binyon) who translated Edgard Blochet’s Musulman Painting, XIIth to XVIIth Century, with an introduction by Sir E. Denison Ross, London: Methuen, 1929. Harold Nicolson, Sir Arthur Nicolson, First Lord Carnock: A Study in the Old Diplomacy, London: Constable, 1930. Sir Harold George Nicolson kcvo cmg (1886–1986) was well known as a diplomat, author, diarist and politician, who was married to the writer Vita Sackville-West. Arthur was his father. Bernhard Heinrich Karl Martin von Bülow (1849–1929), Prince von Bülow, was the German statesman who served as Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs for three years and then as Chancellor of the German Empire from 1900 to 1909. His memoirs, which he stipulated should be published after his death, appeared in four volumes in 1930–32. The wife of Robert Norton. Gaillard Lapsley

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Hugh Smith66 & I. Hugh Smith seem a big-bug on the National Arts fund & I have been preaching hard unto him on the iniquity of exhibitions with their tendency to reduce art to front-page news, & the harm they do to the objects exhibited – disastrous in the case of panel & tempera paintings. And now the monstrosity of the proposal to allow works in British public museums to wander abroad solliciting like wops for approval & support of financial & political interests. Enough & more thereon – My best wishes to you both for a Happy New Year. Affectionately B. B.

30 Dec ’30 The Toft67 Bournemouth Tel. 922

Dear BB. Your letter arrived here this morning & naturally made me blush. This time I have some excuse, as I really had begun to write to you when I was attacked by influenza & spent a miserable week in bed, coming down here as soon as was possible. Alan was also full of cold & Jane assumed the new role of strong man of the family. In fact she really is very much better, & when we return to London, in about ten days, she should be quite herself.Your first letter distressed us both very much with its news of Mary, but this new one sounds so cheerful that I hope she is stronger. What fools we are to live in England. You must be having an enchanting time, & we have had six weeks of more or less uninterrupted fog.68 Nevertheless we are delighted with Richmond. I find I hardly ever go into

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Edith Wharton first met the lively minded John Hugh Smith, 20 years her junior, at a country house party at Stanway in Gloucestershire in 1908. Their initial flirtatious relationship developed into a deep and lasting friendship. At the same house party was Robert Norton. They, with Gaillard Lapsley and Berenson, formed a key component of Wharton’s inner circle and were her regular Christmas guests. In 1939 Wharton, Norton and Lapsley published an anthology of English love poems, Eternal Passion in English Poetry: Selected by Edith Wharton and Robert Norton with the collaboration of Gaillard Lapsley, New York and London: D. Appleton-Century, 1939. See Ch. 1 n. 2. Records show about 2 weeks of fog reaching a climax just before Christmas.

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London and enjoy the work & comparative quiet immensely. It is just as well that we like it, as we’ve spent a fortune doing up the house. Last month I was invited to leave it. Apparently they can get no one to take Baldwin Brown’s place in Edinburgh69 and in despair applied to me (unofficially, but firmly). I was immensely flattered at the prospect, but reason prevailed & I refused. I should have made a poor mess of stuffing future schoolmistresses to pass degrees in the whole of art and archaeology. Besides which I am really enthralled with the work I am doing. The work on the Leonardo’s at Windsor has proved unexpectedly rewarding. I had thought, ‘such a great name, such a famous collection, there will be nothing left to do but record other people’s judgements.’ But I find that there is almost everything to do. I suppose no one has ever worked there quite long enough – or perhaps they have not been allowed to get the drawings out of order. From whatever reason I find that no one has ever tried seriously to put them in chronological order & do the obvious things – for example no one seems to have tried putting together the sketch books which is quite easy as the watermarks are often clear. And if such gross mechanical criteria are neglected, you can imagine how neglected are the esthetic. As for the Florentine Drawings: of course you don’t want anything like the detail I have to take. For example you have thirty or so horse drawings classed under one rubric, & I imagine that if this were expanded to three or four, according to period & intention, it would be detailed enough. Same with flower drawings & landscapes. With your permission I shall make out a scheme for these parts & send it to you, to accept or reject as you like (of course they are all drawings you have passed as genuine). I really think that the catalogue when it is finished will be useful in a pedestrian way. I fear it won’t be very popular as people like Malaguzzi Valeri,70 Venturi71 & co have made the wildest guesses at dating – but of course they’ll never read it, so it doesn’t matter. I think the trouble is that Leonardo drawings are amongst the very few things that can’t be studied from reproduction. I have got about a dozen Windsor photographs & will send them off to the Tatti when I return to Richmond. I’ve also got some photos of the little figure on the tomb of Michelangelo, & some good details of the Bertoldo bronze battle relief.72 I wish I knew if anyone had ever written on the influence of that piece

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Gerard Baldwin Brown (1849–1932) was the first holder of the Watson-Gordon Professorship of Fine Art at the University of Edinburgh in 1880 and held the chair for half a century until his retirement in 1930. Francesco Malaguzzi Valeri (1867–1928), Leonardo da Vinci e la scultura, Bologna, 1922. He was head of the Fine Arts Service of the Comune di Bologna. Adolfo Venturi, Leonardo da Vinci pittore, Bologna, 1920; Storia dell’arte in Italia, Milan, 1925. Lionello Venturi, La Critica e l’arte di Leonardo da Vinci, Bologna, 1919. The ‘little figure’ is possibly in the Royal Library, Windsor, RL 12355. Bertoldo di Giovanni (c. 1420–c. 1491) Battle (with Hercules), 1478, Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence.

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on high renaissance. But no Leonardo scholars seem to mention it in relation with Anghiari. We have seen a lot of Moravia, & I enjoy his company very much. I am afraid we’ve done very little towards introducing him to the great, partly because Jane was ill, partly because we know so few. However he seems to have met all the celebrities, & found his bourgeois afternoons with us a rest: also we encouraged him to talk as much as he liked which not all the celebrities did. His attitude towards English intelligence is uncompromising & no doubt just, but he misses a lot by his inability to learn the language. He understands little, is with difficulty understood & refuses to speak French or Italian. As for the new discoveries in Lady Allendale’s bathroom. The Matteo di Giovanni is a Bishop who must certainly have formed the left hand corner of a lunette the centrepiece of which is the Esztergom ‘Virgin & Angels’.73 The size & the very complicated ornamental border both agree. The Sassetta, as I think Jane told you, is extremely dirty & rather unattractive looking, the small fragment of sky being regiet. Otherwise it is untouched. Waterhouse is going to publish it, but has promised me an advance photo for you.74 The Allendales are naturally furious, & say that it is a copy – Sir Lionel Cust75 (or Sir Lionel Earle76) told them so years ago. Waterhouse I think I mentioned to you as a formidable young man who had your lists interleaved with complete bibliographies. I think he is really our white hope & may replace Constable (passed to another sphere) as our one non dago Kunsthistorike. I am re reading Wolfflins Grundbegriffe77 prior to giving a lecture on him at London University & am horrified to find myself rather disappointed. Really he does not seem to have improved on his Renaissance & Barok & gets very muddled up on his taktilisch & malerisch. However he is such streets ahead of his successors that I shall keep any denigrations to myself.We, too, have been reading Lord Carnock. I really didn’t think Nicolson had it in him to write such a good book, and it makes his present debacle all more lamentable.78 We have read two

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There is a Madonna and Child with Two Angels by Matteo di Giovanni in the Christian Museum in Esztergom, north-west of Budapest. See n. 48. Sir Lionel Henry Cust (1859–1929) was the Director of the National Portrait Gallery from 1895 to 1909 and co-edited the Burlington Magazine from 1909 to 1919. Of aristocratic stock himself, his knowledge of the genealogy of the British nobility was prodigious. He was Surveyor of the King’s Pictures from 1901 to 1927. Sir Lionel Earle (1866–1948) was the civil servant who headed the Office of Works. Heinrich Wölfflin In 1931 Harold Nicolson joined Sir Oswald Mosley’s New Party which by then had become supportive of the idea of a fascist dictatorship for the uk.

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fairly good novels, Lawrence’s Virgin & Gypsy,79 which has a sort of classical breadth, & Somerset Maugham’s Cakes & Ale.80 I wonder if you and Mrs Wharton have tried Jorrocks yet. I nearly sen[t] you an edition for Christmas, but thought I would wait and send you the Catalogue of the Dark Ages Exhibition81 instead. It isn’t out yet, and if by any chance you’ve ordered it, let me know & I shall have the fun of thinking of something else. We were so touched that Mrs Wharton remembered us so kindly. Perhaps we might be allowed to call on her on our way to Sospel82 this spring. But please do not suggest this if you think she would find it impertinent or inconvenient. Jane sends her love & joins me in good wishes, Ever yours affectionately K.

Sainte-Claire le Chateau Hyeres (Var) Tel: 2-29 Address Settignano [in BB’s hand] Jan. 13. 1931 Dear Kenneth. I hope you are recovered fr. the flu & that you are enjoying all the pleasures of warmth & safety that one can still easily enjoy in an English home. I delivered yr. message to Mrs Wharton who expressed the wish that you both would come to stay. She has written herself. This place is a paradise. Climate, scenery variety of walks, possibility of excursions put it beyond all other oases, and for me it has been a haven. For a month I have not looked at a work of art or an art book. We have had no outside company. Except [for] glimpses of the Aldous Huxleys.83 We have read

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D. H. Lawrence’s short story written in 1926 and published posthumously in 1930. An entertaining novel of social mores of the artistic and literary world in fin-de-siècle London, first published in book form in September 1930. In it Somerset Maugham has a sly dig at aesthetes and the impossibility of defining the fleeting qualities of beauty. The book caused a sensation when first published because of its leading characters’ resemblance to real-life celebrities. Although Clark claimed that he he did not like reading novels, the Clarks became close friends of Maugham and after the war frequently stayed with him in his villa at Cap Ferrat in the South of France. The exhibition Art in the Dark Ages was held at the Burlington Fine Arts Club, London, in spring/ summer 1930. See Ch. 1 n. 15. Aldous Huxley

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aloud together and by myself I have galloped thro’ the memoirs of v. Bulow.84 I doubt whether you & your generation can get the fun out of it that I do, for it revives all the excitement & passions I was so keen about when the events Bulow chronicles and comments, were occurring. Something I must recommend to your perusal is Chesterton’s essay on Gilbert & Sullivan in a vol. called ‘the 1890s’ that contains some real criticism.85 And I revelled in Edith Sitwell’s introduction in her ‘Pleasures of Poetry’.86 There at last something like justice is done to the sound-sensuality of verse. And now my vacation is drawing to a close. I expect to be back at I Tatti the 21st. & to go to work at once on the Drawings. I forsee no snags to delay me before I reach Leonardo. Then Windsor remains a difficulty. What I need is a complete set of reproductions of all drawings save mere diagrams. Each reproduction should have attached the inventory number of the original, the technique and paper & the measurements. Is there nobody you could employ at my expense to do this for me? Did you not tell me there now was to be had a series of post-cards after the Windsor drawings? These & existing photos could be used, and when both [fail] reproductions in publications could be indicated. As a final resort, where absolutely necessary, new photos could be made. If you could ‘achieve’ – what a big word! – this for me, you would be doing me a real service, & not me alone. For whether liked or not, the new edition of the Flor. Drawings will be the ground in which further planting will be carried on for some decades to come. Of course I shall be happy to study all the classifications & chronology of the Windsor drawings that you will submit to me, & write ample acknowledgement about any of them that fit in with my schema. Send me a Catal. of the Dark Ages Exhib by all means. Offhand I can recall only Bode87 on Bertoldo, but I suspect if you look through the Pruss. Jahrb. you will find a good bit. In his own field, Florence 1460–1490, little escaped Bode. With Nicky’s greetings to both of you as well as my own. Affectionately B.B.

84 85 86 87

See n. 63. G. K. Chesterton wrote an introduction to A. H. Godwin, Gilbert and Sullivan: A Critical Appreciation of the Savoy Opera, London: J. M. Dent, 1926. Berenson’s reference has not been traced. Edith Sitwell, The Pleasure of Poetry: A Critical Anthology, London: Duckworth, 1930. Wilhelm von Bode

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26.1.31 Old Palace Place, Richmond Green, Surrey Richmond 1384 Dear BB, We were so delighted to hear from you again so soon. Your letter found us still at Bournemouth, both very much recovered, & now we are home we are able to enjoy our house for the first time. Of course I shall see that you have all the material for the Windsor Leonardo. There are not so many that have never been photographed if you include Rouveyre’s miserable & swindling publication.88 A few out of the way horse studies are in Malaguzzi Valeri’s Scultura.89 The trouble will lie with the flower & landscape studies, I fancy. However you shall have a full list as soon as I can make it, and I hope next week to give you a preliminary list of horses. I will give no., size, medium & reference to photo. of anything not in your list, or included with some slight mistake. I will add supplementary remarks, for you to look at or not, as to what I take to be approximate grouping. You are not missing much in the Persian Exhibition,90 which is full of pretty things, but does nothing to modify even my sketchy previous knowledge of Persian culture. It is really too big an exhibition for such a small, esoteric art, & a contradiction of its true nature – the exquisite made commonplace by multiplication, & the aristocratic vulgarised. A culture must have pretty deep roots to survive exportation to Burlington House. I am sending separately a few photos. which may interest you. The ones from Windsor are poor prints of rather poor things. I find that my copy of the Michelangelo is mentioned by you as existing in a Grosvenor gallery photo, but send you another as I believe some of your Michelangelo material went astray. Isn’t it for the big David? The monogram of Durer is barely visible in the photo between his right foot & the baby. I don’t think it is a Durer copy, but the monogram is suggestive, & might have been used by your old chum Panofsky in his Durer’s Stellung zur Antik (which seems to me his best effort).91

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Edouard Rouveyre, Notes et dessins sur la génération et le mécanisme des fonctions intimes, feuillets inédits, reproduits d’après les originaux conservés à la Bibliothèque du Chateau de Windsor, 23 vols, Paris, 1901, with 452 photographic reproductions of Leonardo’s sketches. See also Ch. 4 n. 11. See n. 70. The International Exhibition of Persian Art, Royal Academy, London, 1931. Erwin Panofsky, ‘Dürers Stellung zur Antik’, Wiener Jahrbuch zur Kunstgeschichte, 1 (1921–2), pp. 43– 92.

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The walks here are excellent & I often take them with Bogey92 who is a great walker. He speaks most affectionately of you, as indeed do many people we meet, & we all lament your fear of an English winter which makes you come in September when everyone is away. We had just been to Cambridge & spent two really delightful days with Cockerell.93 He is a grand man & has the most wonderful books. Has he ever shown you his Florentine Picture Chronicle – it appears to me to be a sort of Domenico di Michelino.94 His new galleries are large and rather self-consciously bare – with really nothing good in them but the Titian organist, Lucretia & the Paolo.95 But these look much better than ever before. Our love to Nicky and Mary, Yours ever, K.C.

10 ii 31 Old Palace Place, Richmond Green, Surrey Richmond 1384 Dear BB, Here are some photographs. They don’t amount to much, I am afraid. [Written as a footnote: Another Sebastiano to follow] I am still working away at the Leonardos, but the later I put off sending you lists the more complete they will be. I am also slaving at two recent papers I was cajoled (9 months ago) into promising to read this March. After they are over we go out to Mrs Wharton & Sospel;96 & are looking forward to the former extremely. I don’t think we shall cross the Alps, but more likely tour about in Provence & perhaps visit Bayonne; so let me know anything you want there. We should like to go to Venice, but

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Bogey Harris Sydney Cockerell One of Cockerell’s predecessors at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, was Sidney Colvin who was the director in 1876–84. Colvin had a special interest in early Italian art. He purchased a book of drawings from John Ruskin, which he attributed to Maso Finiguerra (1424–1464), the reputed inventor of engraving, and reproduced in facsimile, with a detailed commentary, calling it A Florentine Picture-Chronicle (1898). Three of the outstanding masterpieces in the Fitzwilliam Museum are Titian’s Venus and Cupid with a Lute Player, 1555–65 (a similar picture, but with an organist instead of a lute player, is in the Prado, Madrid),Titian’s Tarquin and Lucretia, 1571, and Paolo Veronese’s Hermes, Herse and Aglauros, after 1576. See Ch. 1 n. 15 above.

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we may be motoring & our second hand car would hardly survive the Col de Turda. Just in case Lee has sent you a photograph of his new Botticelli may I ask you to forget anything Jane may have reported me as having said of it.97 It is one of those pictures about which it is best to be silent: in fact I am coming to believe that it is best for me to be silent about every picture. Did I tell you that my Leonardo book was a mare’s nest. The man had sent photographs of two drawings from the middle of the Codice Atlantico.98 When I discovered this I demanded the book itself & found that the drawings at the end were copies of the Codice Atlantico drawings. They must have been early copies done with some fraudulent motive – perhaps the book really did belong to Leonardo – he certainly had read it – & some pupil thought to enhance its value.99 We were delighted to hear from Nicky that you are all so well. We are all flourishing, & join in sending you all our love, Yours affectionately, K.C. P. S. Lee won’t give anyone a photo of his ‘Giorgione’100 because he says it depends on the colour! P. P. S. Constable is going to America to study the teaching of art-history!!

I Tatti Settignano Florence Febr. 14, 1931 Dear Kenneth. I hasten to thank you for yr. letter of the 10th and the enclosed photographs. But how naughty to send me photos and drawings with no indication of technique or size. And how I wish you had on the back of each written your

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See n. 58. The Codice Atlantico consists of 12 volumes of writings and drawings by Leonardo da Vinci, now in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan. The descriptive name derives from the size of the pages which are similar in size to that of an Atlante (Atlas). 99 See undated letter from Clark, pre-November 1930, pp. 75–6. 100 See n. 58.

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attribution.You who have seen the originals so recently should be able to make valuable suggestions to one like me who does not know the originals. Which does not mean that I am not very grateful for these photos. The one you venture to attribute to Moretto is quite right,101 but I know others besides the Morgan one. So much for this cargo & invoice. By the way Sept. no. of the Art Bulletin, the last received, contains an article on Leonardo’s bronzes which you should glance at. Turning to your letter of Jan. 26, I find that you promised to send the photo of ‘my copy of a Michelangelo’ mentioned in my book as existing in a Grosvenor Gallery photo.You say it has a monograph of Albert Durer.You have not included this photo with those you have just sent. Talking of photos we all have greatly enjoyed the one of your son and heir. I have just finished the Earlier Quattrocento Missing Pictures, and shall devote the coming weeks to the drawings of the same.102 We have been having Morra103 & Trevy104 and my sister Senda105 staying so that the addition of a few outsiders made our lunch table huge.Vavala106 comes to do clerical work, & she is like the rest of us, always more so. I wish I could like her as much as I approve of her, & find I’m duty bound to stand by her. If you retain any leisure for general reading get and read Maurice Hindus’s ‘Humanity Uprooted’.107 It is about Soviet Russia, & makes one think hard. Even if we should have to go through with the dictatorship of the proletariat for as long as we suffered primitive Christianity it would be awkward. And Hindus for the first time makes me fear that the contagion may even reach Western Europa.

101 See Popham and Wilde, Italian Drawings of the XV and XVI Centuries, no 872 (published by Clark in Old Master Drawings, vol. 5, p. 64, pl. 97). See also n. 40 above. 102 Berenson published a series of articles on missing pictures between 1929 and 1932 in International Studio and in Italian translation in Dedalo. 103 Umberto Morra 104 Robert Trevelyan 105 Senda Berenson 106 Evelyn Sandberg-Vavala was a trained art historian who did most of the proof-reading for the Lists. Berenson respected her but found her tiresome and did not enjoy her company (Mary thought he ill-used her). He nicknamed her ‘Attila’, saying that where she had been harvesting there was nothing left for others to glean (Mariano p. 141). 107 Maurice Hindus (1891–1969) was a writer and journalist of Jewish origin who was born in Tsarist Russia and whose family migrated to New York in 1905. In 1929 he visited Soviet Russia and as a result wrote Humanity Uprooted which is a chronicle of the impact on ordinary people of the Socialist experiment, and his judgement on the moral decay of a society without religion but with sexual freedom, without family ties and with equality for everyone, and the group dominant over the individual.

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I luckily shall be well out of the way & have no personal fears. But the House of Life to which I am attached may come out severely damaged, & that grieves me by anticipation. Cockerell is a bit of the real thing. Most people grumble and wish he were a bit less real. Love to both of you B.B.

[Dated 1930 but must be 1931] 20.11.30 Old Palace Place Richmond Green Surrey Richmond 1384 Dear BB., Thank you so much for your letter: we love to hear news of you. I am conscience stricken at not writing sizes & media on the photographs.The reason was that I am weakly [sic] publishing the drawings in Parker’s108 magazine & have incorporated my notes in the article – which was in the press when I wrote to you. You will see these when the number appears. I imagine that there can be no doubt about the Sebastianos, & one of the Venetian drawings must be Tintoret – the standing man. The two men leaning forward I imagine probably Tintoret,109 the reclining woman possibly Palma Giovane for a picture at Doughty House.110 Of the others, the naked warriors must be a copy of, or a pastiche after, a Pollaiuolo & might throw some light on the Sachs drawing, I suppose. The Jonah I take to be a copy of a lost Raphael:111 if so isn’t it the only evidence outside tradition of

108 Karl Parker edited the magazine Old Master Drawings ‘for students and collectors’, from 1926 to 1940. The March 1931 edition contains Clark’s article ‘Venetian Drawings in Windsor Castle Library’, illustrating the Sebastiano del Piombos (RCIN 904813 and RCIN 904815), a Tintoretto (RCIN 904823) and a Moretto of two women (RCIN 4793). 109 Royal Collection, Windsor, catalogued as School of Tintoretto (RCIN 904797). 110 See Herbert Cook 111 Both these drawings are at Windsor: Battle of Nude Men (RCIN 990050) is attributed to Raphael and The Prophet Jonah (RCIN 990804) is catalogued as School of Raphael.

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his participation in that work.. It is no 0804, Pen bistre and white on brownish paper, 30.7 x 20cm. On the verso are some scribbles, of which I enclose a photo. The landscape112 is a fine drawing in the original – silver point & white on buff paper, & interesting for its connection with Marcantonio’s Morbetto.113 I hope to publish it in facsimile in the Walpole Soc.114 I think that was all I sent except the Bertolodo detail & Michelangelo tomb. I enclose one which I hardly thought worth sending, but which may amuse you as showing how those 15th-century sculptors drew. Why are there so few of their drawings? (Can’t remember a single Vincenzo Danti or Perino da Vinci still less Ammanati, (except architectural) Tribolo or Della Porta.Yet they must all have been fine draughtsmen. What with Leonardo & my papers I am pretty busy, but managed to go to Cambridge again last week to hear Purcells Fairy Queen. It is rather thin stuff & I thought the music ill suited to Shakespeare’s text.115 How tedious 17th-century masques must have been. There seems to be nothing new in London except a very fine statue of the Tel-el-lagash type,116 but with its head. Your book on the Soviet state sounds alarming. I suppose we have reached a period when anything might happen, & the end of the Roman empire is our only guide. But I comfort myself by thinking that history never repeats itself. We are going to Haigh117 this morning – a long journey to a cold house, undertaken for love of Balniel, not in hopes of finding unknown pictures, because all the pictures there are bad. Last night I had tea with Cook. He seemed temporarily a little better & was very lively in mind. There can be few people left in Europe who retain such an interest in the names of bad Italian

112 Royal Collection,Windsor, catalogued as Raphael, A Landscape with Fgures and the Ruins of a Column (RCIN 990117). 113 See n. 52. 114 The Walpole Society, named after Horace Walpole, was formed in 1911 to promote the study of the history of British art from the Middle Ages to the present day. The Society publishes an annual volume of studies written by its members and scholars around the world. 115 Purcell’s Fairy Queen was performed at the New Theatre, Cambridge, on 10–14 February 1931, with the dialogue taken from Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream in place of the alterations made by the anonymous librettist of 1692. 116 Probably a reference to a sculpture of Gudea, dating to about 2000 bc and originating in Southern Iraq. Gudea was a ‘Governor Priest’, the supreme ruler of Lagash, a small autonomous Sumerian kingdom. He had statues set up in temples to represent himself as a pious servant of the gods. They were carved from an exceptionally hard dark green stone called diorite. 117 Haigh Hall near Wigan was the seat of the Earls of Crawford and Balcarres until its sale to Wigan Council in 1947. It is now a Leisure and Conference Centre.

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painters, & I learnt a lot from going round with him. He told me of your calling his little Madonna under a baldaquin Domenico Veneziano,118 which appeals to me very much. We are both flourishing, & join in love to you all, Kenneth

I Tatti Settignano Florence Address Hotel Transatlantique Tunis March 16. 1931 Dear Kenneth. We leave in two days Tunis & I had suspended work & am cleaning up my desk. The first unanswered letter I attend to is yours, the one of March 20,119 I mean. Many thanks for the photos enclosed. Talking of photos it must have been yr. intention to send me the one of the really interesting Seb. del Piombo for a Holy Family with Donor that you reprod. in March Old Master Drawings. Be an Angel and make this good. Nicky has sent you a list of photos we need at Bayonne in case you do get so far. Perhaps you would take in Orleans on the way. The two months since my return fr. Hyeres have passed in continuing Festival. We almost never sit down to a meal without as many at table as the room would hold. And seldom was anyone there I would have wished elsewhere. But fatigue comes the more, not the less, from a long strain of good company. Then the library is being more and more frequented, and the frequenters are frequently asked to tea & I am expected to communicate a Jupiter Fruenpieneosis [sic].120 So it will be a great relief to get away into an Anonimia121 where there are no people whom it would be cruel to deprive of the privuledge of my acquaintance

118 This small pictue (29.2 x 21.6 cm; 11½ x 8½ in) is now attributed to Benozzo Gozzoli, The Virgin and Child with Angels, National Gallery, London (NG 5581), purchased in 1945. 119 He must mean 20 February. 120 Meaning a divine ‘hander out of gladness’ (German freuen = gladness)? 121 Italian for ‘anonymity’.

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(an American lady has just left thanking me for having been gracious enough to receive her). I am plunged into Gsell’s History of N. Africa in Antiquity.122 Why do the French print books on monstrously heavy glossy paper that takes the ink badly & tests your wrists? Why are they so pedantique in asking every possible question to answer it Nous l’ignorons. I dare say there is something in killing your interest in a subject. If that is their intention admirably do they do it. I gloat over another vol. of the last edit. of Meyer’s Hist.123 This time it is all about the Phoenicians, Carthage the Israelites, & comes apposite. And I am going to live myself into S. Augustine. The more I know him the more he seems to hold the keys to all that follows after in the West down to our own times. Affectionate greetings fr. all three of us B.B.

4 June ’31 Old Palace Place, Richmond Green, Surrey Richmond 1384 My dear BB. As usual I find it difficult to begin, we seem to have done so much since I last wrote. We have been to the South of France: that was very pleasant, especially our stay with Mrs Wharton. What a perfect hostess, & what an escape from the humbug of fashionable highbrow talk. We found our hotel at Sospel failing, but otherwise our expedition was perfect. It was many years since I had been in Aix & Avignon & I was astonished at the beauty of the Sienese frescoes in the Palais de Papes.124 I found that the sculpture at Arles – I mean the porch of S.Tropheme

122 Stéphane Gsell, Histoire ancienne de l’Afrique du nord, Paris, 1913. 123 Eduard Meyer (1855–1930) was a German historian who held various professorships. His Geschichte des Alterthums (History of Antiquity) was published in several volumes between 1884 and 1902. New editions of single volumes were published sporadically but in order from 1925 onwards. 124 The frescoes are by the Italian artist Matteo Giovannetti (c. 1322–68), a follower of Simone Martini and a friend of Petrarch. He was summoned to Avignon by Pope Clement vi to decorate the Palais des Papes.

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[sic] – disappointing: real Roman revival. S. Gilles is much better.125 We also saw most of the good things en route from Havre to Provence, & arrived home bursting with aesthetic experiences. I had to give two lectures on the study of Art History at London University. They cost me infinite pains & were complete failures: only twenty people in a vast hall & of the twenty 15 were elderly ladies recruited by Jane. They neither heard nor understood a word, & my chairman greeted me at the end with the words ‘You do not really think Riegl126 a serious writer, do you’. So ended the first effort to spread the gospel in Great Britain. Now I am working away at Windsor. I have nearly finished my first comb over, & I will soon be sending you lists of notes. The work has been increasingly interesting, & I believe useful. I hope to write the introduction this summer & the books should be in the press this Autumn. Last week we went to Paris to see the Byzantine exhibition.127 I think you ought to go & see it as it contains some objects which are really hard to see & impossible to judge in reproduction. Have you seen the painting of St Justus on silk from the Cathedral of Trieste,128 or the enamelled cross from Cosenza.129 Probably you have, though Toesca, whom we met there, had not. But even so the sight of all these objects together (& most beautifully arranged) gives one an idea of the variety & splendour of Byzantine art which can otherwise only be achieved by a great effort of imagination. Just in case Tyler130 has not done so, I send you a copy of the catalogue. Of things which I had never seen before the most impressive to me were the Rothschild cameo,131 a piece of silk from Auxerre, & some of the Coptic textiles – one in particular recently discovered, of ladies riding on sea monsters. Familiar things, like the

125 The Church of St Trophime in Arles, built between the 12th and 15th centuries, is an important example of Romanesque architecture. The sculptures over the portal, particularly the Last Judgement, and the columns in the adjacent cloister, are considered to be among the best examples of Romanesque sculpture. The nearby Abbey of Saint-Gilles is a Benedictine monastery that prospered from the 11th century onwards, being enlarged and decorated from the 12th to the 15th centuries, in a French Romanesque style. 126 Alois Riegl 127 The first exhibition devoted to Byzantine art was held at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in 1931. 128 The treasury of the Cathedral of Trieste, dedicated to St Justus, possesses, among other images of the saint, a silk icon. 129 The 12th-century silver-gilt and enamel cross in the cathedral treasury at Cosenza (Calabria) was presented in 1222 by the Emperor Frederic ii. It shows the enthroned Christ surrounded by the Evangelists. 130 Royall Tyler 131 A rare, puzzling, and much discussed cameo belonging to the French Rothschild family in Paris. Dating from the 1st century ad, it is said to depict the Imperial Couple Honorius and Maria; but at a later time it was inscribed as purporting to depict the saints Sergius and Bacchus who were 3rdcentury Roman soldiers and who are commemorated as martyrs by the Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox churches.

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Utrecht ivory Virgin132 & the silver from the Cabinet des Medailles looked twice as well, when surrounded by their fellows. We were only in Paris three days & worked ourselves to a standstill. The third day we went out for an evening & a night to Mrs Wharton at Sainte Brice,133 which made a calm & exquisite close to our labours. Most unfortunately the Byzantine exhibition is to be reported in the Burlington by a young man named Byron,134 whom we met & who does not appear to know the first thing about the subject – but don’t let that prejudice you against the exhibition. We are just off to Cambridge, to a series of bean feasts organised by Cockerell for the opening of his new wing at the Fitzwilliam.135 On Saturday we shall reel home bloated with academic food. On the whole I look forward to the prospect of pomp vanity & indigestion. I can’t imagine why I have been asked except that, as the youngest person present, I am a potential historical document for the occasion. We have had the poet Yeats136 here. Did you ever know him? He is excellent company, the most roaring lion I have ever encountered & no doubt wiser & pleasanter now (as well as being a better poet) than he has ever been. You must have been having a wonderful time – though rather warm at the end, I should have imagined. At present I feel as if I shall never have seen enough of Europe to embark for Africa. I take a new page to ask your advice. I have been offered Charlie Bell’s post at the Ashmolean.137 I did not stand for it, partly because a friend of mine named Ashton138 was standing, but apparently he & all the other candidates have been

132 The Virgin Hodegetria, an ivory plaque of the 10–11th centuries, now in the Rijksmuseum het Catharijneconvent in Utrecht, a former medieval monastery displaying the history of Christianity in Holland. 133 In 1919 Edith Wharton bought, and gave the name to, the Pavillon Colombe at Saint-Brice-sousForêt in the northern suburbs of Paris, carrying out works to the house and garden. She lived and worked there and died there in 1937.The house was a folly built in about 1770 but it had been much altered before Wharton bought it. 134 Robert Byron 135 A new two-storey extension, designed by Dunbar Smith, opened to wide public acclaim in 1931. Sydney Cockerell’s spectacular acquisitions for the Fitzwilliam constantly left it short of space. However, he always ensured that new collections came with funds for new galleries. In 1925 Cockerell approached the Courtauld family who funded the new wing. The new Courtauld galleries were much praised for their innovative treatment of space and natural lighting. 136 Clark had been introduced to the Irish poet W. B.Yeats (1865–1939) by Maurice Bowra when he was an undergraduate at Oxford and he maintained a life-long admiration for, and fascination with, both the man and his poetry, which he learned by heart and often quoted. 137 Charles Bell. What Clark could not have known was that Bell had written to Berenson on 21 December 1930 telling him of his decision to resign. 138 Leigh Ashton

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turned down & they have come to me in despair. The work entailed, if one has a competent assistant, is almost nothing – only 212 days attendance a year, & one has the handling of all the lovely things in the Collection. I am very much tempted, though it means leaving our lovely house & garden, which really distresses me, as well as costing several thousand pounds. Please forgive my bothering you, and let me know what you think. Jane joins me in sending love to you all, Yours ever, K.

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Four Oxford, the Ashmolean 1931–1933

Both Clark and Berenson were familiar with the realities and possibilities of museum curatorship. The opportunity to be in charge of a high-quality and prestigious museum collection is an inevitable temptation for anyone with a love of objects and display and a passion for collecting. Berenson had been attracted by the idea of becoming the director of the Metropolitan Museum in New York. In late 1904 feelers had been put out by several members of the board of trustees, including the president, William Rhinelander. After discussion with Mary, it was decided that if an offer were to be forthcoming he would refuse it, not because the work would have been inimical to him (although Mary thought such a position would be ‘a waste of a man who could think’ (Samuels MC p. 421), but because it would have meant leaving Europe. In the event no offer was made, for Rhinelander was succeeded by J. Pierpont Morgan, who was no admirer of Berenson. Clark and Berenson both knew the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford well. Charles Bell had worked there since 1896. As Keeper of Fine Art since 1908, he had brought about many beneficial changes in the organisation of the Museum, opened new galleries and radically improved the display of objects and paintings. Clark knew that in being offered the post of Keeper of Fine Art as successor to Bell, he was being tempted by an absorbing job at a particularly interesting moment in an institution notable for many surprising developments and reincarnations. Clark later claimed that he should have refused the offer and that he accepted the post out of ‘vanity and filial piety’ (APW p. 198). The Ashmolean claims to be Britain’s oldest public museum. It gains its name from Elias Ashmole (1617–1692), the son of a saddler from the Midlands who trained in the law and settled in Oxford at the moment when Charles i’s court was in residence there. Ashmole married advantageously and gained lucrative government office which enabled him to indulge his passion for collecting books, manuscripts, coins and medals. He also acquired a remarkable collection that had been formed by the Tradescant family. The elder Tradescant had been Keeper of His Majesty’s Gardens to Charles i and he and his son assembled and 97

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created a Museum of Curiosities in Lambeth, London, open to the public and known as The Ark, containing, inter alia, specimens of natural and marine history, royal memorabilia, coins, curiosities from lands and peoples overseas – almost nothing was excluded. Ashmole, who also had a deep interest in alchemy and astrology, helped to catalogue the collection, and the Tradescant son made it over to him by way of gift; Ashmole then bestowed the Tradescant Collection, and his own, on Oxford University and the Ashmolean Museum came into existence in 1683, albeit as a completely different institution, and in another location, from the one that Clark was to join. Over the centuries the fortunes of the Ashmolean waxed and waned, as did its purpose and status within the University. More than once it fell into deep neglect and was on the point of extinction. The University was, over time, the recipient of other collections of curiosities, antiquities, works of art, coins, specimens of natural history and science, and at different times these were shuffled round existing or new institutions. The Bodleian Library, for example, amassed a collection of paintings, initially portraits of University notables but later including landscapes, contemporary art and old masters. In 1755 a large collection of Greek and Roman antiquities came the University’s way from the Countess of Pomfret.The first steps towards sorting out the muddle and bringing some clarity and structure to Oxford’s collections came in 1845 when a new building (the focus of the present-day Ashmolean, but not then known by that name) was opened at the corner of Beaumont Street and St Giles, to include the University Galleries and the Taylorian Institution for teaching modern languages. In 1860 the University opened a new Natural History Museum, devoted to the sciences, and the natural history specimens which had been the mainstay of the old Ashmolean were transferred there. In 1884 a bequest of ethnographic material from Colonel Pitt-Rivers led to the creation of a new museum which bears his name, and the Ashmolean lost its ethnographic material. However, the void was filled by its acquisition of the University’s archaeological collections, which were greatly expanded when the celebrated and energetic Sir Arthur Evans was appointed Keeper in 1884; he oversaw the building of an extension in Beaumont Street to house these new collections. The complex mergers, negotiations and building projects culminated in 1908 when the title of ‘University Art Gallery’ was dropped and a new emergent Institution was created as the ‘Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology’. It consisted of two autonomous departments, the Department of Antiquities and the Department of Fine Art, each headed by a keeper – the first director in overall charge was not appointed until 1973. Thus the Ashmolean Museum, although ancient in its origins, was to all intents and purposes, from 1908 onwards, a new institution, ready for development and for the injection of new ideas. Clark assumed responsibility for an outstanding collection. There were early Italian paintings donated by the diplomat and politician W.T. H. Fox-Strangways in 1850, Venetian pictures from Chambers Hall in 1855 and Pre-Raphaelites

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bequeathed by the widow of Thomas Combe in 1893. In 1845 the University had purchased hundreds of drawings, including sixty-eight by Raphael and fiftyfour by Michelangelo, from the estate of the painter Sir Thomas Lawrence. Lord Ellesmere and Chambers Hall gave further drawings, including works by the Carracci and Leonardo in the 1850s. John Ruskin made several gifts, including Turner watercolours. Other prints and drawings were transferred from the Bodleian. There was also good new display space. Just before Clark arrived, three new galleries had been created. The attractions of working there were obvious for anybody with energy and imagination: fine objects and works of art, many relatively recently acquired; new areas for display which needed the impetus of creative flair; an opportunity to reach out to the the public; an autonomous department with a tiny staff; a lack of bureaucracy and precedent; minimal, if any, direct supervision. For Berenson, Oxford had all sorts of resonances. When Berenson was an undergraduate at Harvard he had (in his own word) ‘yearned’ to go to Oxford and in 1888, during his all-important first journey to Europe, which changed his life for ever, he spent the Hilary term, from January to March, in Oxford as the guest of his compatriot Edward Perry (‘Ned’) Warren, who had established himself at New College and was something of a role model as well as a friend. Warren was the son of a wealthy paper manufacturer in New England and he had sponsored Berenson’s admission to Harvard. Older than Berenson by four or five years, he had decided to settle permanently in England and, en route to becoming an erudite collector of art, had decided to go to Oxford.Warren had visited Berenson in Paris, extending an invitation to visit Oxford and share his accommodation. If Oxford had a deep influence on Clark, it arguably had an even greater influence on Berenson. In the late nineteenth century, Harvard and Yale looked to Oxford rather than Cambridge as their exemplar and in the first editorial of the Harvard Monthly in 1886 the editors likened Harvard to a ‘new Oxford’ with a love and a desire for truth such as is to be found in ‘that old Oxford across the seas’. Berenson delighted in the beauty of Oxford, its social and intellectual life and the friendly interest shown in him, for his fame as editor-in-chief of the Harvard Monthly had preceded him. Aestheticism was then at its height in Oxford, and Berenson was drawn into the circle which included Lord Alfred Douglas; Berenson also got to know Oscar Wilde in London. The talented poet Lionel Johnson became a particularly close friend. Johnson later recalled how Berenson had charmed Oxford for a term and vanished, leaving behind a memory of exotic epigrams. While at Oxford, Berenson had tried to meet the high priest of aestheticism, Walter Pater, whose writings, especially Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) and Marius the Epicurean (1885), had had a profound influence on him, but his polite request to attend his lectures was rebuffed. He was also in Oxford at the moment when the re-organisation of the University’s collections was much in the air and actively discussed.

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It may have been during his one-term stay in Oxford that Berenson became set on the path that led to his abandonment of the idea of a literary career, which had been his first intention, and to make aesthetics and the visual arts his priority. In the first of two letters to Isabella Stewart Gardner, written near the beginning of the Hilary Term of 1888, he said:

it had been my dream before I went to college at all to go to Oxford and spend my life there. I was almost used up with longing for it, and I never quite got over it, although in five years I have travelled far from the aspirations I had then. Now I find that I should have been happy had I been able to come here, that I should have found a place at least almost perfectly beautiful, all the books I wanted, and the most congenial people possible! At any rate I find all these things at Oxford now. I cannot get over my surprise at the English whom I admire beyond measure. Poor Harvard and its men; it is not fair to compare it and them, especially them to Oxford men.These are all – in as far as I can see – very clever, brilliant, serious even, although without too much gravity, and well-taught; just the men whom I admire and even adore. There is something so crude and vulgar and stupid about many if not most Harvard men. (27 January 1888, Hadley p. 12) Later, towards the end of the term, he wrote to her: I feel at times I am going to pieces, which is not a bad thing, but the sad thing is I have not the least desire as yet to take these pieces and reconstruct another life out of them. I have never drifted so long in all my life, not that I am doing less or requiring less, only that it all seems aimless. I have cut with scholarship. I am as yet far from being a writer and farther still am I from having the means or the spirit to be what on the whole I might best be – a man of the world. But you see that is not a profession anywhere – least of all in America. So I am drifting, having a kind of faith that some day I get to a kind of jumping off place. (25 February 1888, Hadley p. 17)

Within five years, by 1893, Berenson had discovered his own particular abilities in art and aesthetics, was about to publish his first book, was advising collectors and had met Mary, who brought with her an allowance and a determination to turn their shared expertise in art into a steady income. In later life both Berenson and Clark expressed regret about the course that their lives had taken since their time at Oxford. For Berenson: ‘I took a wrong turning when I swerved from more purely intellectual pursuits to one like the archaeological study of art, gaining thereby a troublesome reputation as an expert’ (Berenson SSP p. 47). Clark’s experience at the Ashmolean led directly to his appointment as the Director of the National Gallery, of which he later remarked: ‘I often regretted my decision’ (Clark APW p. 210).

Chronology

1931 March

Berenson and Nicky Mariano in Tunisia and Algeria. They return by way of Cumae and stop in Rome with Walter Lippmann and John Walker

Summer

Mary Berenson in Paris with Duveen

July

Edith Wharton visits the Clarks in Richmond Mary Berenson visits the Clarks in Richmond

September

Mary Berenson undergoes operation to cure her cystitis

October

Berenson at work on Signorelli

Christmas

Berenson with Edith Wharton at Hyères Mary Berenson seriously ill at I Tatti

1932 January

Mary Berenson suffers relapse and infection and nearly dies

March

Berenson and Nicky Mariano with Edith Wharton at Hyères

April

Mary Berenson goes to Switzerland for medical treatment

May

Berenson and Nicky Mariano in Rome with Edith Wharton

June

Berenson’s Italian Pictures of the Renaissance: A List of the Principal Artists and their Works, with an Index of Places published

September/October Berenson in London and Paris 9 October

Colin and Colette Clark born

19 October

Clark’s father dies

November

Berenson returns to I Tatti

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Christmas

Berenson and Nicky Mariano with Edith Wharton at Hyères

1933 January

Duveen made a peer in New Year’s Honours List

March

Paul Sachs visits I Tatti to discuss Harvard’s taking on I Tatti on Berenson’s death

April

Clarks go to Paris to see Edith Wharton, then to Rome, Naples, Cortona, Florence, Urbino, Siena, Milan

June

Edith Wharton with the Clarks in Oxford

25 June

Berenson’s intention to bequeath I Tatti to Harvard announced in the New York Times

July

Clark goes to Paris

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Hôtel de la Ville Rome June 10, 1931

My dear Kenneth Yours of the 4th was worth waiting for. My answer must be brief. I write fr. here in an odd moment, for the first days at I Tatti after an absence of nearly three months, will be over-crowded. Leaving for the moment much that yr. letter invites one to discuss, I turn at once to the question you ask namely whether you should or should not accept the succession of Charlie Bell. It is a most flattering offer. You certainly would be in clover to be in such a toy-shop for grown-ups, & free to play at any time with any part of the moment. You would at the same time take a high rank among the dignitaries of a great university where so recently you were a mere boy. Your finger would be expected in every pie that was being prepared within the range of Oxford’s rags – almost cosmic. The advantages are so real, so splendid, & so alluring that you would – perhaps – do well to seize them. On the other hand the post will fix you down in the world of collectors, curators, dons.1 You will, altho’ remaining a plum find yourself more & more embogged in a pudding. It is perhaps the finest pudding in the world, but pudding all the same. My dear Kenneth you still are so young that I venture yet once again – but positively for the last time – to ask you to reconsider what you are doing. Of course if within your deepest depths you find an imperative call to live the life of one who curates, collects, catalogues, makes discoveries, cheers novelties, Burlington-Clubish, haunts exhibitions, etc. etc. etc. obey that call. I go on believing that you can do better, that by getting away from the newspaperial attitude toward art, & becoming a student of art as a realm, of being with a formative influence upon the humanization of that fascinating biped man, you will get much greater satisfaction & happiness in the long run, & achieving a great deal more. Please do not think I shall resent your accepting the offer. On the contrary. But I followed the dictates of conscience & told you what I really think. With much affection to both of you Yours B.B.

1

Clark was elected to a fellowship of Magdalen College on 18 May 1933.

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22 June ’31 Old Palace Place, Richmond Green, Surrey Richmond 1384

My dear BB, I was more than grateful for your long kind letter, every word of which I valued. Before it had time to arrive I was forced to take a decision, & after great searchings of heart decided to accept. I was officially elected last week. The reason why I accepted was partly that I should have, as you say, so many lovely toys to play with, & partly that it really gets me out of the Burlington world far more than into it. Living near London there was no escape for me, & would soon have been less with the Courtauld Institute floated. All writing was made as difficult as possible by every sort of invitation, & a refusal on the grounds of private work was taken as rudeness & vanity. As you know the work at Oxford is necessarily light. Bell made it a real scholar’s post. I shall be among friends who really know what scholarship is, & value a man who gives his time to it. None of the Burlington–Bond St. gang have any pull there. And after all if I find that all the surmises have been too optimistic I can give it up, & return to independence. The kind of work which you do me the honour of believing I can accomplish is none the worse for a little added experience & maturity of mind. And I know all too well that I shall not be able to do much of it under any circumstances, for it really depends on ideas & anyone’s stock of ideas is soon exhausted. I have stipulated that I cannot take over till my Leonardo work is over – in about six weeks, I should think. As for your lists, they are nearly done. I will get them typed in case an accident should overtake them in the post. Of course we shall have to sell or rent this house: that will not take place for some time, & we shall probably be here in the Autumn. We heard from Morra2 that you might be coming over then. I do hope that is true, & that we shall still be here to see you & show you this house. Not but what we may find quite a nice one in the country near Oxford. We are determined not to live in or too near Oxford & become involved in University Society – which means that grave of so many valuable abilities, University politics. I have just been reading Mark Pattison’s memoirs,3 so have the whole horrible picture before my imagination.

2 3

Umberto Morra Mark Pattison (1813–1885) was a Yorkshire-born author, priest and sometime tutor and Rector of Lincoln College, Oxford. He was a stimulating teacher and well disposed towards the young but

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Do you know the Liverpool Gallery4 well? I think I forgot to mention in my last letter that I had been there with Balniel5 & found much of really great interest – especially a, to me unknown, portrait of a young man. I see you have it in as Rondinelli, & wonder if that still holds.6 There is also a fine Tintorettesque picture & two trecento saints which I do not think are known, & a very fair ducento object.7 But alas there is no curator – they are advertising for one – & photographs are impossible. Jane joins me in love to all, Ever yours affectionately, Kenneth Clark.

I Tatti Settignano Florence June 26th. 1931

My dear Kenneth, Thanks for your frank, cordial, detailed letter. I most sincerely wish you every success temporal as well as spiritual in your new job. If you will, & of course you will, your post will enable you to be endlessly helpful while I am preparing the new ed. of Flor. Drawings. So it was the most rigid unselfishness that lead me to advise you not to accept the offer.

4

5 6

7

became embroiled in college and university politics which caused him deep hurt and ill health. He was married to the pioneering feminist and trade unionist Emily Francis Strong. His melancholy autobiography, Memoirs, was published in 1885. The Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, founded by the Liverpool brewer Andrew Barclay Walker, was opened in 1877. It contains a good collection of Italian and Netherlandish paintings many of which belonged to the banker and historian William Roscoe. It was closed from the second half of 1931 until 1933, for the building of a major new extension. David Balniel The portrait first entered the Liverpool Royal Institution in c. 1843 when it was thought to be a self-portrait by Giovanni Bellini, whose name appears on the parapet. It was ascribed to Niccolò Rondinelli (a pupil of Bellini) by Berenson in 1894; but since cleaning in 1950 it has generally been accepted as autograph. The ‘Tintorettesque’ picture is probably by Andrea Vicentino (c. 1542–1617), Court of Heaven; the two saints are possibly two small, tempera on panel roundels of St Peter and St Paul by Bicci di Lorenzo; but if so they date from the early Quattrocento.

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Harries [sic]8 & Fry9 are or have been here, & of course we talked of you. Toesca10 is coming in a day or two. He too will be interested in your new appointment. Cordial greetings to you both. Affectionately B. B.

6 July ’31 Old Palace Place, Richmond Green, Surrey Richmond 1384

My dear BB, First let me thank you for your very kind letter. Of course I shall do all I can to help you with the Florentine Drawings. The collection of material in the Ashmolean is said to be good – it is certainly very well arranged – & may be of real use to you. As an earnest of future services I am sending you today a first instalment of notes on your list of the Windsor Leonardos. It includes horses, landscapes & botany, & some of the anatomies. These last I need hardly send you in detail, as all are available, with full details (most accurate, too) in the two Piumati & the six Vangesten volumes. Among the others you will find very little of which there is no photo in Rouveyre’s rascally publication.11 A few of

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Bogey Harris Roger Fry Pietro Toesca The title page of the first of the two books referred to here, Foglio A, reads: I Manoscritti di Leonardo da Vinci, Della Reale biblioteca di Windsor, Dell’anatomia, Foglio A, Pubblicate da Teodoro Sabachnikoff, Transcritti e annotati da Giovanni Piumiati, Con traduzione in lingua Francese, Preceduti da uno studio da Mathias-Duval, Parigi, Edoardo Rouveyre Editore, M DCCC XCVIII. Foglio A was published by Rouveyre in Paris in 1898; Dell’anatomia, Foglio B was published in 1901 by Roux e Viarengo in Turin. An account of the ownership and publication of Leonardo’s anatomical drawings is given by Henry Schuman, Leonardo da Vinci on the Human Body:The Anatomical, Physiological, and Embryological Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci, New York, 1952, republished Dover, 1983. He explained that the first attempt to make the drawings available in facsimile had been made by Theodore Sabachnikoff. Sabachnikoff photographed the drawings at Windsor and deposited the negatives with Rouveyre, who was the publisher of Foglio A. Rouveyre then published an edition of the photographs without waiting for the transcription of Leonardo’s text that accompanied the drawings. Schuman wrote: ‘While this unethical if not piratical act is said to have hastened the death of Sabachnikoff, it also meant that the work would have to be done over again. Between 1911 and 1916 the need for a proper edition of the remainder of the Anatomical Drawings, that is those pirated by Rouveyre, was finally met by the appearance of the Quaderni d’Anatomia published in Oslo [in 6 vols] through the

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the unpublished horse drawings are in a rotten little book by Malaguzzi Valeri12 – Leonardo da Vinci e la Sculptura. The drawings of Deluges are almost all in Popp.13 Now anything you cannot find in these three – for example numbers 12562 & 12567 which are important – you will probably be able to get from the Commissione Vinciana.14 They have negatives of all the Windsor drawings taken by Carusi15 before the war, and are supplying us with prints at a very cheap rate. Of course they may be unwilling to give prints to any one as formidable as yourself (they suppose me to be perfectly harmless) but if you know Carusi no doubt he will let you have them. Only please do not quote me, as they only supplied us with prints as a favour, & might turn huffy if they thought we were broadcasting the fact. My work at Windsor is finished for the time being. I shall now retire & brood on it until I go to the Ashmolean in August. Sometime in the Autumn I shall have to go back to Windsor for a general revision. I have written to Oppenheimer16 about the pilgrimage drawing. Incidentally it will be available in the illustrated Catalogue of the drawings in the Italian Exhibition.17 The other fragment to which Nicky refers – that with a Ship in a Storm – is presumably that in the Metropolitan Museum. Jane joins me in love to you all, Yours ever K.

12 13 14 15 16 17

editorial efforts of C. L.Vangesten, A. Fonahn and H. Hopstock and contains an Italian transcription and translations into English and German.’ See Ch. 3 n. 70. A. E. Popp, Leonardo da Vinci: Zeichnungen, Munich, 1928. Clark had a high opinion of Popp’s scholarship and artistic sensibility. She was the first to attempt a chronology of Leonardo’s drawings. The Reale Commissione Vinciana under the auspices of the Ministero dell’ Educazione Nazionale published I manoscritti e i disegni di Leonardo da Vinci, 5 vols, 1934–6. Enrico Carusi was one of the scholars who worked on the Reale Commissione Vinciana project. Henry Oppenheimer The Oppenheimer drawing is Incidents of a Pilgrimage, Tuscan School, 1417, pen and ink and watercolour on vellum, Italian Exhibition cat. 613 (see also Clark’s entry for 614 and his article ‘Italian Drawings at Burlington House’, Burlington Magazine, vol. 56, no. 325 (April 1930), pp. 174–7, 180–83, 187. Oppenheimer had lent more than fifty drawings to the Italian Exhibition.

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Poggio al Spino18 Consuma (Prov. di Firenze) July 23, 1931

Dear Kenneth, Thanks upon thanks for the catal. of the Ital. Exhib. I expected it to be magnificent, but I had no idea it was to be so sumptuous & so generous.19 I congratulate you in every way. It is a splendid souvenir. We came out here less than 48 hours ago. It is almost cold, but beautiful. I have discovered that I am tapered out & that it is no use my trying to work till I feel less slack & empty-headed. It’s a pity, as I have so much to do, & at 66 one knows how to appreciate what there is in each minute that passes. Have you read in the last ‘Life & Letters’ ‘Under the Band-Stand’ & ‘In the Sunny South’?20 Who are the young gentleman who write like that & why do they get picked? I truly want information. Mary looks forward to seeing you. Affectionate greetings to you both Yours B.B.

16 Aug. ’31 Old Palace Place, Richmond Green, Surrey Richmond 1384

My dear BB, Our friend David Balniel is coming to Florence in September & has asked if he might see the Tatti. He is a very delightful man with a real interest in Italian

18 19

See Ch. 3 n. 5 above. Kenneth Clark and David Balniel, eds, A Commemorative Catalogue of the Exhibition of Italian Art held in the Galleries of the Royal Academy, Burlington House with the assistance of Ettore Modigliani, intro. Roger Fry, 2 vols, Oxford University Press, 1931, was a lavish folio size with a combined weight of over 10 kg. The volume of plates contained more than 200 illustrations. Life and Letters was the monthly literary magazine edited and published by Desmond MacCarthy. It contained writings and reviews by well-known luminaries as well as unknown young authors.The

,

20

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art & a good deal more knowledge than one expects in an amateur; & I think you would like him immensely. However I imagine you will be at the Consuma & will not want to be bothered with visitors. May he visit the Tatti to see the pictures? If so perhaps Nicky could give his name to Celestino so that when he rings up he will be offered admittance. I am reluctant to add one more to the stream of people who disturb your peace, but there is no one in England I could recommend with so much confidence. We go to Oxford tomorrow. I have paid a number of visits for the day, but this will be my first sustained period of office. Bell has left things in good order, & until my Leonardo catalogue is finished I shall simply keep the machine moving by an occasional touch – at least this is my ambition; but what with re hanging to accommodate some new acquisitions, & training a new & entirely ignorant assistant, I know that my hands will be full. My future assistant, a young man from an Insurance Office,21 seems to me to have a real feeling for pictures, & I chose him in preference to some more scholarly, but less sensuous, candidates. My present assistant, Charlie Bell’s friend Rienaecker, leaves this week. As to Leonardo: I have now signed a contract to publish with the Cambridge press.22 The Book will reproduce every drawing – about 4–6 on a page, & will be in two volumes, one of text & one of plates. I am pledged to have it ready by December. I don’t see how it can fail to be useful however much it falls short of perfection or even ordinary decency. Your last letter contains a question about the young men who write short stories in Life & Letters. Unfortunately I have no time for the researches into ethno-, bio- or pathology which would make the study of such a question really interesting. God knows where Desmond fishes them up. We enjoyed Mary’s visit very much indeed. It was all too short, but do not believe her if she says to you, as she said to us, that our house is luxurious. That was only provoked by contrast with the rigours of Jeremy’s Corner.23 However

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issue for July 1931 contains two short stories, one by Peter Fleming, ‘Under the Bandstand’, and one by Shaw Desmond, ‘Children of the Sun’, about southern Italy. Shaw Desmond (1877–1960) was an Irish dramatist and novelist with an interest in spiritualism. Ian Robertson (d. 1982), who claimed to be a cousin of Clark, spent his entire career at the Ashmolean, succeeding Sir Karl Parker in 1972. His predecessor,Victor Rienaecker, was a prominent collector and writer mostly on British art. Kenneth Clark, A Catalogue of the Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci in the Collection of His Majesty the King at Windsor Castle, 2 vols, Cambridge University Press, 1935. James Stourton suggested that this might be a reference to Logan Pearsall Smith. In 1930 he had published The Golden Grove: Selected Passages from the Sermons and Writings of Jeremy Taylor.Taylor, born in Cambridge in 1613, the talented son of a barber, obtained a place at Caius College, Cambridge, and entered the ministry at the age of 21. He became a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, then the Rector of Uppingham. Expelled from his living by Cromwell, he opened a school in Wales. Charles ii appointed him Bishop of Down and Connor in 1660. He is most celebrated for his learned and witty sermons which demonstrate a subtle mastery of the English language.

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you will see it for yourself as we shall probably still be here when you come over in the Autumn. Ever yours affectionately. Kenneth.

Poggio al Spino Consuma (Prov. di Firenze) Aug. 20. 1931

Dear Kenneth, Let Balniel telephone to Alda24 21.079 directly he comes to Florence & she will arrange about his seeing I Tatti. I shall still be here, & if he has the time to come up here for luncheon, I shall be glad to receive him. Tell him we are just an hour away from the heart of Florence. I am delighted to hear that yr. Leonardo catalogue will be ready for the press by Dec.1. I ask you here & now to let me have the advance sheets as soon as ready. I shall refer to it constantly in my catalogue – in fact to each item. Mary was enchanted with her visit to to Old Palace Place. If you give it up before the end of 1932 there is scant chance of my seeing it,25 for I do not expect to go North this autumn. Up here I have been idle, more idle than in years. If I get to work I may keep at it with almost no interruption till Xmas holidays. Nicky & Alda are here.Trevy26 turned up today just before Morra & Alberti left. Bracci’s27 mother has just died, wh. prevented their coming here for Ferragosto, & precipitated Morra’s departure. The best that has come to me recently in the way of general literature is Daniel Halévy’s Décadence de la Liberté.28 Love to you both Yours B. B.

24 25

26 27 28

Alda von Anrep Old Palace Place was put on the market in July 1931 and advertised twice, in The Times, through an estate agent, in the first half of July. It was described as a ten-bedroom house ‘carefully restored by the current owner at a cost of several thousand pounds . . . Freehold for sale at much less than cost. Or may be let on lease.’ Robert Trevelyan See Appendix 1. Daniel Halévy (1872–1962), the French historian, came from the haute bourgeoisie and was a school-mate of Marcel Proust. Décadence de la liberté, published in 1931, denounced the political

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8 xi 31 Shotover Cleve Headington NR. Oxford29 Headington 6832

My dear BB, It is a long time since we had news of you, except the sad news that Mary had undergone a serious operation.30 I hope she is recovering rapidly: we have heard from Logan that the operation was successful. What with this & with economic alarms you must have been having a troubled time. We have had a busy but an agreeable Autumn. I have enjoyed playing about in my toy shop, which really looks very pretty now. And I am delighted to find how little there is to do. Even though I have rehung the whole gallery I have had plenty of spare time. Most of this has been spent on my Leonardo Catalogue which is now almost finished – all but the mechanical arrangements which as you & Nicky know are the worst part of any catalogue. Charlie Bell is not returned to Oxford. I don’t believe he ever will, as he couldn’t bear to see the mess I was making. As the enclosed shows we are trying to commemorate him. It is an unpleasant time to ask anyone to give, but on the whole his friends have been extraordinarily generous. We only sent the appeal to people who really liked and admired [him], & as you know the number was limited. However we have got close on £130.31 We live here in what Bell describes as suburban squalor. It is a plain modern villa with most of the advantages of a new house, one of which, that it is not in a valley, is particularly necessary here. On the whole we prefer it to Richmond, where we had bored ourselves with our own boasting. This house is nothing to boast about. We do not find ourselves cut off from London – pur troppo: after a weeks work I would gladly have a weekend alone, but it is impossible. Hammell

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system in France which he saw as dominated by professional politicians operating through Masonic committees. He was nostalgic for a ‘Republic of Notables’ and for the independent artisan. His views led him to welcome the Vichy regime as a last chance to preserve that France. Headington is a suburb of Oxford, with views over the city centre. Alys Russell, Mary Berenson’s sister, described the Clarks’ house as a ‘delightful white Italian villa with a tame and wild garden’. Clark described it as a ‘featureless modern house’ and ‘irredeemably commonplace’ (Clark APW p. 198) but with good views over the Thames Valley. Mary’s declining health persuaded her to undergo an operation in the hope of curing her persistent nagging cystitis. Following the operation she developed a fever which nearly killed her and her health continued to worsen. The proceeds of the appeal went to purchase a portrait of Luca Carlevarjis by Bartolomeo Nazari. Bell asked Clark to list it in memory of his entire length of service at the Ashmolean (which he joined in 1896), not simply his years as Keeper (1908–31).

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is our most recent visitor – & most exhausting. However thank heaven I was able to praise his famous picture of the Adultress with sincerity. Please forgive a short & foolish letter, flowing from an exhausted pen. Jane sends love to you all. Ever yours affectionately, Kenneth.

Sainte Claire Le Chateau Hyeres (Var) Tel: 2-29 Dec. 23. 1931

Dear Jane, I got here last night & found your & K’s greeting. Thanks & altri tanti a Loro. Mary was enough better to allow me to leave her without great anxiety. As you know Alys is with her. I shall however scarcely remain here as long as usual. For one thing I must get back to my work. Edith is very fit, & her Xmas Trio32 is now complete. The weather is of paradise. In Florence for some time past it has been purgatorial. If you see Charlie Bell give him my love & good wishes. Ever affectionately B.B.

Sainte Claire Le Chateau Hyeres (Var) Tel: 2-29 Jan. 1. 1932

Dear Jane Thanks for yr. delightful letter of four days ago, & take my further good wishes for a satisfactory 1932. Our plans depend on Mary. If she has made a real recovery, & if we are not ruined first, we shall probably be travelling in N. Africa from about March 15 to the end of May. We also plan to spend some time in England next autumn. I should be only too happy to stay, & see all the Oxford drawings, & all the photo’s

32

Edith Wharton. See Ch. 3 n. 66.

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& engravings thereto appertaining. K. could be most helpful & will be of course. I am making despairingly slow progress with the Florentine Drawings. So I am still far from Leonardo. I hope therefore that K’s proof – or rather advanced sheets with the illustrations will reach me in good time. Mrs Wharton speaks of you both with affection. She is pretty fit, altho’ a trifle tested over all the holiday performances & her new novels.33 Affectionately B.B.

31 1 32 Shotover Cleve Headington NR. Oxford Headington 6832

My dear BB, We hear from Logan a sad account of Mary’s health. How terrible that she should have had such a serious relapse. Please give her our love & warmest sympathy. It must be a most distressing time for you, too. Thank you very much for the lists. They reached me about a fortnight ago & I could scarcely believe my eyes. They have been fabulous for so long that even as I held the book in my hands I expected it to dissolve.34 However it has remained solid, & I have looked through the greater part. Of course I can’t begin to appreciate it. That will only be possible after I had been using them for thirty years. I can only join with everyone interested in pictures in thanking you for having taken the trouble to compress the esthetic experiences of your lifetime. I wish you could find a way of compressing, & so expressing, your ideas.There has only been one Boswell35 – even Eckermann36 was not satisfactory – so you must find some other method of crystallising the fountain.

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She was working on her penultimate novel, The Gods Arrive, published in 1932. Bernard Berenson, The Italian Pictures of the Renaissance: A list of the Principal Artists and their Works, with an Index of Places, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932, pocket-size, 723 pp., listing more than 15,000 paintings by artist and location. James Boswell’s biography of Dr Johnson, The Life of Samuel Johnson, was published in 1791. Johann Peter Eckermann (1792–1854), whose Conversations with Goethe (Gespräche mit Goethe) recorded their conversations during the last nine years of the great man’s life. He acted as Goethe’s personal secretary.

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We have been in trouble. We had Fry down to lecture in Oxford (in the face of bitter opposition) & he developed violent influenza which the doctor feared would turn to pneumonia. He was staying with us. We had to send away Alan & call in two nurses: & after Ricketts and Lytton Strachey37 we were fully prepared for him not to recover. However he did, in a fortnight. And no sooner had he left us than Jane had a motoring accident. She ran into a lamp post, when driving her small car, at such a speed that she upset the lamp post, and overturned the car.The car was smashed to atoms & it is a miracle that she came out alive. She is badly bruised and strained, and apparently has no broken bones. It is difficult to say how badly she is hurt for a few days (the accident was two days ago), as she is still unable to move much. She seems to be less well today. I have no news of myself. In the museum I make a few changes of arrangement, which give me small, but positivi [sic], satisfaction. And I go on at my Leonardos, groaning & grumbling as the mouthful grows more difficult to chew at every bite. We have had little chance of visiting the french exhibition.38 It is, as it was bound to be, most enjoyable, but should have been better. The selection is chauvinistic – et puis c’est si français has been the highest praise. As a result there is too much Le Sueur, too much Le Nain too little Cézanne (who is suspected of being an Italian) and badly chosen Degas (also too Italian). Manet is the best represented. Have you seen that you have got into an anthology of English prose, compiled by H. Read? That seems to me the most enviable kind of fame – as no doubt it will to Logan. But he might object to rubbing shoulders with the Infantry Training Regulations,39 which I am sure you will not. Jane bids me thank you for her letter, & sends her love to you all. Yours ever, K.

37 38 39

Charles Ricketts had died on 7 October 1931, aged 70. Lytton Strachey had died of stomach cancer on 21 January 1932, aged 52, shortly before this letter was written. The Exhibition of French Art 1200–1900 was held at Burlington House, London, in 1932, curated by W. G. Constable and Trenchard Cox (later the Director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, 1955–66). Herbert Read was interested in the art of writing and cared deeply about style and structure. In 1928 he published English Prose Style, a handbook on the elements and philosophy of good writing. In 1932 he published (in collaboration with Bonamy Dobree) The London Book of English Prose, an anthology which examines the various purposes for which prose is written. A short passage from Berenson’s Italian Painters of the Renaissance was included as an example of ‘Criticism’. Field Service Regulations, Part II (1924), I.i.(2) was quoted as an example of ‘Strategy and Tactics’. Both were deemed to fall under the rubric of ‘Scientific Prose (the desire to describe a thing)’.

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I Tatti Settignano Florence Febr. 4. 1932

Dear Kenneth, We are all distressed to hear of Jane’s accident, & congratulate you and her on her narrow escape. And Roger too? I am so very glad he has recovered. I don’t want to be left the one & only survivor of my generation. Besides he works for me, & he has no idea how much I want him to go on. Mary has given me the worst fright I have had in my life. A week ago we as good as gave her up, & for two or three days I expected the end. Luckily she took a turn for the better & now I dare hope again that she will recover. It will be a long pull at best. In what state will she be? Will she still be able to travel? My work is creeping along ever so slowly, & of course Mary’s illness absorbs me almost entirely. By the way it is no longer probable that we shall stray far fr. I Tatti for the next few months. So you will most likely find us here when you come to Italy later, & of course you must stay with us – unless the unforeseen happens. I am sending for Read’s anthology. No, I never expected to see myself in any such book. Affectionate greetings to you both B.B.

I Tatti Settignano Florence May 15, 1932

Dear Kenneth, Your letter was most interesting.40 So you really have got into the Lhasa, into the Portala, into the great dragon-guarded mouth, & had Pisgah sights of treasury of drawings.41 I hope it will be granted to you to penetrate further & to bring back

40 41

Letter missing. The collection referred to is probably that of Henry Oppenheimer. ‘Pisgah sights’ is a phrase used more than once by Berenson and was admirably described by George Landow in his Victorian

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detailed reports. Already I feel like cataloguing the Benozzo on your authority & responsibility.42 This is not going to be a letter but thanks only for yours. It is written in the midst of packing, visitors, proofs to read, & an article I want to get off before leaving for Roma tomorrow to join Edith who, by the way spent two days here on the way down. I expect to spend four weeks there – Hotel de la Ville, Via Sistina. If you both are there any how, & if it is perfectly convenient, we could come to you on landing in England. Don’t fear we should be bored. I can always find amusement enough in the Ashmolean, at Christ Church Library & perhaps even in the Bodleian. Are there no drawings there, no illuminated & illuminating quattrocento mss? Affectionate greetings to you both yr.s B.B.

Pavillon Colombe St Brice-Sous-Foret (S&O) Telephone: St Brice-Sous-Foret, 12 Oct. 10. 1932

Dear Kenneth, Edith has just sent me in yr. wish, & I am happy to congratulate you. Boy & girl.43 It could not be better.You must have done your duty.You have produced three children & paid your debt to the race. More would be self-indulgence.

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43

Types,Victorian Shadows: Biblical Typology in Victorian Literature, Art, and Thought, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980. In Deuteronomy 34: 1–4, God commands Moses to ascend to Mount Pisgah and there He grants him a sight of the Promised Land. As He had explained to Moses in Deut. 32: 51–2, he could not enter the Promised Land because he had disobeyed His command by striking rather than praying to bring forth water from the rock in Kadesh (Numbers 20: 1–13). The Pisgah sight is thus the coming together, a confrontation, of human and divine, temporal and eternal, immediately before the death of a prophet who has given his life to serving God and His chosen people; it therefore stands simultaneously as the culmination, reward and punishment for the acts of that life. Oppenheimer owned a well-known drawing of The Crucifixion, then attributed to Benozzo Gozzoli, which is now attributed to Fra Filippo Lippi. Berenson published it as by Lippi in 1932. Sold in the Oppenheimer sale at Christie’s, London, 10 July 1936 (Lot 15), it was acquired by the British Museum. The Clark twins, Colin and Colette, were born on 9 October 1932. Edith Wharton was Colin’s godmother.

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I find Edith in her best form. She read out what she has already written for her memoirs about Henry James.44 It is first rate. She may even thro’ the door of narrative, & along the corridor of biography attain to creativity. Love to you both B.B.

26.ii.33 Shotover Cleve Headington NR. Oxford Headington 6832

My dear BB, Some weeks ago I was over in Cambridge seeing about the printing of the Leonardo Catalogue, & was told that the ms. was so complicated that proofs of it would not be ready for ages. Thinking of you I set to work to reconstruct the catalogue as best I could out of duplicates of my typewritten entries & I have managed to make it fairly complete. In the set I sent to the press every entry has been revised & often rewritten, but I think the set I’ve put aside for you will serve your purpose fairly well. What you want chiefly is the sizes, descriptions, bibliographies etc., & the chief difference between your set & that sent to press is in my notes, which are not so important to you. If by any chance you look at them, do remember that they are likely to have been revised. I am afraid that my duplicate photos are hardly worth sending, but I will send them too. Without Rouveyre’s publication45 it will be difficult to find reproductions of everything, though the most important are reproduced in Bodmer.46 Incidentally I am afraid that some of the entries I send you will not have the Bodmer references written in, as I only copy them into my final draft. But they can easily be found, as B. always gives a Windsor no. We have had a full winter. Most of my time has been taken up, I am ashamed to say, with lecturing. I have to give three a year here (Bell always ignored this statute, but I am not fierce enough to do so) & I also give six at the Courtauld Institute. It is rewarding work in a way, as four I gave here were really well attended by an audience consisting inevitably of undergraduates – about 200 a

44 45 46

Edith Wharton’s autobiography, A Backward Glance, was published in 1934. See Ch. 3 n. 88, and n. 11 above. Heinrich Bodmer (1885–1950) was a German scholar of the Italian Renaissance and Baroque. In 1931 he published Leonardo: des Meisters Gemälde und Zeichnungen.

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time; & it was pleasant to find that there was some interest in the subject among the young here, when there is so little among the old. Apart from this there have been several alarms & fatigues at the museum, & a great deal of business for my mother.47 She has been staying with us all the time, & is a good deal stronger and more cheerful: but has no idea that anyone need work or busy themselves in any way & has an almost Russian gift for spending my time & Jane’s in aimless conversation. Jane has been well on the whole, though a little tired of domestic life. The twins have waxed beyond belief, & really are a pleasant spectacle, unless one believes as Lady Cunard said to me the day after they born, that anyone who has a baby nowadays ought to be put in prison. You will have seen in the papers – or perhaps you will not have seen as you take in the Times, which gives no news – that Oxford has been distinguishing itself. The decision that the youth here would not fight for King & Country48 has made a glorious rumpus, even more agreeable than the Australian fear of fast bowling49 which is going to lead to a dissolution of the Empire. There have been some excellent letters, none more nauseating than one from Lord Allen of Hurtwood.50 He may be a very nice man, but in his public utterances he is a loathsome prig.

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Clark’s father died in Scotland ten days after after the twins were born. Indeed, Clark missed their birth because he was in Scotland attending to his ailing father. His mother relied on him to handle all her affairs and those of his father’s estate. The now notorious debate at the Oxford Union on 9 February 1933 ‘That this House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country’ was won by 275 votes to 153. The event caused a sensation. The popular press was outraged, Winston Churchill condemned it and Cambridge University threatened to pull out of the Boat Race on the grounds of ‘incompatibility of temperament’ (see Derek Round and Kenelm Digby, Barbed Wire Between Us: A Story of Love and War, Auckland: Random House, 2002). The Nazis took it to be proof that the English had gone soft. ‘Bodyline’ bowling became a matter of the fiercest controversy during the 1932–3 cricket season. Properly known as ‘fast leg theory’, it was devised by the English team as a means of defeating the Australians during their ‘Ashes’ tour of Australia, in particular to overcome the masterly batting of Don Bradman: they adopted the policy of pitching the ball short so as to rise towards the body of the Australian batsman. The theory was that Bradman in particular was vulnerable to such a ball and was afraid. The Australians regarded the tactic as endangering their batsmen and contrary to the spirit, if not the actual rules, of the game. England won the series 4–1. There was intense bad feeling and many Australians refused to buy British goods. In 1935 the rules of cricket were changed to give umpires the power to intervene if they thought batsmen were being endangered. Reginal Clifford Allen (1st Baron Allen of Hurtwood; 1889–1939) was a politician, journalist and active Socialist, who was the Treasurer and Chairman of the Independent Labour Party (1922–6) and a director of the Daily Herald (1925–30). He was a conscientious objector during the First World War and was made a peer by Ramsay MacDonald. He was a sincere and vociferous campaigner for disarmament by the Allies, appeasement of Hitler, and the cause of international Socialism. On 22 February 1933 he had written to the Manchester Guardian to protest that the Oxford Union Debate had diverted attention away from ‘a rapid carrying out of a courageous Socialist and Pacifist programme.’

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We are leaving the country on March 14th, & will probably stay a few nights in Paris: then we shall go through to Florence where we shall only stay a day or two on our way to Rome. Will you be there? I am afraid you are almost sure to be in Africa: or if not it will be because Mary is not well. How is she, by the way? We heard a mixed account from Logan. Our chief objective is Naples, where I have never been; so we shall not stay in Florence longer than to break the journey, and then go on to Rome. To return to my first sheet: if you are not going away I shall send you the Leonardo entries at once But if you are going to be away all Spring, then I would rather not send them till you return. They are the only duplicates I have & are useful for reference until the proofs come in. Love to you all from us both, Yours ever, K

10.3.33 Shotover Cleve Headington NR. Oxford Headington 6832

Dear BB, Our letters continue to cross. However all is clear about the Leonardo notes. I shall bring them out & leave them as long as you like. It is very kind of you & Mary to ask us to stay, & sweet of Nicky to offer her room. But we shouldn’t dream of turning her out. We shall stay in a hotel for the few nights we are in Florence, probably the Grande Bretagne. A young man I know named Greenlees51 has asked me for an introduction to you. He is very keen, quite agreeable & a good specimen of his generation (aged about 19, I suppose) so I told him I did not think you would mind his coming up. I hope I did right.

51

Ian Greenlees

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It is wonderful to think that in a few days we shall have left England, home and duty behind us: that is if we survive our present frenzied bout of letter writing, bill paying & committee meetings, which is the necessary prelude to a holiday. Yours ever, K

2.[vii].33 Shotover Cleve Headington Oxford

My dear Mary, I should have written before to thank you for sending us your Modern Pilgrimage:52 but I wanted to read some of it first, so that I might with more than the conventional congratulations. I can now write with truth that we have both enjoyed it immensely. I liked not only the descriptions of your life & of the country, but also the number of wise observations on life in general which you have been able to include. And it all comes so straightforwardly that it is never dull. We have had a very busy summer. I find that Oxford with its official round of work & social life is becoming more & more exacting, & I shall have to struggle hard if I am to find any time for my own work. The only consolation is that we really are doing something to improve the Museum. As I think we told you, we are adding a new wing for the early Italian pictures;53 & I have been able to buy, or have presented some interesting things. The last of these is Paul of Jugo Slavia’s Piero di Cosimo, the Forest Fire which I managed to get for a very reasonable price.The National Art-Collections Fund are putting up the money. It will make a good pendant to the Uccello Hunt, and

52 53

Mary Berenson, A Modern Pilgrimage, New York: Appleton, 1933. Clark had offered, and the University had accepted, an interest-free loan of £8000 to be repaid in five years’ time, being half the cost of erecting an extension to the Mediaeval Room, for a new lecture room and additional gallery and for the conversion of the existing Archaeological Lecture Room into a library. In today’s money the loan would be the equivalent of £1 million or more.

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will amuse the young.54 With those two pictures they can’t complain that the old masters are dull. We are all very well. The twins have never been ill, & swell visibly. Colin is most active & walks round his pen already. Colette is placid & rather pretty. It is fascinating to see how different they are in everything they do. Please apologise to Nicky for the scandalous way in which I have ignored her requests. I was waiting to get proofs on my own ms. from Cambridge, as the copy I sent you was very defective. But nothing has come, so I shall have to do the best I can without. How is the ‘drawing book’ going? Has BB got to Michelangelo, I wonder. Edith Wharton has just been here, naturally rather sad, but very brave, considering the whole scaffolding of her well-ordered life has been kicked away.55 Jane sends her love, yours ever K

54

55

Prince Paul of Yugoslavia’s painting by Piero di Cosimo, The Forest Fire (c. 1505), had been shown in the Italian Exhibition in 1930. Jon Whiteley was told by Ian Robertson (see n. 21 above) that as soon as the lawyer, Archie Balfour, alerted him to the imminent sale of the painting he passed on the news to Clark, who immediately bought the picture with his own money to secure it for the Ashmolean. Clark sold it at cost to the Ashmolean, the acquisition being funded by the National Art Collections Fund for £3000. According to a letter of 17 March 1972 (Ashmolean Archive) from Christopher Lloyd, then working in the department of Western art of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, enquiring about provenance, the picture had belonged to Count Giulio Ruccellai who sold it after the Russian Revolution of 1917 to Harold Acton’s father, Arthur Acton, who then sold it to Prince Paul. Paolo Uccello’s The Hunt in the Forest (c. 1470) was given to the Ashmolean by FoxStrangways in 1850. In spring 1933, Edith Wharton’s household was visited with a double disaster. Her personal and devoted maid, Elise, suffered a nervous collapse and was diagnosed with pernicious anaemia. She died at Hyères on 29 May 1933. In April her beloved, faithful housekeeper, Catharine Gross, a calmly competent Alsatian, who had been with Wharton since her early married life in the 1880s, was suddenly transformed from an 80-year-old invalid into a ‘a wild, frightened and obstinate stranger’, expressing hatred for everyone and for Wharton in particular. She was taken to a convent where she sank into unconsciousness, dying in October 1933.

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Five The National Gallery, Surveyor of the King’s Pictures, Predicaments and Crises 1933–1939

On 2 September 1933, The Times announced that Kenneth Clark, aged thirty, was to succeed Sir Augustus Moore Daniel, aged sixty-seven, as the Director of the National Gallery, his appointment to be for a term of five years. In the brief press announcement, the rationale for his appointment, besides his experience at the Ashmolean, was that he had worked for Berenson, participated in the Exhibition of Italian Art at Burlington House and was the author of a ‘remarkably able study of the Gothic Revival’. However, Clark’s appointment was not a unanimous decision. For some of the Trustees he was too young and their preference was for W. G. Constable, the Assistant Keeper, aged forty-seven. The principal advocate for Clark was Lord Lee of Fareham who threatened to withdraw support for his pet project, the embryonic Courtauld Institute, unless he got his wish: namely that Clark should be appointed to the National Gallery and Constable become the first Director of the Courtauld Institute. When Clark took up his directorship on 1 January 1934 morale in the National Gallery was at a low ebb. For nearly four decades there had been a history of bad relations, and sometimes outright hostility, between the Trustees and the director and staff of the gallery. Clark’s immediate predecessor, Sir Augustus Daniel, had previously been a trustee and became the director in 1929. It had not been a successful appointment and the atmosphere at the gallery had been poisonous. Several members of staff including a talented young Assistant Keeper, Ellis Waterhouse, and the Keeper Collins Baker had resigned. Daniel had sided with his staff against the trustees, as had his predecessor Sir Charles Holmes (1916–28). Holmes’s predecessor, Sir Charles Holroyd (1906–16), had also had a bad relationship with his trustees. One of the principal points of contention was over who should decide on acquisitions – the director or the trustees? Directors also constantly complained that their trustees treated them as if they were domestic servants. The administration and the scholarship at the gallery were also amateurish compared with German and American counterparts, and the facilities were inadequate. For example, when Clark took office there was no artificial lighting of any sort, or staff or department responsible for conservation. 123

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Clark’s appointment was supposed to represent a new beginning. He established a good relationship with his trustees and became a close friend of his first chairman, Sir Philip Sassoon. He also set about modernising the gallery, one of his first acts being the introduction of electric lighting. He established a scientific and conservation department, extended opening times until 8 pm, introduced public lectures and organised small temporary exhibitions. He also worked on popular publications. The trustees were drawn principally from the socially and politically illustrious. When Clark took up office, the longest serving trustee was Viscount d’Abernon (then seventy-seven years old), who was an international financier, collector and former ambassador in Berlin, who had held office since 1909. Sir Philip Sassoon, aged forty-six, was a suave bachelor, connoisseur and collector, astute Member of Parliament (Under Secretary of State for Air) and heir to an immense merchant fortune.The other trustees (most were born in the era of Gladstone and Disraeli) were Sir Robert Witt, a prominent London lawyer, dedicated supporter of the arts and Chairman of the National Art Collections Fund (nacf);William George Arthur Ormsby-Gore, the future 4th Baron Harlech, a politician and banker with an extensive knowledge of art and architecture on which he was a published authority; Ramsay MacDonald, the ailing and beleaguered Prime Minister; Sir Joseph Duveen, the notorious and charismatic art dealer; the Prince of Wales, ‘who rarely attended meetings because he was not allowed to smoke’ (Clark APW p. 225); Samuel Courtauld, the industrialist, collector and benefactor; Sir Evan Charteris, an aristocrat, barrister, biographer and the Tate Gallery’s Chairman of Trustees; and Sir William Llewellyn, the portrait-painter and President of the Royal Academy. Those who became trustees during Clark’s tenure, up to 1939, were: Henry Harris, an eccentric connoisseur; David Balniel, the future 28th Earl of Crawford and 11th Earl of Balcarres, whose family were noted for their interest in the arts; Anthony Eden, the Foreign Secretary and future Prime Minister; Viscount Bearsted, an art collector and philanthropist, whose family fortune was derived from Shell oil and merchant banking; Paul Methuen, 4th Baron Methuen, a painter.and landowner, who had inherited Corsham Court with its fine art collection; the Hon. Sir Jasper Ridley, a banker and collector. In 1934, the National Gallery collection consisted of less than 2000 paintings, displayed in some 30 rooms, and there were approximately 500,000 visitors a year. Like the other great London museums at that time, the gallery was essentially a national institution whose audience was principally domestic. Besides the director, there was a small professional staff of four keepers and curators. It was not until the 1960s that museums and galleries began to assume the now familiar role of international tourist attractions. (Today there are more than

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5 million visitors a year, the collection, which contains more than 2300 paintings, is displayed in more than 60 rooms and there is a professional staff of 120 who are organised into 24 departments.) During the 1930s, the Royal Collection was regarded as the preserve of the monarch, rather than the property of the nation, and none of it was open to view, although the public had access to the collections at several of the royal residences, including Windsor Castle and Hampton Court. Extensive in its scope, it contained some 7000 paintings, 40,000 watercolours and drawings and about 150,000 old master prints, as well as tapestries, furniture, ceramics, books and other works of art.The office of the Surveyor of the King’s (or Queen’s) Pictures dates from 1625 and the appointee is responsible for the care and maintenance of the Royal Collection’s pictures. Until 1972 the office was a part-time appointment and it was not until then that the staffing and supervision of the collection was professionally organised with, besides the Royal Librarian, two new full-time Surveyors – one for pictures and one for works of art – supported by teams of trained assistants. Clark’s immediate predecessor as Surveyor was the gentle and unworldly Collins Baker, who had been the Keeper at the National Gallery, and who had resigned in 1932 to take up a research appointment at the Huntington Collection in California. Clark was appointed as the Surveyor only seven months after taking up the directorship of the National Gallery. According to Clark himself, he was reluctant to become the Surveyor but George v was insistent to the point where he made a private visit to the National Gallery and during a tour of the collection commanded Clark to accept. Clark’s natural habitat, like that of the Berensons, was not the groves of academe and the scholar’s cell but the salons of society and the inner sanctum of the passionate collector. When they moved back to London, the Clarks took a lease on a grand eighteenth-century town-house at 30 Portland Place, a short walk from Regent’s Park and an even shorter walk from the new headquarters of the British Broadcasting Corporation (bbc). ‘Jane and K’ soon became the darlings of society hostesses such as Lady Cunard and Sibyl Colefax, in what Clark later described as the ‘Great Clark Boom’. They lunched with the Prime Minister at 10 Downing Street, dined with the King and Queen at Windsor Castle (and reciprocated with invitations to Portland Place); they stayed with Winston Churchill and he came to dine; they were invited to lavish weekend house-parties and were frequent guests of Sir Philip Sassoon at Port Lympne in Kent. Jane was dressed by Schiaparelli. Their house, decked out in the height of fashion, was full of servants and nannies. Such a lifestyle was a bond between Clark and his trustees – they were mutually at ease socially and met at dinner parties and house parties – but such grandeur was the cause of an increasingly bad relationship with his staff who, while acknowledging Clark’s abilities as a

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scholar, regarded him as too rich and too worldly and disliked his policy of popularising the gallery. At first they had welcomed him, seeing him as someone who would be on their side in any battle against the trustees. However, they soon came to regard him, especially after his appointment as the Surveyor of the King’s Pictures, as a place-seeker and no better than one of the trustees. The relationship between Clark and his curatorial staff degenerated to the point where they locked him out of their offices and the gallery’s library. Their difficulties were succinctly summed up by his friend and contemporary, John Walker, who commented that although the staff acknowledged that Clark was brilliant they found him arrogant. He looked down on his subordinates, delegated to them reluctantly and when he did, criticised their efforts. ‘In the end he aroused the hostility of his staff, who then proceeded to make his life miserable’ (Walker p. 293). Clark’s directorship was notable for many eye-catching acquisitions. He persuaded his trustees to fill some of the gaps in the collection and made a number of major additions with overt popular appeal, by Bosch, Rubens, Ingres, Constable and Gainsborough. However, one potentially spectacular acquisition brought nothing but anguish. In 1937, Clark persuaded the trustees to consider four small Venetian panels. He had seen them in Vienna and had been bewitched by them. They were in the style of, although not necessarily by, the rarest of Venetian Renaissance painters, Giorgione. The trustees decided to buy them although the asking price was a problem: it was beyond their budget. However, if the panels were by Giorgione himself they were a bargain; if not by Giorgione, but by some lesser artist, they were too expensive. Sir Robert Witt offered a way out of the dilemma by saying that the nacf would purchase and present them provided they were catalogued as by Giorgione himself. Clark hesitated but agreed. Once the acquisition and the attribution became known, scholars and academics came forward to prove that they were probably by a minor Venetian artist called Andrea Previtali, and there was a campaign to have Clark dismissed. It was a long drawn-out and painful episode. The four panels can now be found in the mostly unvisited reference section in the basement of the gallery, catalogued as by Previtali. There was one milieu which Clark enjoyed and cultivated but which was alien to Berenson. Clark liked avant-garde modern and contemporary art and purchased works for himself by the French Impressionists and Post-Impressionists and by the Bloomsbury Group. He sought out young artists whom he thought had talent, and whose company he enjoyed, such as Henry Moore, Graham Sutherland, John Piper and Victor Pasmore. Before he had gone up to Oxford, he had had ideas of becoming a painter himself, although he was perceptive enough to realise that this was not where his true talents lay. The company of creative

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artists, conversation with them and the atmosphere of the studio appealed greatly to him. In 1935, Berenson celebrated his seventieth birthday and with the clock ticking he knew he had certain things he wished to complete or bring to a conclusion before he died.The new edition of The Florentine Drawings was a priority but there was no publisher committed to it. The original edition had been published by John Murray. Oxford’s Clarendon Press, which was in discussion about the new edition, was proving recalcitrant. In the event it was published by the University of Chicago Press in September 1938, the cost being shared by the University and the Carnegie Foundation. The three-volume edition was workmanlike rather than sumptuous (unlike the first edition) and the price was $25. It was what Berenson wanted, for he wished it to be accessible to, and to be used by, students. New German scholarship gave Berenson much anguish. His approach to art had its roots in nineteenth-century aestheticism, which placed emphasis on personal perception and feeling, and concerned itself principally with the object rather than with documentation. He had been a pioneer in identifying and attributing Renaissance paintings, and his four essays on Italian art had brought its appreciation to a wide audience. His skills and philosophy were, however, highly personal and although he had many followers – Clark and John Walker being two prime examples – he established no disciplined school of thought. In Germany and Central Europe, a new and much more rigorously objective approach to art history was being established, whose priorities were documentary evidence and the reading of works of art for symbolic and contextual, rather than aesthetic, content and meaning. Berenson sensed, correctly, that these scholars, with their ideas which were often in conflict with his, were a new and powerful force and he railed against them. The fact that many of the scholars were both German and Jewish increased his vitriol. Berenson’s relationship with the Germans, individually, culturally and historically, and with the Jews into whose faith and community he had been born, was a complex one. Brought up in the Jewish faith, he had been accepted into the Episcopalian Church in Boston in 1885 and accepted into the Catholic Church in Italy in 1891. As a boy in Lithuania, living near the German border, German was his first language at the insistence of his father, and by the age of twelve he was already steeped in Goethe whom he idolised. In Boston, however, as a young immigrant, he suffered from the scorn of the older German-Jewish immigrants, who regarded themselves as superior to the Jewish Slavs from Lithuania and Latvia who lived alongside them. Berenson determined that he would show that it was he who was superior to them and that one day he would be avenged. A principal object of his spleen was Erwin Panofsky (1892–1968), who had been a professor of art history at the University

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of Hamburg until forced out by the Nazis in 1933, when he emigrated to the usa, where he held posts at New York University, Princeton and Harvard. Berenson was horrified when he learned that Panofsky had been invited to become the Charles Eliot Norton Professor at Harvard for 1947/8. Berenson could see that these new scholars were taking over or establishing academic departments of art history where their methods and ideologies would be taught and examined, and that the migration of these scholars from Central Europe to the United States would mean that they would become dominant there. This mattered greatly to him because of what he hoped for the future of I Tatti. He wished to give I Tatti, complete with its works of art and library to his (and Mary’s) alma mater, Harvard, and he had clear ideas about what sort of an institution he wished it to be. (See Appendix 2.) Clark was not unaware of the merits of the ideas offered by the new generation of art historians, and a lecture by Aby Warburg, in Rome in early 1929, made him conscious of the limitations of Berenson’s approach. However, Clark’s principal relationship with works of art remained visual and aesthetic and in the Berenson tradition. One of his early acts as director of the National Gallery was to start to rehang the collection. This he did by eye and feel and aesthetic response, rather than according to any theory. He wanted the place to look beautiful and visitors to have a memorable aesthetic experience. His newly established scientific department set to work to take large, high-quality, black and white photographs of the major paintings and close-up details. These were rare commodities at that time, and to be in a position to choose which details was a heaven-sent opportunity, the results of which excited both Clark and Berenson. The latter was greedy for as many as he could get hold of for his photographic archive, which was an essential tool in his work of attribution. Clark, however, saw their potential in a different way. ‘I had always taken pride in our publications department,’ he later wrote, ‘and had encouraged our excellent photographers to take photographs of details, ostensibly for scientific purposes, but actually because they gave me pleasure’. In 1938, he edited 100 Details from Pictures in the National Gallery, a volume of large-scale black-and-white details, selecting them so that two images, placed on facing pages, would have some visual correspondence and would suggest the possibility of a visual conversation. This he elucidated in simply written, but not facile, notes discoursing freely over a wide range of topics and ideas. The book was intended to encourage the lay person and the scholar to look at works of art more closely and with a fresh eye, and because the details ‘have been chosen for their beauty’. Looking back on that book, he said: ‘I wrote in an informal and quasi-conversational style that I was later to attempt on television . . . re-reading it, I recognise for the first time the sound of my own voice’ (Clark APW p. 259). The seed that was sown in 100 Details would come to full bloom thirty years later in his television series ‘Civilisation’.

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In 1937, Berenson and Clark each brought to a close one of the chapters in the life and career of the charismatic and duplicitous dealer, Joseph Duveen, who was the king of the international commercial art world. Twenty years earlier, he and Berenson had signed a contract (which they kept secret) whereby Berenson would supply him with expertise and inside information and Duveen would pay him a retainer and fees. Berenson could not have supported his lifestyle at I Tatti, or his work on the Lists and Florentine Drawings, without this income. The arrangement caused Berenson much anguish, although Mary was thrilled both by the man and the income he provided, and was often the one who dealt directly with Duveen. By 1935 Duveen was a dying man (he had cancer and died in 1939, although he kept his illness secret) and in 1937 Berenson terminated their business arrangement. It had been causing trouble for some time and matters finally came to a head over a picture known as the Allendale Adoration. Duveen had bought the painting, which depicts the Adoration of the Shepherds, from Lord Allendale, and was looking for a high price from an American buyer. He hoped that Berenson would give an authoritative opinion confirming it to be by Giorgione. Berenson refused to do so, believing it to be an early work by Titian, which would mean a considerably lower value. Although he came under much pressure to change his mind, he refused and the refusal effectively terminated their arrangement. (The picture now hangs in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, dc, with an attribution to Giorgione. By 1956 Berenson changed his mind, attributing it to Giorgione with the landscape finished by Titian.) When Clark became the Director of the National Gallery in London, Duveen was one of the trustees, as noted earlier. It is true that Duveen was a benefactor of the British Museum and the Tate Gallery, among others, but even so, and even by the much laxer standards of those days, it was an unusual appointment and caused problems. For the reality was that Duveen was in the market for exactly the same pictures that the National’s trustees wished to buy, was privy to useful information which he chose to withhold and gained access to sensitive commercial information, such as what works of art might become available for sale from an owner who wished to avoid publicity, and which works rival dealers were offering to the National. Clark came face to face with Duveen’s conflicted interests early on in his directorship. Seven panels by the Sienese artist Sassetta were put before the trustees at Clark’s suggestion, he having heard that the owner was in financial difficulties and wanted to sell. Anecdotal and charming, they depicted scenes from the life of St Francis. They had obvious popular appeal and would strengthen one of the areas of weakness in the gallery’s collection. Furthermore, they had a Berenson connection in that he owned the principal panel of the altarpiece from the church of San Francesco in San Sepolcro, to which they had all once belonged. Duveen had sold the seven panels to one of his principal clients, Clarence

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Mackay of Long Island. Ostensibly, it was Mackay who wished to sell them at a suggested price of £35,000. However, it then turned out that Mackay could not sell them because he had never paid Duveen, so to all intents and purposes they belonged to Duveen and it was he who was putting them on the market. Furthermore, Mackay’s butler was in Duveen’s pay and had passed on to Duveen the trustees’ correspondence with Mackay. In the end the trustees purchased the panels for £42,000 ‘through the good services of Lord Duveen’, according to the press release. It was an uneasy situation, especially when it turned out that Duveen had carried out extensive and not subtle restoration work on the panels. Calouste Gulbenkian had assembled in Paris one of the finest collections in Europe. It included paintings, French decorative art, ancient Greek coins and Islamic and Egyptian artefacts.Taking a liking to Clark, Gulbenkian lent thirty of his pictures to the National Gallery in 1936 and, liking even more the way Clark displayed them, he suggested that he would be willing to give his entire collection to the National Gallery, with an endowment of his revenues from Iraqi oil, if it could be housed in a separate annexe. However, Gulbenkian told Clark that he would not make his bequest if Duveen remained a trustee. In 1936, Duveen’s term of office was due to expire but he was eligible for re-appointment. He had supporters among his fellow trustees but the chairman, Samuel Courtauld, was opposed. Consequently it fell to Clark to arrange for Duveen’s removal from the board of trustees, a task which he undertook in 1937 (as noted, the year when Berenson terminated his contract).To bring the matter to a conclusion, at Clark’s initiative the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, was asked to intervene, and Duveen’s fate was sealed. Clark never saw Duveen again. Several trustees were outraged to the point of refusing to speak to Clark. In the end, Gulbenkian’s proposed bequest never came to fruition. At the outbreak of war he was deemed by the British government to be, technically, an ‘enemy alien’ and in 1945 Clark’s successor as director was opposed to largesse from rich capitalists. The 1930s presented Berenson with two particular personal problems: the deterioration of his finances and Mary’s declining health. His recently negotiated new contract with Duveen nominally gave him sufficient income to continue to run I Tatti and maintain his lifestyle but payments were often delayed.The turmoil on the world’s financial markets affected his investments and the income he derived from them. Harvard constantly demurred about making a commitment to taking on I Tatti because they considered.that Berenson’s endowment, with less than £1 million in securities, would be insufficient to maintain the property, the library and the art collection. For his part, Berenson always wondered how committed they would be to his vision for I Tatti. All these matters weighed considerably on his mind but his heaviest emotional burden to carry was the physical and mental state of Mary. She had played many roles in his life: mistress, professional colleague, wife, critic, scold, business manager, châtelaine, occasional

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enemy and, finally, after the arrival of Nicky Mariano, ‘wife emeritus’, as his biographer Ernest Samuels aptly put it (Samuels ML p. 431). In all these roles she was, however, always a much needed companion. She had nearly died at Christmas 1931 and from then on the state of her health was a roller-coaster ride, a succession of bouts of seeming good health followed by genuine physical pain and depressive hypochondria. In July 1935, she spent four months in a hospital in Vienna and contemplated suicide, relaying details of her bodily and mental state by letter to Berenson. Contemplating his seventh decade, and conscious of the loss of close friends, Berenson observed that ‘one should prepare oneself with young friends for one’s old age, and transfer the enjoyment from oneself to them’ (Morra p. 4). He was as good as his word, for he added many young friends to his entourage, Clark, Morra and Walker being among the most prominent, and to each he transferred much. One of the grievous losses for him was the death in 1937 of Edith Wharton, who had been his best friend outside the walls of the I Tatti family. Clark also had his worries, although not of a financial kind. He already had an income of £2,000 p.a. from the family cotton business, and when his father died in 1932 he was left the income from a trust fund of £100,000 (say £20 million equivalent in today’s terms), and the prospect of the residue of a further £400,000 when his mother died. He could therefore afford the lifestyle which he and Jane conducted but, with Jane’s uncertain health and wellbeing, that put heavy demands on their marriage and affected their relationship with their young children, whom they rarely saw. Consequently the close and harmonious family life which Clark might have wished for proved elusive. Over the wider world, the political storm clouds gathered. Hitler pronounced in 1934 that the Third Reich would last for a thousand years. From then on came the actions that led to war in 1939: the occupation of the Rhineland, the annexation of Austria, the invasion of Czechoslovakia, the Munich Agreement, and finally the invasion of Poland. British anxieties were heightened by the Abdication Crisis in 1936. From Italy, Mussolini went to war in Abyssinia and his strident dictatorship put Berenson in an increasingly difficult situation. He was an American citizen and a long-standing resident in a country which he loved but whose current regime he despised. His movements and views were watched and monitored by the authorities and he was careful not to express his anti-fascist views in written correspondence, for letters, especially those to and from abroad, were liable to be read: Morra, when writing to Berenson about European politics, wrote in coded language. In spite of the worsening political situation and the threat of war, both Berenson and Clark were able to travel extensively and with freedom, and between them their journeyings took them from America to Russia, to Germany, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Spain, Greece and around the Mediterranean

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from Turkey to Tunisia. It was on such journeys that both were probably at their easiest and happiest, free from the demands and antagonisms of day-to-day routine and able to whet their appetites for curiosity about new experiences, new sights, and to share the pleasures of looking.Yet, like many others, they both must have wondered how long these freedoms would last and they must have been conscious that the philosophical, humanist and aesthetic values which they held dear might soon disappear completely.

Chronology

1933 Late Summer

Berenson and Nicky go to Vienna to meet Duveen, then travel in Austria, and to Czechoslovakia to visit President Tomas Masaryk

2 September

Clark announced as next Director of National Gallery as from 1 January 1934

September

Clarks tour England Clarks go to Madrid Berenson’s sister Senda dies

30 October

Harvard votes in favour of the gift of I Tatti on condition that it is sufficiently endowed

Christmas/January

Berenson stays with Edith Wharton at Hyères

1934 June

Mary Berenson in London with Duveen

October

Clarks stay with Edith Wharton near Paris

Christmas

Berenson with Edith Wharton at Hyères

1935 23 March

Barbara Strachey arrives at I Tatti with Mary’s first greatgrandchild, Roger

28 March

Berenson and Nicky Mariano depart for a 6-week tour of the Barbary Coast: Naples, Tripoli, Malta, Syracuse, Messina. Letters sent to Mary result in her book A Vicarious Trip to the Barbary Coast (1938)

July

Clarks visit Edith Wharton in Paris Clark family holiday in Norfolk

133

July/September

Mary in a clinic in Vienna for treatment of tuberculous ulcer Clarks go to Holland, Russia and Germany Clarks go to Paris to see Edith Wharton

October

Berenson, Nicky Mariano and Umberto Morra depart for the Titian exhibition in Venice, joined by John Walker to go to Urbino and Rimini

Christmas

Berenson stays at I Tatti because Edith Wharton is ill

1936 January

University of Chicago Press offers to take on publishing of new edition of the Florentine Drawings

February

Berenson goes to see Edith Wharton at Hyères with Nicky Mariano Berenson’s brother Abie dies

March

Berenson visits Rome with Nicky Mariano

March–April

Clarks visit Edith Wharton at Hyères Clarks go to Vienna

May

Berenson departs with Nicky Mariano on a two-month trip to Yugoslavia

June

Berenson and Nicky Mariano return home via Salzburg and Czechoslovakia, followed by a trip down the Rhine and visit to Rotterdam

September/October Berenson and Nicky Mariano visit London and Paris Clarks go to usa November

Edith Wharton comes to stay at I Tatti John Walker visits I Tatti with his new bride

December

Berenson declines invitation to see Edith Wharton at Hyères because of pressure of work

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1937 February

Clarks visit Calouste Gulbenkian in Paris

May

Berenson and Nicky visit Cyprus and Rhodes. Mary goes to Viareggio

June

Mary goes to Haslemere in England

July

Clarks visit Edith Wharton

August

Edith Wharton dies. Clarks go to Constantinople

October

Berenson elected to the American Academy of Arts

August

Benedict Nicolson arrives at I Tatti Berenson goes to Vienna for medical treatment Berenson terminates his contract with Duveen

1938 February

Berenson receives final payment.from Duveen Clarks visit Calouste Gulbenkian in Paris

April–June

Berenson and Nicky Mariano in Smyrna (Turkey) and Near East

May

Duveen and Co. goes into voluntary liquidation

1939 February

Clarks go to I Tatti

March–April

Berenson and Nicky Mariano in Rome

May

Duveen dies

May–June

Clarks go to New York. Philip Sassoon dies

July

Clark goes to Geneva to see exhibiton of pictures from the Prado, Madrid

July

Berenson in Paris

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[28 Aug ’33 written at the bottom] Shotover Cleve Headington Nr. Oxford Headington 6832

My dear BB, I have just received a letter offering me the directorship of the National Gallery, which I have accepted. It would have been the act of mugwump [sic]1 to refuse. My appointment is a melancholy proof of the lack of serious interest taken in art-history in England, & I do not regard it in any other light – except, perhaps, as a tribute to my conciliatory disposition. My chief duty will be to end a long period of quarrelling. My appointment is only for five years, after which I can retire & lead a reasonable life, having worked the poison out of my system. I shall only be 35 so with God’s help I shall not altogether have lost the power of contemplation & composition. Naturally I am very pleased at my appointment. The work here, though petty, was burdensome, & if I must give up my time to administration I would rather it were the National Gallery. Of course it will stop me writing books – but then they might have been bad books. We are very much enjoying all your articles on drawings, & looking forward to the Dedalo with the article on Verrocchio.2 I don’t believe I ever thanked you for sending me a number of tirages apart,3 which I was delighted to have. How is Mary? We heard rather a bad report of her lately. I wrote to her about her travel book,4 which I much enjoyed. Unfortunately she did not believe my praise to be sincere, & wrote me a letter to that effect, which I did not enjoy.5 She is mistaken. I thought it very well done & most interesting. I have lent it to several friends who have liked it as much as I did. We have had a wonderful summer,6 each day more beautiful than the last. Most of our time has been spent in moving my mother into a new house, and we have not had any official holiday, though no doubt the life of museum director is one long holiday. We are going away at the end of this week, more as a holiday for Jane, who needs a rest from children & servants. We are going for a motor tour in England; & at the end of the month we are going to Madrid

1 2 3 4 5 6

A North American expression meaning someone who chooses to remain aloof, notably independent of party politics. A great chief of the Algonquin tribe was called a ‘mugquomp’. See n. 42. Fr. tirage à part = offprint. See Ch. 4, letter to Mary Berenson of 2 July 1933. Letter missing. August 1933 broke all then records for hot weather and the temperature reached 33.9C (93F).

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for a few days as I can hardly take on my new work without having visited the Prado. Meanwhile the Ashmolean is being eviscerated. I have made a plan for rearrangement & extension which I fear will not be finished before me – rather annoying as I am paying for it.7 You will have heard that we got the Piero di Cosimo Forest Fire – yes, I told Mary.8 I have had it cleaned and the result is really magnificent – it has the colour of a Hieronymous Bosch or Brueghel, & is in really lovely condition. With love to you all from us both, yours ever, K [monogram] 28 Aug ’33

Aug. 31. 1933 Poggio Al Spino Consuma (Prov. di Firenze)

My dear Kenneth, We are all delighted with yr. appointment to the directorship of the N. G. You can do a great deal while occupying it for the institution as well as for yr. own education. One’s education is the important point, & its importance increases with one’s years. And it is not a merely self regarding matter. The better educated one gets the more one educates society. God knows society needs it. The N. G. will be a school in which you can be headmaster and first pupil all at the same time. Nicky9 & I are just leaving for Vienna. I want to look over the drawings & other art treasures before the worst happens there.Then we shall pay visits & end up perhaps with a run down to Spoleto. I want to see how much I shall have to do there in connection with my next big undertaking. Dedalo has died & not en beauté.10 My Verrocchio article nearly got buried with it. Only today have I got back the mss & the photo’s are still out. Without these I cannot as much as offer the article to another mag. I may send it to

7 8 9 10

See Ch. 4 n. 53. See Ch. 4, letter to Mary Berenson of 2 July 1933. Nicky Mariano The art journal Dedalo was published by Ugo Ojetti between 1920 and 1933.

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the Bolletino11 but the new director general of the Fine Arts thinks of nothing but economy & the existence of the Bolletino as more than a noticeboard is doubtful. You know they have reintroduced payment to museums etc. So as usual during the last 45 years I sent in the request for free entrance. After two months I got the answer that it could not be granted as I came in under no category to whom this privilege was extended. Here too we have had a most beautiful summer. Mary on the whole has been gaining since she came up here, & her spirits are ever so much better.The certain success of her book and other books she is preparing have given her a new zest for life. Nicky has been with all three Anreps at Sorrento12 for four weeks. Again my heartfelt congratulations, & every good wish. Affectionate greetings to both of you. Yours B.B.

9.10.33 Shotover Cleve Headington Nr. Oxford Headington 6832

My dear BB, I have been waiting for a lucid interval in which to write an adequate answer to your exceedingly kind & wise letter. But since it came I have had, as you can imagine, a deluge of letters – as kind but less wise; & we have been away from home. I do appreciate all that you say, and will try to make the N. G. a school, & to profit by my opportunities to learn. The trouble, I foresee, is that the trustees are all longing to spend money, & will much dislike it if I try to deprive them of their legitimate excitement. If they can be persuaded to spend it on framing & decoration all will be well, but heaven preserve me from flashy acquisitions.

11

12

An Italian, semi-official monthly art journal, first published in 1907, with information on the national artistic patrimony, especially concerning acquisitions, restorations and rediscoveries. The magazine’s editor is the Direttore Generale dell’Amministrazione di Antichità e Belle Arti. Alda, Bertie and Cecil von Anrep.The Ruffino family, who were introduced to Berenson by Umberto Morra and were a significant part of the anti-fascist underground, owned a house called La Rufola at Sorrento. Members of the I Tatti household were frequent visitors. See Appendix 1.

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Our holiday was in two parts – of which only the first was holiday & the second hard work. The first was a motor tour in England, in the course of which we saw the most wonderful scenery & architecture & some fine pictures. Amongst other things I made a discovery – quite unimportant, but may interest you for historical reasons. You remember the list of early pictures belonging to Dennistoun of Dennistoun & published at the beginning of Hutton’s edition of the Dukes of Urbino.13 I have often wondered what became of them, so I was delighted to find some parts of old Dennistoun’s collection in a back bedroom of the Bishop of Durham’s Castle at Bishop Auckland. We had been taken in to see the view. All Dennistoun’s collection of miniatures – mostly Sienese trecento – was there, stuck into old mirror frames with drawing pins. The Bishop’s wife, who was Dennistoun’s great niece, – was prepared to give them away, but finally I bought them from her, (for about twice their value, as I now find), & now possess a really amusing monument in the history of early collecting. They were all (I suppose there are about 60) bought in Italy in the ’40s, & Dennistoun has left his notes of how he got them – mostly from Sacristans, I fear. I shall have one or two of the best photographed. But when you are in England again you must study the originals with the help of Dennistoun’s notes. They will amuse you.14 After our tour in England we went to Madrid, & did a week’s intensive work in the Prado. I will spare you my reflections on the Prado, except to say that I think Titian’s St Margaret almost the most beautiful picture in the world.15 I will also refrain from saying anything about Toledo and El Greco. We returned home rather exhausted after our orgy, & immediately sank beneath a wave of domesticity – Jane with a bad cold trying to look after the twins & so forth. We are consoled by the fortunate purchase of two small Renoirs,16 which would

13

14

15 16

The Dennistouns are a Scottish family of Norman descent whose surname derives from the ancient barony of Danzielstoun, in Renfrewshire.The head of the family is styled Dennistoun of Dennistoun. James Dennistoun of Dennistoun (1803–1855), an antiquarian of Jacobite sympathies, practised as an advocate. His book of 1851, Memoirs of the Dukes of Urbino: Illustrating the Arms, Arts and Literature of Italy from 1440–1630, was inspired by his meeting the German Nazarene artists in Rome. It was a pioneering and scholarly book which was influential in promoting an interest in early Italian art (pre-Raphael) in Britain. A new edition edited by E. Hutton was published in 1908. Dennistoun’s collection of early Italian art was sold at Christie’s, London, in 1855. Hutton’s book includes a reprint of the Christie’s catalogue, complete with the prices achieved at the sale. Those miniatures still in Clark’s possession at his death were in the Clark sale at Sotheby’s, London, on 3 July 1984. The catalogue contains comprehensive notes about the origins of the Dennistoun Collection and individual items. Titian’s life-size St Margaret and the Dragon is a late work, c. 1559, notable for its brushwork and handling of light and colour. Pierre-Auguste Renoir, La Baigneuse Blonde (now Agnelli Collection, Italy), and Femme en Blouse Blanche, 1907 (now Nahmad Collection, Switzerland).

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make Mary sick, but seem to me most exquisitely lovely. The Ashmolean is all upside down but will emerge better and brighter just before I have to leave it. I must stop. Please give our love to Mary & Nicky. Ever your affectionate Kenneth. I have been making friends with a most devoted admirer of yours, Paul of Jugo Slavia.17 When I told him I was writing he sent you all kinds of messages.

Sainte-Claire Le Chateau Hyeres (Var) Tel: 2-29 Jan. 16. 1934

Dear Jane, I am sorry to hear that yr. eldest has been so alarmingly ill. Here we all hope that he is now out of danger.18 We shall be grateful if you send a p.c. to reassure us. Mary will be equally eager for better news. She is with her cousin’s Cary Thomas19 at Roquebrunne but expects to join us here Saturday. We shall then stay here another week before returning to I Tatti. Mary writes that she is feeling well, & can lead an almost normal life. Would it were so! I wonder how Kenneth is inserting himself into his new charge, how he is filling it with his own personality & whether it is still softly & cosily upholstered, or whether already showing the points of the Nuremberg Virgin.20 Not that I

17 18

19 20

Prince Paul of Yugoslavia After the arrival of the twins, Alan became ill. He complained of a bad chest and high temperature but the doctors never diagnosed the cause. In Alan Clark: The Biography, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2009, Ion Trewin suggests that the sympotms were precipitated by the arrival of Colin and Colette and their claims on his parents’ affection. Martha Carey Thomas An instrument of medieval torture. The prototype originated in Nuremberg. It was a wooden container somewhat like a coffin, which stood vertically and was surmounted by a carved head of a young woman. Inside were spikes that pierced different parts of the body but never damaged vital organs, in order to keep the victim alive.The device was so solid that no shriek could be heard from outside unless its doors were opened. The doors opened from the front and back so that when they were shut back the spikes penetrated the same parts of the body and into the same wounds as before, thus inflicting excruciating pain.

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hope, altho’ one can scarcely expect roses, roses all the way & never a stab at all.21 If only Kenneth had the leisure to keep a detailed diary! I wonder whether Mary wrote to thank you for ‘Jack Robinson’.22 I read it with interest. The picaresque narratives amused & delighted me, reflective discourses made me wonder. They seem to be of such a very young man, & yet I am told he is no longer, the author I mean, a mere youth. When we were here together Kenneth sort of promised to make for me a selection of Yates’ [sic] best poems. I understand that the verses of this Yates have appeared at last in one volume.23 So Kenneth might, at his convenience mark his favourites in this book, & send it to me. I should try to follow him in his admiration. Keep well, reserves of energy for future use, & let us hear very soon about Allan [sic]. Ever yrs. B.B.

Burlington Hotel24 w.1. Thursday 18th [January 1934]

Dear BB, We are both very touched by your kind letter about Alan. I wish I could tell you he was better but alas his temperature is slowly mounting each week and after more consultations with the doctors K and I feel they are not really quite sure what is the matter themselves. All the ordinary tests and the Xrays we are told are negative apparently an obscure fever in a child is diagnosed as the

21

22

23 24

‘It was roses, roses, all the way,/ With myrtle mixed in my path like mad’ are the opening lines of Robert Browning’s poem ‘The Patriot, An Old Story’. Dorothy Parker wrote in ‘Thought for a Sunshiny Morning’: ‘It costs me never a stab or squirm/ to tread by chance upon a worm/ ‘Aha, my little dear,’ I say,/‘Your clan will pay me back one day.’ Jack Robinson: A Picaresque Novel, 1933, was the first published work of Gerald Brenan (writing as George Beaton). Edward FitzGerald ‘Gerald’ Brenan (1894–1987) was a British writer.who spent much of his life in Spain. Aged 18, and to spite his father who wanted him to train at Sandhurst military academy, he set off with an older friend, the occasional photographer and eccentric, John Hope-Johnstone, to walk to China. Between August 1912 and January 1913 they walked 1560 miles, reaching Bosnia before lack of money made them turn back. W. B.Yeats, The Winding Stair, and Other Poems, London: Macmillan, 1933. (The Collected Poems of W. B.Yeats was published by Macmillan in 1935.) Until they were settled in Portland Place, Jane and the children remained in Oxford and Clark stayed in hotels in London.

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mediastinal glands. However they are to try a new medicine next week, and after they have observed its effect they will allow us to take him home from Ascot in an ambulance and treat him there. There doesn’t seem much hope of the fever ending quickly. I will write to Nicky next week as soon as we have further news and we are most grateful for your sympathy. Please thank Edith25 too with all our heart and give her our news. I’ll write her later. You couldn’t have set us a more delightful task than to send you a marked Yeats and we have already got your copy and shall start this evening. We will hope to have it at I Tatti in time to greet your return. Kenneth is enjoying himself hugely! If it weren’t for poor Alan, he says he wouldn’t have a care – however I expect they will come. So far the Trustees, the Treasury and the Office of Works are lying down with the lamb – pour mieux sauter Je suppose. But it really is great fun and he much looks forward to your next visit so that he can share some of the jokes with you. The rival rackets in London have been in great form, but that sort of gossip is too long for a letter. We have just found a very pleasant house in Regents Park No 1 Cumberland Place which I think we shall probably buy and move into in a few months time, in the meantime we are very well off here. Charles Parker26 seems very happy at the Ashmolean. I think Oxford were very lucky to get him. Jack Brennan [sic] who wrote Jack Robinson, is now about 35 or even less and as you know is a great friend of Hope-Johnstones and shares a house with him in Spain.27 The book was written some time ago and over a period of seven years. We enjoyed the book and hoped you would too. Kenneth feels it is really two books which are never connected – the picaresque part and the symbolist last half so very influenced by de Quincy. It is marvellous that Mary is so much better. I do hope she will continue this. You have had such terrible worries with her. Much love to you all from us both Yours affectionately Jane Clark

25 26 27

Edith Wharton Karl Parker See n. 22.

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I Tatti Settignano Florence Febr. 2. 1934

Dear K In the last Jahrb. Kunsthistr. Samml. Wein28 a certain Lauts (not Laut as one would think) says that Antonello’s Crucifixion in the N.G. is dated 1475 & not 1477.29 Kindly tell me whether he is right. Yrs B.B.

[Typewritten letter on National Gallery headed paper] National Gallery Trafalgar Square 5th February, 1934. Bernhard30 Berenson, Esq., I Tatti, Settignano, Florence.

Dear B.B., I was delighted to get your postcard with its official question, which gives me the excuse of sending you a typewritten letter, because I have to write so much in the way of lectures and articles at the moment that I really cannot face the thought of sitting down to a long eigenhändig,31 holograph.32 As to your question, we all went up to look at the Antonello and there can be no shadow of doubt that the date is 1475, not 1477. The top of the 5 has been cut in two by a worm-hole and a crack, it is clearly visible and its bottom could never have been a 7 as it is too low down in relation to the preceding 7.

28 29 30

31 32

Jahrbuch des Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen in Wien. Antonello da Messina, Christ Crucified, 1475, oil on panel, signed and dated, acquired by the National Gallery in 1884 (NG 1166). Berenson was named ‘Bernhard’ by his parents. He changed the spelling of his name to ‘Bernard’ when the.usa entered the First World War in 1917. Nonetheless, his The Italian Painters of the Renaissance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930) and his The Italian Pictures of the Renaissance: A list of the Principal Artists and their Works, with an Index of Places (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932) were published with the name ‘Bernhard’ (the first of 4 volumes of which had been published in 1894); whereas his Three Essays in Method (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1927) was published with the name ‘Bernard’. German and Dutch, meaning ‘with one’s own hand’. A manuscript handwritten by the person named as its author.

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I am enjoying myself immensely here. The spikes which you so rightly anticipate are hardly perceptible as yet, though I very much appreciate a sentence in a letter you wrote to Witt,33 indiscretely [sic] repeated to me by him, about L. of F.34 forcing me to walk the plank. I am glad you understand the position so well and can only tell you that I will not be caught like that again, though no doubt I shall be forced into other equally uncomfortable positions. I have had a small share of difficulties already, especially over the question of an art laboratory, the rival picture cleaning rackets all bringing their forces to bear on me. But as long as I have the support and goodwill of the Trustees I think it will be possible to deal with the crooks. No one can tell how long that will last, but you can see for yourself that they are a much more amenable body than they have been at any time in the past. As far as I can see, I am extremely lucky in my Staff who have shown great generosity in not resenting my intrusion. At present there is lots to do which we can all agree on and I believe that this state of affairs will last for a few years.The problem will then be how to keep the Trustees amused without letting them make exciting purchases; because it is obvious that the fewer purchases we make the better. So in the intervals of being a manager of a large department store I shall have to be a professional entertainer to the landed and official classes. I cannot honestly say that I dislike either occupation and there is a great deal to be learned incidentally, more I suppose than one is aware of, by constant contact with such wonderful pictures. We have got Alan home and I think that he is really much better, though no credit is due to any doctor as they have not yet found out what is, or was, wrong with him. Jane and the twins are flourishing. I am so glad to hear such a good account of Mary. With love to you all, Yours ever, K.

33 34

Robert Witt Arthur Lee

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I Tatti Settignano Florence Febr. 8. 1934

Dear Kenneth, Yr. s of the the 5th is too delightful not to be answered at once even tho’ the reading of my script may be a burthen. In the first place take my thanks for the date of the Antonello Crucifixion. Then let me express the satisfaction of all of us that Alan is better, and that the rest of you are flourishing. The contents of the rest of yr. letter pleased me more than a little & if you can manage to keep control, I shall be happy. At yr. leisure look over Yates’ [sic] complete poems & mark those you think I should try to understand. We are having our halcyonic February weather. One can scarcely bear to remain indoors. If Mary were well, I should confine my worries to the removing of the heaps of rubbish that the Popps,35 & [illegible] have piled up over Michelangelo to which Frey36 has contributed not a little, & Tolnai37 is busily barbwiring & spiking. Why do the toughest problems attract the softest fools, or the most crashing sledge-hammers! Don’t hesitate to send type-written letters. I have no dandy prejudices against them.

Affectionate greetings to you all Yrs B.B.

I Tatti Settignano Florence Febr. 17, 1934

Dear Kenneth, Thanks for sending me the lecture on architectural backgrounds in Ren. Pict.38 I have read it with real pleasure. It is charming, well phrased, and suggestive. How

35 36 37 38

See Ch. 4 n. 13. Her Die Medici-kapelle Michelangelos was published in 1922. Karl Frey Charles de Tolnay The lectures were published in The Journal of the Royal Institute of British Architects, 1934.

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many problems are raised that would lead to discussion almost endless. And that is, its charm apart, the greatest value of yr. lecture. So much of the work the rest of us do is so extinguishing that we ourselves were perhaps better extinguished. It is wonderful out here just now. If only Mary’s health did not worry me, & the Proto Nazis, whether or not possessed of Aryan grand-mothers, had left Michelangelo alone in the last 25 years! I hope Alan is better & better. Affectionate greetings to you both. Yrs, B.B.

Burlington Hotel Cork Street, w.1. 27 February 1934

Dear BB, Thank you very much for your kind letter. I would never have dared to send you a copy of my lecture, but Jane did so before I could stop her. I was horrified to think of your reading anything so full of the approximations and ill-established generalities, but I hope you understand that it was written in great haste for an unlearned audience. I am very glad that you think the subject has possibilities, because it is the sort of thing which I feel I could do at the National Gallery. My work there really takes every moment of time and atom of energy all day, so that I can’t set down to a heavy task in the evenings. Things continue to go quite smoothly. Courtauld has presented us with his Manet, Un bar aux Folies Bergeres, and Cézanne’s La Montagne Sainte-Victoire, and I have managed to get back the Renoir from the Tate39 so that we have made a slightly more reputable French room. Eventually I should like to make a whole room of 19th century French painting, but our 18th century is too weak to stand alone. Before long I hope to send you some of our new photographs and details which I think will amuse you.We have got some splendid heads of the Pollaiuolo St. Sebastian40 and the big Paul Veroneses.41

39

40 41

Samuel Courtauld bought Manet’s Bar at the Folies Bergères and Renoir’s La Loge in 1926 for £22,600 each (not including commission). All three pictures were given to the Courtauld Institute in 1934. Pollaiuolo, The Martyrdom of St Sebastian 1475 (NG 292). Paolo Veronese, The Family of Darius before Alexander, 1565–7 (NG 294); Veronese, Adoration of the Kings, 1573 (NG 268).

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It suddenly strikes me that I have never thanked you for sending your articles on Verrocchio and Leonardo42 which as you can imagine, I read with the greatest interest. I am entirely persuaded by your Verrocchio and your Leonardos and the new Ghirlandajo attributions seem to me very convincing. But it is rather difficult to believe that such an ass as Credi was ever as accomplished as you make him. Even the earliest datable Credis always seem very poor. I have almost been forced to believe that Verrocchio drew in two styles, a broad and a fine manner, and that the Dresden Silver point43 and the V. and A. design for monument44 are really Verrocchio in his fine manner. How I wish I could see you talk over other puzzles in the article. But I cannot pretend that there is any hope of coming to Florence this spring. I am sorry to say that Alan is very little better. He seemed to improve for a little, but he was never without fever and now he has developed another bad cold which has raised the temperature again. Otherwise we are all well. How disappointing that Mary should have had such a relapse after her wonderful return to health. Love to you all Ever yours affectionately K.

I Tatti Settignano Florence March 18. 1934

Dear Kenneth, We all were distressed – all includes Morra – to hear that Alan was not as well as you could wish him to be. Poor little chap we are sorry for him, & sympathise with you. It must furnish a constant ground swell of worry. I hope you will soon if not immediately be able to give us more comforting news. I am interested in yr. suggestion that Verrocchio may have done two manners of drawing a fine & a broad. I wish you could work it out. It might yield startling results.

42 43 44

Bernard Berenson, ‘Verrocchio e Leonardo’ and ‘Leonardo e Credi’, Bollettino d’arte (November 1933), pp. 193–214; (December 1933), pp. 241–64. The Young Madonna (now attributed to Lorenzo di Credi, c. 1459–1537), Kupferstich-Kabinett der Staatlichen Kunstsammlungen, Dresden. Verrocchio, Design for a Monument, 1470s,Victoria and Albert Museum, London (no. 2314).

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Roger Fry45 has just been here, most enthusiastic about yr. way of running the N. G. I look forward to seeing with my own eyes, perhaps in the autumn. That will give you time to make a defining start. Do send detailed photos, Pollaiuolo, Veronese, you make my mouth water. I wish I could have details of the Sebastiano Resurrection of Lazarus.46 I have Braun,47 Hanfstaengl48 & Anderson.49 The part on our right is blurred in all of them. Could it be managed? To be of use, I should have them before two months, nay earlier. Love fr. all of us to both of you Affectionately B.B.

[Typewritten letter] Burlington Hotel, Cork Street, W.1 23rd March 1934

My dear BB, Thank you very much for your letter, and your kind enquiries for Alan. After his second attack had abated we sent him down to Brighton, and I really believe that he is getting better at last. His temperature has been normal for the last week, and he has been out and about on the beach. We are no nearer to knowing what has been the matter with him however, and we have been disappointed so often that I do not like to crow too much just yet. At all events he is very happy playing

45 46

47

48

49

Roger Fry Sebastiano del Piombo, Raising of Lazarus, c. 1517–19, is the second-largest picture in the National Gallery, measuring nearly 4 x 3 metres. Acquired in the original purchase from the Russian-born John Julius Angerstein (1732–1823) who established himself in business in London. He accumulated an especially fine collection of pictures and after his death 38 of these were bought by the government to form the nucleus of the collection of the newly founded National Gallery in London. The Sebastiano has the distinction of bearing the inventory number NG 1. Jean Adolphe Braun (1812–1877) was a French textile designer who, in 1853, took up photography. As well as making 300 flower studies as an aid to artists and designers, he became a major supplier of reproductions of paintings. Franz Hanfstaengl, Catalogue of Reproductions of Works of Old Masters: Carbon Prints, Silver Prints, Pigment Prints, Photogravures, Facsimiles, London: F. Hanfstaengl, 1907.The German firm of Hanfstaengl published what were considered the finest available black and white carbon prints of paintings. James Anderson (1813–1877) was a British photographer working mainly in Rome. His son Domenico Anderson (1854–1938) took over the business after his father’s death; at Domenico’s death the archive was bought by Fratelli Alinari in Florence.

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with the penny-in-the-slot machines with the Balniels50 two little boys who are just about his age. I am sending you in a separate package a few of our detailed photographs. I dare not send you more as I am not quite sure what you have already. If you have had any of these please send them back as I should like to have them for myself. The most interesting are the series from the Pollaijuolo St. Sebastian,51 which I am sure will delight you if you have not had them already. I am afraid you may have seen the detail of the early Botticelli52 which was done some time ago, but you cannot have seen the detail in the Paul Veronese as I only did it last week, when I made it change places with the Sebastiano ‘Raising of Lazarus’. Most unfortunately I did not have a detailed photograph taken of the Sebastiano, because I thought that our print, which I have included with the others, was so clear that no-one would ever need a detail. It would be a terrible job to take one now, as the picture has not got a removable glass and it needs a portable crane to shift it. The next time it is out of its frame for cleaning the glass, I will have those details taken. By that time I am afraid you will have finished your work on Sebastiano. The detail of the Bronzino53 is one of a series which I have taken to show the character of different crackleures [sic].54 If this sort of thing interests you we have many more of the same kind. We have got the best results in crackleure with stereoscopic photographs looked at through a magnifying stereoscope. The work in the Gallery continues to be most enjoyable. I have not yet made any purchases and as far as I can see am not likely to do so, though there is one which I should like to make, the Chalandon Sassettas.55 Duveen tells me that

50 51 52 53 54 55

David Balniel The Martyrdom of St Sebastian, mid-1470s, ascribed to Antonio and Piero del Pollaiuolo, purchased by the National Gallery in 1857 (NG 292). Probably Botticelli’s Virgin and Child with two Angels, a studio work of c. 1480 (NG 275). Bronzino, Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time, c. 1545, now An Allegory with Venus and Cupid (NG 651). Craquelure is the fine pattern of minute ‘cracking’ formed on the surface of ageing paintwork. The ‘Chalandon Sassettas’ had a special interest for the Berensons. Shortly after they were married and had decided to live at I Tatti, they found, in an antique shop in Florence, three unidentified panels, which they later established as Sassetta’s St Francis in Glory, Blessed Ranieri and St John the Baptist. ‘That adorable Sienese Sassetta’ (Mary Berenson’s words; Samuels MC p. 348) being then un-rediscovered as an artistic personality, and the dealer being unaware of what he had got, Mary was able to haggle the price down to £80. The Berensons re-established Sassetta’s place in the art historical canon, and the three panels became one of the treasured possessions in the I Tatti collection (and still are). The panels came from an altarpiece which had been created for the Franciscans in Borgo San Selpolcro, which also included eight small panels depicting incidents in the life of St Francis. Six of these had, by 1903, come into the possession of a M. Chalandon in Paris; the seventh was separately owned and the eighth had come into the possession of the Comte de Saint Ferréol in Isère (it is now in Chantilly). Mary Berenson saw the panels in 1903 and, as a result of her report and photographs, Berenson (who had not seen the panels) wrote a famous article in the Burlington Magazine (September 1903) in which he compared Sassetta’s spirituality to that of Chinese art. The six Chalandon panels were acquired by Joseph Duveen in 1925, who, after he had acquired the seventh from a different source, had them restored. He then ‘sold’ them to the American collector Clarence Mackay who never paid for them (see Introduction).

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Mr. Mackay is prepared to sell these for considerably less than he gave for them, but even so the cost would be enormous, and we could not possibly afford them without Government aid: and that is impossible at present, since the National craze for the Bible has diverted all possible funds to the purchase of the miserable Codex Siniaticus.56 I have little enough time for my own work and my Leonardo catalogue is now nearing publication, & even the proofs of the collotypes are being finished. Incidentally I could send you a complete set of the proofs if you would like to have them, but they are bulky and tiresome things to read, and before the end of the year you should have the book itself. If it would be convenient to you to have the proofs at once, do let me know and the Press will send them; and of course I should be infinitely grateful for any corrections you could make. We are so glad to think that you may be in London in the autumn. If you come in October you will find the big Tuscan room closed for re-decoration, and you will be able to see all the pictures out of their frames and on the ground. The re-arrangement of this room will be the biggest job I have tried, and it will not be completed till November, so I hope you will be able to give me some advice. Jane and sends her love to you all. Ever yours affectionately, K. [monogram]

I Tatti Settignano Florence Apr. 1. 1934

My dear Kenneth, We all were delighted, truly glad, to learn fr. yr. letter of March 23 that Alan is really getting better. I hope you will be able to tell of continued improvement when you write again.

56

In 1933 the Soviet government sold the Codex Siniaticus to the British Museum for £100,000, raised by public subscription. The Codex is written on parchment in an ancient hand and is a copy of the Greek Bible dating from the 4th century. As originally written it contained the whole of both Testaments. The Codex now consists of half the Old Testament and the whole of the New. Most of the surviving Codex had been acquired, not without skulduggery, by Tsar Alexander ii in the mid19th century.

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The photo. of details you speak of sending have not reached me yet. I have none of the details you speak, unless it be of the Botticelli. I had some details done for me several years ago. If I have any of these that you send, I will send them back at once. How can you ask whether craquelures interest me! Was I not the first – certainly did it before Laurie57 – to draw attention to them as a significant calligraphic element in identifying a painter? So please send all you can, & I shall be very grateful. And do have the Sebastiano in mind for the next occasion that you have to remove the glass. It would be wonderful if you could acquire Mackays Sassettas for the N. G. I have a special interest in the matter naturally. It is good of you to offer to send the proofs of yr. Leonardo. I fear I should have no time to look at them now as I am so fearfully busy. Since the first publication of my Flor. Drawings the German-speaking peoples of Central & East Central Europe have turned the subject of Michelangelo into a mishandled privy. I have to hold my nose to approach it, & at first like Goloubev when he entered Ajanta58 I all but fainted. But I am recovering, & I hope to clear the place so well that all but those who love a befouled & bestenched Michelangelo will be able to approach him with unoffended senses. Yes there is a chance of our coming to London in the autumn, particularly if the book is done & I can take mss & photos to printers. Have you seen Al. Huxley’s paper on Nationalism in the ‘Life & Letters’?59 Best wishes & affectionate greetings fr. all of us. How lovely it is here now. Yours B. B.

57 58

59

A. P. Laurie, ‘Crackle and Forgeries of Primitives’, Connoisseur Magazine, no. 81 (1928). The Ajanta Caves are situated in West Central India (Hyderabad) and the rock cut decorations and frescoes inside them date from about the 2nd century bce to about 480 or 650 ce. They are also noted for their stench resulting from centuries of bat droppings. They were rediscovered by chance by British soldiers in the early 19th century. Victor Goloubev published two books about them (in French) in 1927. Aldous Huxley. Life and Letters was a literary magazine edited by Desmond MacCarthy.

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I Tatti Settignano Florence April 10. 1934

Dear Kenneth, Thanks upon thanks for the photo’s of details. I have never seen anything quite so good. I only wish I had as many of every important picture as thanks to you I now have yr. great Pollaiuolo. Do send more & more as you have them made. The photo. of the Sebastiano is far more satisfactory than any I have had hitherto, altho’ I must own all. I wonder whether photos exist of the Pace frescoes by Sebastiano now at Alnwick?60 They represent the Annunciation. I don’t think the Nativity is there. If they exist & I could have them, if only on loan, they would be most convenient just now. And do you know anything about the Mantegna Mad. just purchased by the Boston Mus. of Fine Arts?61 In the reproduction it is hard to accept & as hard to reject. Perhaps it has been too much rubbed, or possibly it is only an old, almost contemporary copy. I can’t make up my mind. With nose closed I dig my way through the learning piled up by the German writing tribes of Central & East Central Europa on the drawings of Michelangelo. The stench is almost as intolerable as what Goloubev encountered at Ajanta where for ten centuries bats piled up their droppings. Surely the learning of one generation is the rubbish that the next has to clear away, and so ad-infinitum. We all hope that Alan is getting better & better and that the rest of you are flourishing. Affectionately B.B.

60

61

At Alnwick Castle in Northumberland, the seat of the Dukes of Northumberland, in a small antechamber, there is part of a fresco by Sebastiano del Piombo (c. 1485–1587) depicting the Visitation of Mary with Elizabeth. It was painted for Santa Maria della Pace in Rome; removed by the French, it was purchased by the French Cardinal Joseph Fesch (1763–1839), a close associate of the family of Napoleon and a celebrated collector. He retired to Rome on Napoleon’s downfall.The fresco was purchased by the 5th Duke from Walter Davenport-Bromley in 1853. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, purchased Virgin and Child in 1933 for $80,000 as by Mantegna, now attributed to a follower of Mantegna.

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[This is a postcard written to Clark at the National Gallery] I Tatti Settignano Florence July 1, 1934

Delighted with yr. talk on ‘What I like in Art’ & yr. approach to Piero.62 That is the way to do it. I congratulate you. Continuez! B.B.

I Tatti Settignano Florence July 6, 1934

Dear Kenneth, My congratulations on the appointment to be surveyor of the King’s pictures. I am doubly glad as I shall feel free to ask you for photos & information about said pictures. To begin at once, do you remember a floating Venus, at once Bronzinesque & Lottesque at Hampton Ct.,63 that we saw together several years ago? A photo would be welcome, & eventually of all others as yet unphoto’d there. Any hope of a photo. of the S. del Piombo fragments at Alnwick? I expect Mary in two or three days, & in about a week we shall be going up to Consuma.64 I hope you all are flourishing.You must be off to the country or sea-side. Wither? I am sure you have no time to read me, so I will write no more now. Affectionate greetings to you all Yours B.B.

62

63 64

The Listener magazine ran a short series of articles, ‘What I like in Art’. On 27 June 1934, Clark wrote about Piero della Francesca’s Nativity in the National Gallery. The other contributors were Eric Maclagan and Clive Bell. Probably Giovanni Cariani’s Venus, c. 1530–5, at Hampton Court (RCIN 402912). See Ch. 3 n. 5.

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National Gallery begun June 10. finished 1465

Dear BB, I had just written you a letter of thanks for your postcard when your congratulations on the Kings pictures arrived, so I must write a new one. Thank you very much for both, & especially for the postcard, of which I am so proud that I sit and look at it in moments of depression. I am so glad you found something to interest you in my approach to the Piero. It was at least an attempt to tell the truth, & to do what was asked of me, which is more than can be said of some others in the series. As for the surveyorship – that is an unmitigated nuisance to me, & nothing more. I have always hated palaces as a tourist & I hate them even more as a servant. The exception is Hampton Court, which is of course really a public gallery, tho’ as badly run as if it were private. However I suppose it is of value to this gallery to have some connection with the Kings pictures, & that this may be more valuable still under Edward viii. Meanwhile you shall have all the photos you require. I shall be delighted at the opportunity of having some of the pictures taken. But alas, I fear I can’t supply you with them free as we do here, as every penny has to be squeezed out of the Privy Purse, which does not recognise the claims of scholarship. You will here [sic] about our house66 from Mary. I am hardly ever in it, but it makes a pleasant impression on me as I pass through it on the way from the front door to my bedroom.We enjoy London. It is a full & interesting life & makes up for the rather dim & colourless years I passed at home before I married. Logan67 is full of the awful misery awaiting us when we are finally dropped by our (according to him) grand friends. We look forward to the period with rapture. Today we decide the fate of the Chalandon Sassettas,68 & I will keep this letter open in order to let you know it. On the whole I should be glad to have them here, though I am inclined to think that the money could be laid out to better advantage. Four days later: it is fatal to interrupt a letter. For four days I haven’t had a free five minutes to finish this one. We have decided to try to buy the Sassettas, & with Duveen’s help we probably shall succeed. He says he can persuade Mr Mackay’s lawyer.

65 66 67 68

Clark must mean July, not June. In 1934 the Clarks took a lease on 30 Portland Place. Fashionably decorated by Jane and Sibyl Colefax, and full of servants, it was suitable for entertaining on a grand scale. Logan Pearsall Smith See n. 55.

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Since beginning this letter I have been to Hampton Court, & have ordered your photograph.The picture is hung in a better light now & looks worse.There are an immense number of pictures tucked away in Hampton Court which I doubt few can have seen since you first went there – chiefly Bassanos, of course, but a few interesting sub Titianesque Venetians. We wonder how you are & what you are writing. Are you still ploughing through the German theories of Michelangelo? I imagine that you will have a good deal of fresh material for the later Florentines, especially Pontormo. It must be lovely at the Consuma. We have had a glorious summer.69 Love from Jane to you & Nicky, yours ever, K.

Poggio al Spino Consuma (Prov. di Firenze) Aug. 9, 1934

Dear Kenneth, Nicky forwarded me a word of yrs to her in wh. you speak about myself & my doubts & troubles in a way that touches me deeply. I assure you yr. sympathy & appreciation mean a great deal to me. As for the Clarendon Press I certainly should not care to bring such an unwilling bride to bed. She may be only standing out for a meaner dowry. I was upset by the tone of Chapman’s letter more than by its content. Meanwhile the work is proceeding & but for the impudent, befouling, bestenching writers fr. darkest Central Europe, it would have already been finished. Logan & Desmond arrived a few days ago, & I need not tell you what good company they are. Even Logan is not neighing & prancing but quite orderly & feeds rather than jams talk. Next week Eric McLagan [sic] comes for a few days. So all would be pleasant if only my poor Mary were not so invalidish and seeming I fear to get worse rather than better. Plans uncertain. If possible I shall come in Oct. but I fear there is little chance.

69

In 1934 there was a fairly warm June and a very warm July. There was a notable heatwave 7–11 July.

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If you take a vac do send thro’ the vol. of Yates’ [sic] complete poems & mark those that are of faith & obligation. Affectionate greetings to you both. Ever devotedly B.B.

I Tatti Settignano Florence Oct. 10, 1934

Dear Kenneth, I am sorry not to be in London just now. I could with yr. help have my belly-full of looking at pictures nose to nose as I now enjoy doing. But Mary’s condition does not allow me to leave her. She is in almost continuous pain, and when she has intervals of comparative peace she wants attention & sympathy. I am a poor hand at either, but I do what I can. The compensation is that I stick to my desk, & every day brings my superfluous task nearer to the end. I want to ask you while the pictures are down to make photo. details of the Sebastiano Resurrection of Lazarus.70 Even yr. photo of the whole leave certain parts dim. It would be desirable to have those parts taken in detail, & all the portr. heads of course. Of these there is one at least to r. & another to l. Also the small groups in the middle distance.Then the big Pollaiuolo. I should be most grateful for photo’s of the medallions in the arch.

What a bad business this assassination at Marseilles! It certainly will change Prince Paul’s status, & I am really anxious for him.71 I wish he were safe in England. If he is there make a point of giving him all my sympathy. I scarcely

70 71

See n. 46. On 9 October 1934 King Alexander of Yugoslavia was assassinated in Marseilles and his cousin Prince Paul assumed the regency until Alexander’s son should come of age in 1941. He pursued a policy of delegating power to the regions in order to tackle the ancient Serb–Croat antipathy. At the start of the war in 1939, Yugoslavia declared neutrality but after the fall of France Paul deemed it expedient to accommodate the Axis powers while at the same time remaining quietly pro-Allies. In 1941 he was removed from power and remained under British house arrest in Kenya. He died in exile in Paris having never returned to Yugoslavia.

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dare to write or even write to Belgrade. Besides nella confusione no word would reach him. Edith has written most appreciatively of both her visits to you. I fear she had too good a time to leave her with any desire to come to us in Nov. as usual. I am so glad that the Leonardo is ready. I look forward to it. Yours B.B.

Pavillon Colombe St Brice-Sous-Foret (S&O) Telephone: St Brice-Sous-Foret, 12 14 Oct. 34

My dear BB, By good luck your letter reached me here, so that I am able to give Edith your news & have the leisure in which to reply. But what sad news it is. I am terribly sorry that Mary has taken such a disastrous turn for the worse. I can imagine all too well what you must all be going through in anxiety & in that horrible feeling of helplessness & insufficiency which overwhelms one at such moments. At all events you mustn’t add to your depression by thinking that your work on the Florentine Drawings is to no purpose. Strictly speaking I suppose I am no longer entitled to represent the opinion of ‘the youngs’; but as the quasi-youngs are concerned I do know how much genuine interest is in your work, & especially in that work. Like most classics you are far more widely & intelligently read than the published work, at present, would show.You will see all this when the book comes out. It is sad that you can’t come to London, although the Gallery will be looking better next year, & after all you can have down any picture with which you want to rub noses. A good deal has been done, but I hope to have much more to show in 18 months.You will have seen Duveen’s gift of a Hogarth illustrated in the Times.72 We have also bought a very fine Hieronymous Bosch,73 which I managed to carry in face of opposition on all sides. Now it is clean and its most bitter assailants have come round, & I think it will have a really great success of estime tho’ I don’t suppose it can be popular in the same way as Hogarth. I think it is safe to say that we have also bought the Chalandon Sassettas. The

72 73

Hogarth’s The Graham Children, 1742 (NG 4756), was presented by Lord Duveen through the nacf and announced in The Times on 8 October 1934. Hieronymus Bosch, Christ Mocked (The Crowning with Thorns; NG 4744).

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steps by which this was achieved have been very elaborate & indirect. However the great thing is that we should have them. Only a small sum now remains to be raised,74 & I think I see my way to it. When they are finally ours I am going to ask you a favour. Do you think you would publish them in the Burlington Magazine? I note that you don’t usually write for the Burlington: & I know that there is probably very little new to say about the Sassettas. But don’t you think there would be a certain dramatic appropriateness in your introducing your own children to the National Gallery. You would not need to write a long article unless you wanted to – just something to accompany good reproductions of the pictures – which I don’t think have ever appeared before, since the photos in your original article were taken before cleaning, & are not distinct in details.Will you think it over & let me know how you feel. You shall have all the details we take. At present I am having great fun with our ‘Cimabue’, which is being most successfully cleaned.75 We have taken some most interesting details of the heads. The medallions in the Pollajuolo have been done already. I thought I had sent them to you. Did you ever get the photograph from Hampton Court. The people there are sometimes very slow. We both feel the loss of Paul of Jugo Slavia very much.We had looked forward to seeing him in Paris this time. He really was one of the most sympathetic of our recent friends, & the perfect amateur. What a tragic position for him. I think he has plenty of determination & infinite public spirit: but I am afraid he is rather die hard, & has inherited some of the prejudices of the Russian aristocrat. Jane & Edith join me in love & sympathy. Let us hope that when Mary has so often taken a sudden turn of the better, she may do so again. Ever yours affectionately K. [monogram]

74 75

The Sassettas (NG 4757–63), were bought with contributions from the nacf, Benjamin Guinness and Lord Bearstead. The Virgin and Child with Six Angels by the Master of the Albertini (Master of the Casole Fresco), c. 1310–15 (?, NG 565), had been acquired in 1857 as by Cimabue. It was cleaned and restored in 1934–5. See also n. 110.

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I Tatti Settignano Florence Oct. 21, 1934

Dear Kenneth, I cannot thank you enough for yr. words of comfort & sympathy. All other worries & vexations disappear in the presence of Mary’s condition. She suffers almost continuously, & again & again she drives me out of her room because she cannot bear to have me hear & see her being tortured. I leave her & go to my study & try to go on with my work. It is a track upon which even the most rusty locomotive can crawl up & down carrying fr. one stop to another. So I can still do something over my task in hand. At no time can I easily switch off fr. what I happen to be doing & do something to order. I am a poor in fact utterly inexperienced writer of occasional or ceremonial things. And in the conditions in which I find myself now I fear it would be impossible to attempt to present in the Burlington the Sassettas you [are] about to acquire. Let me add that no event not touching my own skin could give me greater satisfaction & pleasure than this purchase. And it is not diminished may I add [sic], likely guess that I make as to who is ready to supply the lacking funds. Let me for a moment return to Mary. The doctors are disposed to make light of her case, & to put most of her pains down as ‘cortical.’76 As if that made any difference to the subjective reality of the torture. And doctors are naturally too ready to ascribe to imagination what they cannot account for. Unhappily their inability to find a cause (because being ‘cortical’ it is not in their province) leaves us with a feeling of helpless despondency. The only alleviation is the animal hopefulness that never quite deserts one. While Mary is in this condition I can only make believe that I am at work. And yet my interests and curiosities cannot wholly disappear. Therefore I thank you in advance for the photo’s you promised to send of the Sebastiano Resurrection. I enclose a slip I wrote months ago, which I discovered among my notes.You are right about the Pollaiuolo.You have already sent them. I wonder what is going to happen to the Burlington Mag.77 Will it continue as it has been almost fr. the beginning? Will most of its articles on Italian painting be written by brainless pedants or utter humbugs? Who will own it, & who will control it? I believe you know what I think could be done with good will.

76 77

The outer layer of the grey matter of the brain. Herbert Read took over as Editor in 1933.

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Let me turn back & tell you that I am truly sorry to find so definitely that under present circumstances I cannot do the small favour you ask for. I suppose we can now safely transfer them fr. Mackays to the N.G. for the Ital. transl. of wh. we are already correcting the proofs.78 With affectionate greetings to you Always yrs. B.B.

National Gallery Trafalgar Square 7th November, 1934. Bernhard Berenson, Esq., I Tatti Settignano, Florence.

Dear BB, As soon as I got your last letter I set about photographing the Sebastiano..It was not one of the pictures we had intended moving and it is such an enormous picture that it would take several days hard work to get it out of its frame; it requires a crane to lift the glass and frame. I was therefore forced to photograph it in situ, with the glass. It hangs in rather a dark place and for several days we had real November weather, so that any attempt at photography was impossible. On the first bright day, I had a tower erected and black curtains stretched between two other towers. The lens of the camera poked through a hole in the middle of the black curtains. It was like Cellini’s casting of the Perseus.79 The Signorine who take our photographs enjoyed the necessary feats of equilibrium and altogether you are regarded as a public benefactor. Considering the darkness of the glass, I think the results are quite creditable. As you will see, there are two different scales; the photographs of the figures above Christ’s arm being on a larger scale than the other three. If ever the picture comes out of its frame again, which is not probable during my time here, I shall have it properly photographed in detail, because really these detailed photographs are the only possible way of

78 79

Berenson’s Pitture italiane del rinascimento: Catologo dei principi artisti e delle loro opere con un indice dei luoghi, trans. Emilio Cecchi, Milan: Hoepli, 1936. Cellini’s casting of his bronze Perseus with the Head of Medusa, 1545, which adorns the Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence, was dramatically recounted in his autobiography. The furnace temperature got too high and its lid exploded, causing the roof of the house to catch fire. To lower the temperature, Cellini threw in all his tin plates and bowls. The cast was, in the end, perfect.

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enjoying it. The group of mourning women is really magnificent and worthy of Michelangelo; indeed it seems to foreshadow that indescribably marvellous group in the bottom right-hand corner of his ‘Crucifixion of S. Peter’.80 Talking of Sebastiano, how magnificent is the portrait at Bowood.81 I only saw it recently and immediately longed to have it in the National Gallery. We were dreadfully distressed by your news of Mary. Placci,82 whom I saw a few days ago, gave rather a better account of her and I hope this means some signs of recovery. We have not yet seen Logan, who has been in bed since his return. We are all well & send love Yours ever, K. [monogram]

I Tatti Settignano Florence Nov. 10, 1934

Dear Kenneth, Considering that the glass could not be moved – & I understand the reason only too well – the photos are a triumph. I am truly grateful. I wish only that it had been feasible to make one of the lower r. hand corner – the bit wh. in all photo’s of the entire composition, comes off worst. I share your enthusiasm for the picture. It is perhaps the first where grandeur is deliberately aimed at.You know the beginnings of evil are apt to be very good. Here the sky is a trifle less gloomy. Mary is improving, but so slowly that she cannot believe it yet. And I can hope that she will be well soon to let me return to my job. I dare say you know already from Edith that she is coming here in a

80

81 82

Michaelangelo’s Crucifixion of St Peter, Cappella Paolina, Vatican. Dating to 1546–50, it is the last fresco executed by him. Michelangelo made sketches which were used by Sebastiano for the Raising of Lazarus. Sebastiano, Portrait of a Humanist, c. 1520 (acquired by Samuel Kress in 1955; now in the NGA, Washington). Bowood is the seat of the Marquis and Marchioness of Lansdowne. Carlo Placci

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week. Harries [sic]83 must be back in London, & will be able to tell you about I Tatti & it denizens. Affectionate greetings to you all B.B. Thank the Signorina with my congratulations.

I Tatti Settignano Florence Dec. 17, 1934

Dear Kenneth Could you get me a photo of the late Henry Oppenheimer’s drawing where the Madonna is so close to my (Windsor) 1608 wh. you believe to be by Bugiardini & I as Michelangelo for the Daniel in the Sixtine?84 It would be of great use to me. Oh those Germans, O those Germans! Really they invented Dachau85 long ago & Frey is Goering & Panofsky Goebels.86 I have a sneaking fondness for

83 84

85

86

Bogey Harris Henry Oppenheimer. The Oppenheimer drawing, later owned by Clark (see Ch 2, n. 39), has generated much discussion. It is included in Berenson, The Drawings of the Florentine Painters, 3 vols, University of Chicago Press, 1938, vol. i, pp. 364–5, and vol. ii, no. 1694 (fig. 797) where it is attributed to ‘Andrea di Michelangelo’. See also Paul Joannides, Michelangelo and his Influence: Drawings from Windsor Castle, National Gallery of Washington and London: Lund Humphries, 1996, p. 37, where he attributes it to ‘Unidentified Artist after Michelangelo’. The Oppenheimer/ Clark drawing includes a copy of the head of a young person which is taken from the recto of a drawing at Windsor Castle: Berenson, ibid., no. 1608 (fig. 785), which Berenson attributed to Michelangelo, as did Popham and Wilde, The Italian Drawings of the XV & XVI Centuries, London: Phaidon, 1949, pp. 257–8. In their discussion of the Windsor drawing, Popham and Wilde commented that Clark thought that the verso was possibly the work of Michelangelo’s friend Giuliano Bugiardini (1475–1554) and that Berenson thought it was ‘done by some such as Sogliani’. Joannides, ibid., considered both the recto and verso to be by Michelangelo. Berenson’s reference to ‘Daniel’ is probably a slip: he must mean ‘Joseph’ since in his discussion of 1608 he considered that both heads ‘recall’ that figure in the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Dachau, near Munich, was the Nazis’ first concentration camp. It was opened in March 1933 and was publicly known about.The press release issued at the time of its opening stated that:‘All Communists and – where necessary – Reichsbanner and Social Democratic functionaries who endanger state security are to be concentrated here.’ The Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold was a liberal, proconstitution group formed during the Weimar Republic (the colours of the German flag adopted in 1919 were black, red and gold). Karl Frey and Erwin Panofsky

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Goering as compared with Goebels.87 The only half decent biped in that jungle is Frau Dr. Popp.88 Mary would be better if only she could believe it. I fear ‘the wish to be ill’ is too strong in her. Best wishes for Xmas & Happy New Year Yours B. B.

[Typewritten letter] 30 Portland Place, w.1. Langham 2417 1st January 1935

Dear BB, Please forgive me sending you a type written letter, but I have strained my heart and have got to stay in bed for a few days until it is right again. I will do all I can to get you a photo of the Oppenheimer drawing, but another time if you want a photograph of anything in that collection a quicker and surer way of getting it would be to write to Parker89 who is still more less in charge. I say this to save you, not myself, trouble. As soon as I am better I will send you a few new photographs from the Gallery. We have taken some very beautiful details of the Piero della Francescas.90 When I left just before Christmas I was investigating that tiresome portrait of a lady with an inscription stating that it represents Constanza dei Medici, which you will remember used to be called Credi and then Ghirlandaio. I see you have it in under Ghirlandaio.91 I must say I regard it with the gravest suspicions, as although it purports to be in a pure unvarnished tempera, it is painted in an oil technique, and what is worse the modelling of the face is carried out in the substance which is suppose to be dirty varnish. In short, I think it is a fake; and I find that Ruhemann,92 who as you probably know was turned away from the Kaiser Friedrich and is now doing some of our work for us, had come independently to the same conclusion purely

87 88 89 90 91 92

Joseph Goebbels was the most highly educated of the Nazi hierarchy and Hitler’s Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. Hermann Goering was responsible for the Luftwaffe. See Ch. 4, n. 13. Karl Parker helped Christie’s to catalogue the Oppenheimer drawings. Piero’s Baptism of Christ, 1450s (NG 665), and Nativity, 1475 (NG 908). The Portrait of Constanza Caetani, c. 1480–90, now attributed as Style of Domenico Ghirlandaio (NG 2490). Helmut Ruhemann

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on technical grounds. It also has a very unconvincing x-ray, totally unlike that of the Filippino which was once supposed to be painted on Australian wood.93 I will take some magnified photographs of the crackleyure [sic] for you to see. As you do not feel able to publish the Sassettas, I shall have to do so myself in order to save them from Langton Douglas,94 but my article will be that of a Museum official, and will be undertaken in order that students may have good photographs of them in their clean condition. I think I told you that all being well I shall be going to America in the Autumn.95 I should be grateful for any advice you can give me as to which collections to avoid etc. We are glad to know that Mary shows some signs of improvement, and if it is chiefly her nerves which are at fault, I know from my own Mother that a change may come when least expected. With best wishes for the New Year, Yours ever, K.

I Tatti Settignano Florence Jan. 5, 193496

Dear Kenneth, I am distressed that you have to stay in bed with a strained heart. I will not preach for others abundantly must have told you what it means. What you tell me about the portr. of Constanza de’ Medici97 excited me, & I shall be palpitating with eagerness to know the results. It was I who attributed it to Ghirlandajo & I confirm it never, simply never occurred to me to question its genuineness – No, it is news to me that you mean to go to America in the

93 94

95 96 97

Probably Filippino Lippi, An Angel Adoring, c. 1495? (NG 927). It is a fragment of a larger work and painted on wood. Robert Langton Douglas would have been an obvious choice by the editors of the Burlington Magazine for an article on Sassetta in the absence of any other candidate. Clark wrote a short article, ‘Seven Sassettas for the National Gallery’, Burlington Magazine vol. 66, no. 385 (April 1935), pp. 152–5, 158, praising the paintings rather than their historical significance, and acknowledging Berenson’s 1903 article. Clark had been invited by Yale University to deliver the Ryerson Lectures at the School of Fine Arts, which he did in October and November 1936. The lectures were on Leonardo da Vinci. He must mean 1935. See n. 91.

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autumn. Why do you ask what collections to avoid? Surely if you have the time you should see them all. Needless to tell you that if we can do anything for you we should be delighted. Both Nicky & I are pretty thoroughly used up, & Karin Stephen.98 Nick & I will go to Edith’s on the 8th to remain away about a fortnight. Take good care of yourself. With all our best wishes for 1935. Yours B.B.

20 June ’35 30, Portland Place, w.1. Langham 2417

Dear Mary, I was deeply touched by your letter. It was so good of you to write when the effort cost you so much & when I am such a bad letter writer. I am also most grateful for what you say about the book.99 My friends have written kindly about it, but none of them are in a position to judge, as you are. It was finished three years ago, so I can view it with a certain detachment & there is a good deal I should like to alter in it. We were delighted with your photographs, with its evidence that you all able to find pleasure in life in spite of all you have been through, & still endure, I am afraid, although I hope less acutely. The work here is still of the greatest interest, but I believe it will come to [take] less of my energy & I shall be able to find some time for writing. We have no very exciting new purchases in view: the Sassettas almost exhausted our funds. My time is filled with minor improvements in arrangement, framing etc. & in trying to prepare a good catalogue. Jane & the family are all well.The twins are a great joy to us: it is a misfortune for the human race that children don’t always come in twos & threes.

98 99

Karin Stephen Clark’s Catalogue of the Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci in the Collection of His Majesty the King, at Windsor Castle, 2 vols, Cambridge University Press, had just been published.

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Please forgive me for writing a short letter.You will realise why when I tell you that it has taken me four days & in writing it I have been interrupted 14 times. With love from Jane, Yours ever, Kenneth Clark

I Tatti Settignano Florence June 26, 1935

Dear Jane and Kenneth Thanks for thinking of me on this day.100 It makes me happy that you have, and helps to reconcile me to the fact that no matter how un-grown-up I feel within I now count with the ancients. As a matter of fact, excepting A. Venturi101 I seem to be the oldest in our job. Mary leaves for Vienna in a week, and Nicky and I for Consuma. I think of you both very often and wish I saw you as often Ever affectionately B.B.

Poggio Allo Spino Consuma (Prov. di Firenze) July 14, 1935

Dear Kenneth My congratulations on the review of yr. Leonardo in the last Lit. Sup. Who wrote it? Certainly not Fils. Mutton-Chop.102 It is rather intelligent and mature, as if the writer had pursued an incredibly new method. He seems to have thought first, and thought a good deal, and then written.

100 Berenson’s 70th birthday. 101 Adolfo Venturi 102 Clark’s catalogue of the Leonardo Windsor drawings (see n. 99) was reviewed, as the leading article, in the Times Literary Supplement on Thursday 11 July 1935. The article was anonymous but was, in fact, written by Alan Clutton-Brock (‘Mutton Chop’).

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Why do you not send me yr. Hertz103 lecture. When I wrote in answer to yr. telegram of good wishes on my birthday, I had not yet seen or even heard of the letter to the Times.104 Now I thank you for having signed it, and for all I know for having written it and collected the signatures. It has touched me deeply. Mary is in Vienna Cottage Senatorium, Starnwartengasse 74 Wien xviii. She is undergoing rather distressing and even alarming examinations As for me, if God is good, He will allow me to stay here till end of Sept. You probably are with Edith today. What of yr. summer? Affectionately B.B.

National Gallery 16 July ’35

My dear BB, On the table in front of me is a letter to you begun exactly a month ago, & timed to arrive on your birthday. Between then & now lie heaven knows how many interruptions & annoyances & rather than finish it I am beginning a new one. I am truly sorry that it didn’t reach you at the right time, because I should have liked my congratulations to reach you with this first. Though I’m afraid I have done some things which are unworthy of your teaching, I still remain your pupil, & never forget how much I owe you. Indeed I realise it more than ever now that I know the apathy & pedantry of most of my countryman in all that concerns our shop. Their interest in art scholarship is still confined to pedigrees & pentimenti, & I have the greatest difficulty in persuading the senior assistants

103 The British Academy hosts an annual lecture, ‘Aspects of Art’, established by the Henriette Hertz Trust in 1916. The lecture is ‘on some problem or aspect of the relation of Art in any of its manifestations to human culture; Art including Poetry and Music as well as Sculpture and Painting’. Clark gave the lecture in 1935: ‘On the Painting of English Landscape’. 104 On 26 June 1935 there appeared a letter in The Times as follows: ‘Sir – Bernhard Berenson is 70 on June 26. And it is just over 40 years since there appeared the first of those four closely packed essays on the Venetian, Florentine, Central and North Italian painters which were a new revelation to those of us who were beginning to study and to enjoy the art of the Renaissance; slim predecessors of the two massive volumes on the Drawings of the Florentine Painters of which we are now promised a revised edition. We ask the hospitality of your columns to express on behalf of his English admirers our indebtedness, our gratitude, and our homage. We have the honour to be, Sir, Your obedient servants, C. F. Bell, Laurence Binyon, Kenneth Clark, W. G. Constable, Herbert Cook, Campbell Dodgson, George Hill, A. M. Hind, C. J. Holmes, D. S. MacColl, Eric Maclagan, Eugenie Strong, Robert Witt. June 25.

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here that critical notes will be necessary in a new edition of our catalogue. All of which shows that if I hadn’t been well grounded at i Tatti I might now have been stuck in the morass of country house archaeology which takes the place of criticism & connoisseurship here. Then I have never thanked you properly for your letter about my Leonardo Catalogue. I wish I could have made it into a festschrift & presented it to you on your birthday with a suitable dedication; but I was told that the dedication of a Royal Book to a private person was against the rules, and I had to leave it out altogether. There is one awful mistake in the book – they have reproduced the wrong drawing. This is what Holmes refers to in his (asinine) Burlington review105 – only as he had not read my description of the drawing he thinks that I have mistaken a Luinesque head for a Pollajuolo profile. The mistake is so gross that I shall have to issue an erratum slip.There are a few other minor errors which can also go on the slip. My H. Hertz lecture was a most annoying business. I was asked to do it a year ahead & protested that English landscape was not my subject; however I was told that they wanted a non-specialist lecture. I then found that all their lectures were strictly by specialists, & that I had been asked to write about landscape because they thought that anyone who knew about Art would know about it all. It cost me great pains to write, & inevitably it is no more than a literary exercise – chiefly in the art of evasion. However I will send you a copy as soon as it is printed. We go away for a country holiday on the 19th. We have taken a house – or rather a cottage, – on the north coast of Norfolk. It is lovely country & will be a rest in some ways. But three children & two grandmothers, which are included in the troupe, will make it a rather stiff dose of family life. I am going to try & write six lectures, making a short book, on Leonardo:106 which lectures I promised to give in your country this autumn, but have had to put it off till next. I suppose I shall have to write the book, & then make up the lectures from it, as printed lectures are always a failure. I have only given one lecture (the Hertz) this year, as they are a great waste of energy. By the bye, I don’t know who wrote the Lit. Sup. leader on Leonardo, but I think it must have been Clutton Brock. He is a perfect ass in the flesh (also grubby and querulous) but rather good on paper. I do hope that Mary enjoys Vienna & returns the better of it; and that you recuperate all your forces at the Consuma. Love to you & Nicky from us both, yours ever, K.

105 Charles Holmes’s review appeared in the Burlington Magazine, vol. 67, no. 388 (July 1935), pp. 45–7. 106 See n. 95.

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It strikes me that you may like to know how I found Edith, so I am enclosing a copy of the letter I wrote to her niece Mrs Ferrand107 and, as I can’t add much to it. She is better than I had expected.

K.

Poggio Allo Spino Consuma (Prov. di Firenze) July 27, 1935

My dear Kenneth It did me good to read yr. long letter, in wh. you say such nice things about our relations to one another. Of course it would have delighted me if you had dedicated yr. Leonardo to me, but it pleased me greatly that you thought of doing it, and would have had it been in yr. power. Speaking of this book Nicky has already checked every item with my catalogue, and read yr. preface. She gave me some interesting and even entertaining tidbits. I wish I could get out my Flor. Drawings as you have yr. book. I wish I could reproduce every drawing catalogued. I wish even that I could reproduce the finished works for wh. they were intended. Then and then only would my Flor. Draw. teach the student. As it is the publication may have to appear with no illustrations. In that case it will remain a dead letter except for those who have access to a library as well stocked at least as the Tattiana. And even those happy students will have to lose much time looking up the illustrations in books. Happily my share in the work is progressing. This time I can venture to hope that the manuscript will be ready before the end of the year. How glad I shall be to have it off my shoulders – how glad to turn to studies that in the course of the last 25 years have been growing more and more attractive! All this if I am not interrupted, and the interruption may come, for Mary’s health is pre-occupying me more and more. She is at Vienna and has been put thro’ an examination by the best that Vienna can offer. They declare that she suffers fr. a wide spread tubercular condition. I fear that means there is no chance

107 Beatrix May Jones (1872–1959), who in 1924 married Max Ferrand (a professor of history at Yale), was the daughter of Edith Wharton’s brother Freddy. She had established herself as a notable international landscape gardener – e.g. a commission from Mrs Woodrow Wilson for a new garden at the White House, gardens at Yale and Dumbarton Oaks, gardens at Glyndebourne and Dartington in England.

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of recovery, that at best she will linger on in her present state with less suffering it is to be hoped. If she gets no worse and has her own kith and kin to entertain her, the greatgrandson particularly, I shall remain here till the end of Sept. It is all but perfect for my wants. It feels not Alpine but like good homely country in the summer.The temperature stays almost unchanging at ab’t ’70.The walks are endless. No neighbours. And the Tattiana not an hour away. Nicky leaves me today for Sorrento108 but Morra is here and will be with me till she returns. What you say of Edith sounds alarming. You can’t imagine what it means to hear the main beams of one’s life cracking and threatening to break and disappear in the flood. I should like to see the Chinese show109 and if my mss is ready, and Mary well enough, I may come to London in Dec. or Jan. In that case I should like to find an unluxurious un-Ritzonian but a comfy warm house or lodgings for a month. Write when you have the leisure and inclination. With love to you both B.B.

Poggio Allo Spino Consuma (Prov. di Firenze) July 30. 1935

My dear Kenneth The batch of details is a most welcome surprise. How interesting and delightful! Everyone of them tells me something new about the picture fr. which it is taken, and some show what the smaller photo does not, nor the picture as a whole in the original. A good example is the detail of the Virgin’s head in the Madonna (no. 565) by the Citta di Castello Master.110 It takes on a most lovely Russo-Byzantine tenderness of feeling, that I never perceived in the original painting as a whole. So bless you for these details, and remember that I can never have enough.

108 See n. 12 above. 109 The International Exhibiton of Chinese Art, organised by the Royal Academy, was held at Burlington House in 1935–6. 110 See n. 75 above. Some experts had identified the work as by the Master of Città di Castello but the now accepted view is that it is by Master of the Albertini, an artist whose style is transitional between Duccio and the Master of Città di Castello.

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I am alone here with Morra. We work separately and meet for walks and meals. In the evening he reads aloud Moravia’s last.111 Nicky is at Sorrento. From Mary the news has been better the last two days. I hope you are already in Norfolk, and that it is as delicious there as here. Affectionately B.B.

[In pencil at top ‘1933/34?’. but must be 1935: see Clark’s letter of 16 July 1935] Brancaster, King’s Lynn. Telgrams, Brancaster Station, Hunstanton Parcels, Burnham-Market

Dear BB, I am so glad that the photos were a success. It comes over me that I never told you I was sending them – they were intended as a birthday present. That is why the details of the Virgin & Child by the Citta di Castello master give such a new idea of the picture in that it has just been cleaned. As you will see it is beautifully preserved. Did I tell you that we are cleaning the big Foppa Adoration?112 It is coming out marvellously & will really be a great picture. Some of the heads are almost certainly over painted, & the whole thing was flattened out by layers of toned varnish. I have taken photos of every detail & will send you them all when it is finished. We have had a heavenly time here – only instead of one peaceful companion, there are three screaming children.The weather has been perfect, & it is the kind of country I like. I have worked hard at a difficult job, an introduction to Roger Fry’s unpublished Slade lectures, & have just managed to complete it.113 I am interested to hear that Moravia’s book is out at last, & wonder what it is like – you said nothing about it. Europe becomes more idiotic every day, & the English climate has improved so much that I think you ought to come here often. I imagine that the Chinese exhibition will be well worth seeing. There is

111 Alberto Moravia’s Le Ambizioni sbagliate was published in 1935. 112 Vincenzo Foppa, Adoration of the Kings, c. 1450? (NG 729). 113 In 1933 Fry was offered the post of Slade Professor at Cambridge and began a series of lectures on the nature of art history.They were never completed.The text for the lectures was published in 1939, after his death, as Last Lectures by Roger Fry – Slade Professor of Fine Arts in the University of Cambridge, 1933–1934. Fry died on 9 September 1934 following a fall at his London home. His ashes were placed in the vault of King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, in a casket decorated by Vanessa Bell.

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no hope of our going to Florence this year so these inducements offer our only chance of seeing you.We are going to Holland the end of this month,114 but after that will be in London all through the autumn. Ever yours affectionately, K.

Poggio Allo Spino Consuma (Prov. di Firenze) Aug. 18, 1935

Dear Kenneth Nicky has returned fr. Sorrento.The Braccis are here and Johnnie115 and Trevy,116 so yr. name is frequently called in the course of conversation. It is most beautiful here, and crisp, and radiant. I could stay here half the year at least, as one is so much more integrated in one’s self, and secured fr. intrusion. I have asked the bookseller to send you Moravia’s ‘Ambizioni Sbagliati’. It is a remarkably able bit of craftsmanship but horrible as the minor Elizabethans are horrible. It is good news that you are cleaning the Fra Filippo Epiphany.117 And I look forward to enjoying the photos you promise. I want to come to England to see the Chinese Exhib (altho’ I don’t expect much from it). But apart from fear of the cold and the damp, my movements will depend on Mary’s. I fear she may have to stay on for a long time in Vienna. In that case I should have to go there periodically, and I should be taking in all the cold and fatigue I could stand. Affectionate greetings to you both Yours B.B.

114 115 116 117

The Clarks went to Holland, Russia and Germany in August and September. John Walker Robert Trevelyan The picture that was being cleaned is Foppa’s Adoration; see n. 112 above.

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[Typewritten letter] 30, Portland Place, w.1. Langham 2417 3rd September 1935

My dear BB, You once said that you did not mind a typewritten letter and as, for many reasons, I am rather hard pressed at the moment I hope you will excuse this one. One reason is that last week I had to let my dentist remove an impacted wisdom tooth which was giving me a good deal of pain and poison. It was a painful business and left me rather low for a few days. Another reason is that the day after tomorrow we are off to Russia. I have always wanted to see what is left of the Hermitage Collection and by going now I shall also see all the Iranian treasures. A good many friends are going on the same boat in order to attend the Persian Conference118 and I believe we are being treated to special ballets and opera. Apparently there is a considerable probability of our getting catastrophic stomach aches, but it is worth risking.We shall be there till the 18th, and then fly home via Berlin, where, as a lover of art with a big nose, I am certain to be taken for a Jew and beaten with rubber truncheons. The chief purpose of this letter is to thank you for sending me Moravia’s book, which certainly looks a tough mouthful, only to be undertaken in the best of health and spirits. It was very kind of you to order it for me as Italian books are not easily found over here. I have been reading with immense interest your article on Andrea.119 What an appallingly difficult problem Michelangelo’s drawings present not even equalled I suppose by late Raphael which is at any rate a more restricted [sic]. Incidentally is it true that Steinmann120 died some time ago? I heard it implied by someone I was talking to recently, but this country is

118 In September 1935 the Third International Congress of Persian Art and Archaeology was held in Leningrad and Moscow. The concurrent exhibition consisted of 25,000 items displayed in 84 galleries in the Hermitage. 119 Berenson had published ‘Andrea di Michelangiolo e Antonio Mini’, L’Arte, July 1935. Andrea di Michelangelo was invented by Berenson as the purported author of a number of drawings which he thought were by the same hand but not that of Michelangelo himself. Antonio Mini, however, did exist. Berenson’s theoretical speculation was doubted by some at the time and has subsequently been convincingly shown to be completely misconceived. His article and his methodology were reviewed by Carmen Bambach, ‘Berenson’s Michelangelo, part 1’, Apollo Magazine, 171, no. 574 (1 March 2010), pp. 100–07, and ‘Berenson’s Michelangelo, part 2’, no. 575 (1 April 2010), pp. 48–53 (see also Ch. 2 n. 39). 120 See Ch. 2 n. 64.

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so provincial where our shop is concerned that such an event might take place without one’s ever hearing of it. Love from Jane, Yours ever KC.

[Postcard from Clark to Berenson postmarked Berlin 22.9.35. It is a black and white card showing a ‘Carpaccio/ Grablegung Christi (Ausschnitt)/ Gemäldegalerie Nr 23A/ Photographiekarten der staatlichen museen zu berlin’] Esplanade. 21 Sept. 35

Just arrived from Russia after a marvellous fortnight. The Hermitage is inexhaustible, & though it has lost a few masterpieces, it has gained a great many interesting & beautiful things.You would find the gold treasure fascinating & very imperfectly published.The whole gallery is very well organised – a great contrast to the kfm121 which has lost whatever charm it had in the new arrangement. Yours ever, K. Love from Jane. [in pencil]

Poggio Allo Spino Consuma (Prov. di Firenze) (Written from Settignano) Sept. 25, 1935

Dear Kenneth Thanks for yr. p.c. fr. Berlin. I am impressed by yr. account of the Hermitage, and it makes me think seriously of ways and means of getting there myself. I should have to be assured that I could see what I wanted to see, and that

121 Kaiser Friedrich Museum, now called the Bode Museum. When it opened in 1904, painting and sculpture were presented together equally, which was considered a radical innovation.

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no Whittemore122 or Upham Pope123 stood in the way, as the former did in Constantinople. I should not go for the pictures but for what has been found on ‘Russian’ soil. Next summer ?????? I hear that Berlin has sold its Crivelli St. Catherina. Do you know to whom? And who has got the Hermitage Titians that were exhibited in Venice.124 It was officially announced here that they left the other day for London. Mary writes more hopefully and expects to be back in a fortnight. So Nick and I will spend this time wandering but chiefly in Venice. I envy all that lies before you, dear Kenneth. It would be wonderful if one could look forward as you can to forty or even fifty years of activity, instead of ten. With love to you both Cordially B.B.

Tetworth, Ascot Ascot 677. 30 Jan. ’35125

My dear BB., We have for long been buoyed up with the hopes of seeing you here, but I am beginning to doubt if you will face the horrors of an English winter in order to enjoy the Chinese Exhibition. To tell the truth the winter has been unusually horrible & the Exhibition is not very enjoyable.There is a good show of bronzes, but less easy to see than the one at the Orangerie last year, & there are good ceramics, well shown. But the painting is very disappointing, as neither the best American nor the Japanese collectors have lent. I find it very hard to be sure of my feelings (or lack of feelings) when going round the exhibition. No doubt Chinese art is particularly ill suited to that kind of display, & if I could look at some of the pictures at leisure I should enjoy them far more.

122 In 1928 the Berensons and Nicky Mariano had travelled to Constantinople and the Near East. On the trip Berenson became convinced that they were being denied access to certain monuments and antiquities in Turkey because Thomas Whittemore had instructed the Superintendent of Fine Arts in Constantinople to hinder them. 123 Arthur Upham Pope 124 The largest show of paintings by Titian to date was held in Venice in autumn 1935. Berenson spent three week in the Veneto, getting there by way of Urbino, accompanied by Umberto Morra and John Walker, arriving in Venice on 10 October. 125 He must mean 30 December 1935: see Berenson’s reply of 3 January 1936.

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I was waiting to see you in order to give you details about Russia.You must go there. The journey is long but not uncomfortable, & once arrived the hotels are perfectly bearable. I suppose they are about the same as the best hotel in Turin – or, say, less friendly than the Cavour, but almost as comfortable.The food is better than an English hotel.You might find the odd hours of the meals rather upsetting. As you probably know any insect is immediately put down by the gpu126 (or its equivalent) & we certainly never saw one. One has a private bathroom, quite clean with plenty of hot water & towels. Leningrad is marvellously beautiful & when we were there an ideal climate. The hotel (Astoria) is about 12 minutes walk from the Hermitage so one can go there every day without a guide. I think you will have to allow about 10 days for Leningrad. The Italian pictures in the Hermitage won’t take very long, but the gold treasure, Coptic objects, Greek vases etc. not to mention paintings of other schools make it inexhaustible – almost like the Louvre. Then you will have to see all the surrounding palaces which are about 15 or 20 miles from Leningrad: they make good afternoon expeditions, & you can get very good cars from Intourist. Moscow is really a horrible place with no glimmer of its former romance. I found the Kremlin disappointing as the old buildings are dwarfed by two enormous 19th-century blocks of offices like hydropathies. Most of the 16th century Russian architecture we saw was poor stuff but there are said to be very fine ‘mediaeval’ monasteries about 20 miles from Moscow so one sh’d leave time for expeditions there, too. I suppose a week would do. When we go to Russia again (as we hope to do in 1937) I shall try to come home via Kiev, which must be enchanting. One can get to Nijni Novgorod127 from Leningrad, but it is too long a journey for a day & the hotel is dubious. The frescos are said to be interesting, but if the famous Ikons in the Tretiakov are any guide, they will be disappointing. Russian painting is a real spoof. The only good Ikons were obviously made in the Balkans (Our Lady of Vladimir is a really beautiful ruin & must have been made in Constantinople128).

126 The Soviet Secret Police’s intelligence service. 127 Nizhny Novgorod is the fifth largest city in Russia, known from 1932 to 1990 as Gorky after Maxim Gorky,who was born there. It boasts a good art gallery with many Russian and some Western European works. The 11th-century Cathedral of St Sophia has good early frescoes. 128 Our Lady of Vladimir is one of the most venerated of Russian icons. It depicts the Christ Child snuggling up to his mother’s cheek. Created in the early 12th century in Constantinople, it was a gift to Grand Duke Yury Dolgoruky of Kiev. In 1395, during Tamerlane’s invasion, it was taken to Moscow and was eventually placed in the Cathedral in the Kremlin. Regarded as the holy protectress of Russia, it is credited with saving Russia on numerous occasions. It is alleged that in 1941, as the Germans approached Moscow, Stalin ordered that the icon be placed in an aeroplane and flown round the besieged capital: several days later, the German army started to retreat. Currently, the icon is installed in a church in the grounds of the Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

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Apart from ‘those sites’ there is a good deal of shop. They have discovered some very interesting early Italian pictures which were being used as Ikons. And then there are some important unpublished drawings. People in the museums are charming & helpful, but it seems impossible to have any communications with them – at least I have not had an answer to any of the letters I have written, but then, as you can imagine, I haven’t written very many. There: I have written enough to encourage you to go, but before you actually set out I could give you a good many tips on points of practical detail. Since our return our life has been rather blighted by Jane having a succession of attacks of ’flu. I have seemed immune till yesterday when I suddenly succumbed to a roaring cold. However it has given me the leisure to write this letter. The Gallery still aborts all my time. We have purchased two romantic landscapes – a really glorious Constable129 & a magnificent Rubens.130 They are both masterpieces & I am proud to have landed them – it took some doing. Of course only a fraction of my work at the Gallery is concerned with purchases, but a good deal of time is taken up with arrangements & decoration, & one of the many reasons why I should like you to come to England is to have the fun of showing you what I’ve done. Of course there have been one or two failures, but on the whole I think the place looks much better. My trustees have been most helpful & encouraging – did you notice that Balniel is now one of them. After all the troubles of my predecessors it is marvellous to have a board made up of real friends. I am afraid that this letter is all about myself, but it seemed as if your troubles wouldn’t be a suitable subject for a letter from England.We often think of you & sympathise. Why not come to England in the summer? With best love from us both, Yours ever, K.

129 John Constable, Hadleigh Castle, c. 1828–9, now in Tate Britain. It is a full-size oil sketch for the painting now in the Paul Mellon Collection at the Yale Center for British Art. 130 Peter Paul Rubens, Peasants with Cattle by a Stream in a Woody Landscape (The Watering Place), c. 1615–22 (NG 4815).

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I Tatti Settignano Florence Jan. 3. 1936

My dear Kenneth Yr. long and interesting letter was worth waiting for, and I am most grateful. Only I wish the leisure for composing had not been procured by a bad cold. All you say about Russia is exciting, and I wish I could take yr. advice and go there soon. I should have to stay much longer. In the first place I take in things more and more slowly, and then I get tired so easily. All you say abt Russian art confirms what I know fr. reproductions and what they have told me. It is scarcely for that I should go to Leningrad or Moscow. What does attract me is the stuff fr. pre-historic and Sarmatae131 and down thro’ the period of Migrations, that has been dug up in its ample borders. To see what I already know to exist in the Hermitage alone would take me a month, at least. I should like to have a glimpse of the Kremlin, and strike out as far north as Wladimir132 and as far south as Kiev. Pskoff and Novgorod133 one might do fr. Esthonia or Leningrad. But I am not getting ygr. And if I don’t get there very soon, I may never get there. I am afraid I shall not get to London this winter. As the time approaches I find I cannot face the idea of the cold, the damp, the mirk. And yr. impression of the Chinese show confirms what I hear fr. others. After all Chinese art is not ‘news’ to me. So I shall peg away at the revision of my Flor. Drawings. I am getting on and may have done before March. I am just approaching Leonardo and look forward to reading what you have to say ab’t him in connection with the Windsor Coll. The chapters after Leonardo are ready for print. I should greatly enjoy seeing what you have done at the N.G. and perhaps I shall next summer. Mary is fragile and invalidish I plunge fr. cold to cold. Ma si campa.134

131 In classical antiquity, the Sarmatians (composed of several tribes of Indo-Eurasian origin) were settled in a territory known as Sarmatia, corresponding in modern times to Ukraine and southern Russia. Following the ‘barbarian invasions’ (also known as the Migration Period) beginning in the 4th century ad, the Sarmatae were gradually dispersed and absorbed by the various tribes of Goths, Vandals and Huns. The archaeological evidence found in graves containing armed females suggests that the Sarmatian culture gave rise to the myth of the Amazons. 132 One of the medieval capitals of Russia, 120 miles east of Moscow. 133 Pskov and Novgorod are on the Estonian–Russian border, south of St Petersburg. 134 Italian for ‘One gets by’.

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In Dec. I did not receive the Ill. Lond. News,The Times,The New Statesman, nor even the Burlington. The Jan. Burl. has just arrived, and The Times is coming again but not the others. With love to you both Ever yrs. B.B.

[Typewritten letter] National Gallery Trafalgar Square 25th March, 1936. Bernhard Berenson, Esq, I Tatti, Settignano, Florence.

Dear BB, I am sending you a few details of photographs which we have taken lately: if I have sent any of them before, perhaps you might let me have them back. Those of the ‘Virgin of the Rocks’135 are full-size, and I think they will interest you as showing the technical methods employed and the unequal workmanship. I am sure you will enjoy the details of the Ansidei,136 if you have not already seen them. I wonder if you have ever seen a photograph of the grisaille drawing on the back of the long early Botticelli ‘Adoration of the Magi’, number 592?137 If not, you ought to have it before you send in the final proofs of the Florentine Drawings. You will see in the papers that we have been spending a lot of money here, but none of it on Italian painting. I am very pleased with our purchases, which were only achieved after great struggles.138

135 Leonardo da Vinci, Virgin of the Rocks, c. 1491/2–9 (NG 1093). 136 Raphael, Madonna and Child with the Baptist and St Nicholas of Bari (Ansidei Madonna altarpiece), 1505 (NG 1171). 137 Rough drawings on the reverse of the wood panel are thought to be among Botticelli’s earliest works. 138 After the purchase of the Sasettas in 1934, the National Gallery acquired Bernardo Cavallino, Christ driving the Traders from the Temple, c. 1645–50 (NG 4778); Paolo da San Leocadio, The Virgin and Child with Saints, c. 1495 (NG 4786); Caspar Netscher, Portrait of a Lady, 1683 (NG 4790); Rubens, The Watering Place (NG 4815; see n. 130); Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Madame Moitessier, 1856 (NG 4821); Joachim Patenir (attrib.), St Jerome in a Rocky Landscape, probably 1515–24 (NG 4826), now catalogued as Workshop of Patenir.

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We were glad to hear from Edith that you had a relatively peaceful holiday at Hyères. We are going down there for a few days at Easter, and are then going to Vienna.We are both suffering acute nostalgia for Italy, and Florence in particular; but I do not like to go there until opinion is rather more stable. Yours ever, K. Our love to Mary and Nicky

I Tatti Settignano Florence March 30, 1936

Dear Kenneth Yours of the 25th has only just reached me. Without waiting for the photos that you are sending to arrive, for which my thanks, I hasten to ask you for the photo. that I have never seen of the ‘Grisaille drawing on the back of Botticelli Adoration of the Magi, number 592’. If I received it at once there would be just time to get it in. I wish you and Jane were coming here.We meet so seldom that there is danger of losing touch. And the political situation need not prevent you. ‘They’ are only too eager to have tourists, and I believe English in particular. They have already established a ‘tourist Lira’, and tourist benzina costs almost nothing. None of the people you are likely to see but would receive you with open arms. Ever yrs. B.B.

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I Tatti Settignano Florence March 31, 1936

Dear Kenneth The photos came sooner than I expected. Ever so many thanks. As I have none of them I shall greedily keep all. How much more Leonardo the details of the Virgin of the Rocks – excepting the Virgin herself! Let me congratulate you on the Ingres you have just purchased. How redolent of Raphael but so absorbed that the Times critic does not observe it altho’ so manifest. Far be it for me to think of advising yr. trustees. In their place however I should get more and more and more French painting fr. David to Cezanne.139 I shall probably go Apr 8 for a fortnight or more to Roma – Hotel de la Ville, Via Sistina. Yours B.B.

[undated] 30, Portland Place, w.1. Langham 2417

Dear Mary, Thank you so much for sending us your book.140 I have read it & enjoyed it very much.Your convalescent reverie turns out to be an ideal way of recounting travels, making them vivid and personal. Thank you, too, for your letter about Lockov. I have long thought of getting him to copy the missing Sasetta, but the Trustees are not much in favour of it. A copy in a gallery of originals is always rather disconcerting & the public might have reason to ask ‘Why pay £7000 apiece for the originals when the copy is almost indistinguishable?’ It’s an awkward question. I will put it to my Board.

139 In 1937 the Gallery purchased Edgar Degas, Combing the Hair, c. 1896 (NG 4865). 140 Mary Berenson, Across the Mediterranean, Prato: Tipografia Giachetti, Figlio e C, 1935.

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We have heard that you are feeling rather stronger & how much consoled by the great-grandchild141 – which must indeed be a most consoling phenomenon. I hope I live to see mine. It is abominable how difficult it is for us to meet nowadays. I am longing to show BB. round the Gallery, but he is right not to attempt an English winter. I wish you could all come in the summer. I believe it has been possible to improve the arrangements of the Gallery a good deal, & I have even managed to add to it – a magnificent Rubens landscape & a gorgeous ferocious Ingres lady like a sacred goddess decked out by the peasantry.142 You will see them both enlivening the insupportably gloomy pages of the Burlington.143 Jane & the family are well, & J. sends you & Nicky & BB. her love. Yours ever, Kenneth Clark.

[Typewritten letter] National Gallery Trafalgar Square 12th May, 1936. Bernard Berenson, Esq, I Tatti, Settignano, Florence.

Dear BB, The drawing on the back of the early Botticelli144 appears to be in black chalk, done straight onto the wood, without any priming or preparation. The figure is 33 c.m. high. The head is full face, but only roughly indicated. As far as I can see, the right-hand was originally raised and the thing hanging down at the figure’s right side is part of the sleeve; the left hand is of course, resting on a shield. There are several other scribbles on the back of the panel, and too vague to be worth recording, except that one is a caricature of the rather infantile type which Giovanni Bellini was drawing on the back of his pictures at about the same period.

141 Mary’s great-grandson, Roger Halpern, Barbara Halpern’s son, born in March 1935, spent his first three winters in Florence with Mary and brought her much consolation. 142 See n. 138. 143 Martin Davies wrote on Ingres in the Burlington Magazine, vol. 68, no. 399 (June 1936), pp. 256–8, 260–63, 266–8. 144 See n. 137.

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We are delighted to know that you really expect to come to London in September.We shall be here for the whole of that month, as we are probably not sailing for America till about the 10th of October.145 I shall be in the throes of re-writing our catalogue, so that your presence will be most valuable. We had a very pleasant time in Vienna and saw a lot of your friend Wilde,146 whom I found much the most interesting person in the Kunsthistorisches Museum. Yours ever, K. PS. I see that Pudelko in a recent article in the Burlington refers to a picture in your collection, representing the Flagellation, as being part of the same series as our small Castagno ‘Crucifixion’.147 I am ashamed to say that I cannot remember anything at I Tatti which by the remotest stretch of the critical fancy could be called a Castagno ‘Flagellation’. If it exists, I wonder if Nicky could send us a photograph, as we need to reference for our catalogue?

I Tatti Settignano Florence May 15, 1936

Dear Kenneth Thanks for the information about the drawing on the back of the early Botticelli. I am sending you the photo. of the only Flagellation at I Tatti. It is as I have thought for 30 years and still think, by Francesco Botticini. Truly German-Jews do make a Nazi of me. I do not understand by the way how it failed to get into my Lists – except on the eternal principle that tailors go ragged, and shoemakers out at the heel.

145 See n. 95. 146 Johannes Wilde 147 The National Gallery picture is ascribed to Andrea del Castagno, The Crucifixion (predella from an altarpiece; NG 1138). See also Georg Pudelko, ‘Two Portraits ascribed to Andrea Castagno’, Burlington Magazine, vol. 68, no. 398 (May 1936), pp. 235–7, 239–40, 242.

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I am glad you like Wilde. He is the only decent human there excepting Planiscig.148 As for the others Bald-ass149 and that ineffable humbug of a Buschbeck!150 Ever yrs B.B.

N.A.S.M. Holland-America Line R.M.S. Statardam 15 Oct. ’36

My dear BB, I must write at once, before I am involved in the hospitalities of your country to say how truly grateful I am for all your letters of introduction. I am appalled at all the trouble we have given you – also shocked to remember the rather perfunctory gratitude with which we first received them never guessing how full & numerous they were. Each one is to a person whom we really want to meet, & are especially glad to meet through you. Now that your London visit is over151 I seem to have seen far too little of you. I wish you had been able to come to the house when fewer people were there – but there were so many who wanted to meet you. I also much regret that I was never able to be in the Gallery on a Sunday morning, but Jane would never have let me abandon the children so soon before going to America. I had no time before going to make a full selection of x rays for you: I will do it when we return & at the same time look for any details you haven’t had, though I think that most of our recent details have been of non-Italians. We left England in a collapsed state aggravated by a cold in the head; but I like the sea, & feel perfectly fit by now. Jane likes it a good deal less, & for two days, I must say it was rather disagreeable. There is really nothing to be said for this boat, except that we have a sitting room. The Dutch whether passengers or stewards are ugly & ill mannered. I prefer Dagoes.The food is no better than any other boat, & of course if it is rough she rolls far more than a boat twice her size.

148 149 150 151

Leo Planiscig Ludwig von Baldass Ernst Buschbeck The Berensons and Nicky Mariano visited London in September–October.

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Jane hopes that the sea oxygen helped your Channel crossing. I think it saved her life yesterday. Please give our best love to Edith. We both look forward to seeing you all in the spring, & saying part of what we forgot to say in England. Love to Mary & Nicky Yours, affy Kenneth.

Oct. 29, 1936 Hotel Plaza-Athenee 23-27 Avenue Montaigne Paris

My dear Kenneth I am delighted to hear fr. you and pleased to learn that yr. voyage out has on the whole gone very well. I hope you will find moments to write again and again if only p.c.s. Mary passed thro’ yesterday on the way to I Tatti where we shall join her Nov 15th. Edith will in every probability come along with us. She by the way is fairly well, as agile as ever. An alarming symptom is that she has taken to misunderstanding and misinterpreting à la Logan. I spend the hours of light at the Louvre wh. is more than ever inexhaustible now that it is getting more and more accessible. Only the Italian pictures, thanks to dear, dying Jamot152 I find more absurdly hung and labelled than ever. I also have been frequenting the Cabinet des Medailles and extracted every object of interest – and nearly every one is – and turned it over and over and examined it with a glass. It is a marvellous collection in quality as fine as Mme. de Behague’s153 and of course there is much more of it. And I shall plow away till Nov. 14, enjoying every minute.

152 Paul Jamot 153 Martine-Marie-Pol de Béhague

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I see my very small crowd, but them constantly. Edith, Philomene,154 Norton,155 Salles,156 Huyghe,157 the Chambruns,158 Marthe Ruspoli,159 the Noailles,160 the Du Boses,161 etc. You both were angelic to us in London, and I wish with all my heart we could meet oftener. Best love to both of you. Yours B.B.

[Typewritten letter] National Gallery Trafalgar Square 22nd of July, 1937. Bernhard Berenson, Esq, i Tatti, Settignano, Firenze.

My dear BB, I am writing to tell you that the Gallery has recently bought some pictures which I think will interest you if they are not known to you already. They are four small Giorgionesque pictures painted on two panels which were evidently part of the case of a musical instrument. The subject is taken from the second eclogue of the Ferrarese Court poet, Thebaldeo. This poem was written about 1495, and to judge from their style the panels also be from the last years of the 15th century. Personally, I think these little pictures are of supreme beauty, the purest expression of humanist or pantheist poetry I have ever seen in painting, and I find it difficult to resist the belief that they are by the painter of the Tempesta in an earlier phase. In composition, types and feeling generally they are extraordinarily like the lost Birth of Paris as we know it from the Teniers copy.

154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161

Philomène de la Forest Divonne Robert Norton Georges Salles René Huyghe Jacques de Chambrun Marthe Ruspoli was a cousin of Jacques de Chambrun. Charles and Marie-Laure de Noailles Charles du Bos

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In fact part of their interest is that they allow one to reconstruct this picture in the language of Giorgione rather than Teniers. Of course they are not in the least like Martin Conway’s pictures162 or any of the other small absurdities which have been attributed to Giorgione lately. Nor are they like the four little pictures in Padua,163 being quite obviously of an earlier and still strongly Bellinesque tradition. I am having a good photograph made and will send to you as soon as possible. I wanted to write at once in case you should have heard rumours about the acquisition from friends. Whether or not you think the pictures could be by Giorgione, I am sure you will like them and feel, as I do, they are the quintessence of the Giorgionesque spirit. I saw Edith about a month ago. She was terribly weak, but able to enjoy a very short conversation, and for a few minutes spoke with quite her old spirit. Since then I heard from Mrs. Tyler164 that there was a steady improvement, but John Hugh Smith165 gives a very different report. He seems to think there is very little hope of her making a real recovery.We are going over to Paris on Monday to see her again and I will let you know my impressions. It is bad luck that we shall be in Florence at a time when apparently there is no chance of your being there, but the beginning of October is the only time we shall have free. I hear that Benedict Nicolson166 is coming to work at the Tatti. He is very quiet and at first you may find it difficult to form any estimate of him. But I think he is a real lover of painting and a patient student; and that you will like having him there. With love from us both to you all, Yours ever, K.

162 Martin Conway had published a short article, ‘Giorgione’s Birth of Paris’, Burlington Magazine, vol. 51, no. 296 (November 1927), pp. 204, 208–9, 211, discussing a lost Birth of Venus by Giorgione which had been copied by Teniers; the Teniers copy was then in the possession of Charles Loeser, a friend of Berenson’s, in Florence. 163 There are two small Giorgionesque paintings in the Museo Civico, Padua: Leda and the Swan and Country Idyll. Of similar size, and appearing to belong to the same series, are Venus and Cupid, National Gallery of Art, Washington, dc, and Old Man with Hourglass and Violin Player, Phillips Memorial Gallery, Washington, dc. 164 Royall Tyler 165 John Hugh Smith 166 Benedict Nicolson

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Orient Line England – Australia S.S.Orcades 26 Aug. ’37

My dear BB, I have been meaning to write to you every day, but preparations for departure on this boat prevented me. I know how deeply you will feel the loss of Edith,167 & would like you to know how much we both sympathise.You will have heard, from the Tylers I expect, that she did not suffer at all. We saw her a fortnight before her death, & she was full of plans for the autumn. I don’t know how much of this was her indomitable courage & her determination not give pain to those about her; personally I think she knew, far better than she ever admitted, that she had come to the end of life. But this makes her last months all the more magnificent. Although I knew her so short a time I feel I have lost one of the few friendships which make life worth living, & I shall not forget that I owe that friendship, with so much else, to you. I went to the funeral.168 It was not what I should have liked (the garbled ritual would have made Eric Maclagan faint, if he hadn’t been at a conference in Vienna) but many old friends were there united perhaps for the last time by devotion to Edith & I was grateful for the privilege of being among them. We are on our way to Athens & Constantinople. I find I can work on board ship & have several delightful holidays at our ports of call. I hope you are having a good summer. Jane & I send love to you all, Ever yours affectionately K.

167 Edith Wharton died just before 6 pm on 11 August 1937, at home at the Pavillon Colombe, St Brice, near Paris. 168 Edith Wharton was buried in the Cimetière des Gonards in Versailles. A guard of honour had formed in the courtyard of the Pavillon Colombe composed of war veterans and other friends. As the coffin left the house, flags were lowered and a bugle sounded. Another guard of honour of veterans met the coffin at Versailles. She had herself planned her funeral service some years before. Clark attended along with some 25 other old friends.

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[Letter undated but must be October 1937] National Gallery Trafalgar Square

My dear BB, At last I am able to send you photographs of our small Venetian pictures. I would have done so long ago, but first of all the pictures had to be cleaned, then I went away, then the first photographs were a failure – and now these ones aren’t much better. For some reason they defy the camera, and you cannot judge the beauty of the pictures until you see the original. I am sure you will like them: they are full of poetry. Of course I do not expect you to think or say that they are by Giorgione. When my Trustees bought them I told them that they must do so purely because of their beauty and that there would never be agreement or certainty as to their authorship. They accepted this very well, but rather unfortunately have insisted on the pictures being published as Giorgione. It does not greatly matter as they certainly are all that the ordinary educated man means by that name, and further one can hardly go. My own feelings are set out in next months Burlington. I have argued the case in favour of Giorgione, I could equally well put the case against, except that if Giorgione didn’t paint them I have no idea who did. Perhaps one can say that they have the spirit of Giorgione without the letter. The only pity is that such truly beautiful and enjoyable pictures should be the subject of disputes, when they should only be enjoyed for their own sakes.169 It was hard luck to miss you both in Florence and Venice. We enjoyed our hasty visit to the full, and left Venice with our heads surging with Tintoretto.170 It was like hearing all the nine symphonies of Beethoven in three days. I wish we could meet.We enjoyed your visit to London so much last year and now there seems to be ever more I should like to talk over with you. But here

169 Clark, ‘Four Giorgionesque Panels’, Burlington Magazine, vol. 71, no. 416 (November 1937), pp. 198–201, 204–7. In the article Clark argued for an attribution to Giorgione, based on the balance of probabilities. Although now relegated to the basement of the National Gallery, John Walker’s opinion (Walker p. 295) was:‘They are paintings I find enchanting under any attribution and I would love to have them for the National Gallery of Art in Washington. . . . given the high opinion I have of the pictures, and it is my field of study, I feel there is something vindictive in their continued demotion.’ 170 A major exhibition of 74 paintings and 30 drawings by Tintoretto was held at the Ca’ Pesaro, Venice, 1937.

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I am tied to my continual round of administration and you bound by your fear of our insouciant climate. With heaps of love to Nicky, Ever your affectionate Kenneth

Hotel Bristol Wien Oct. 21 1937

Dear Kenneth. Your letter touches me. It is so affectionate in tone, so comforting so cordial. If there is anything I now crave for it is your affection. You may say I have it, and far would it be from me to doubt it. I want affection with perfect confidence, perfect ease. Without timidity or holding back of any sort. What I crave for is a brotherly comradeship. It is to be had, and others younger, one younger even than yourself give it to me. What comes in between you and me? It can’t be wives, for all the others I refer to are married. I wonder at times whether there is something school-masterly superior or even censorious in my attitude.You have it is true not taken the path I expected you to take. But I have long ago concluded that on that score you were right. I have for as long thought of you as emancipated from apprenticeship, and have in my own mind held you as a grown up with every right to his own opinion and judgement. I have felt all the same that you did not trust me with such feelings toward you and found a certain tone of superiority and perhaps even aggressive superiority on my part. Only last autumn, did the ice really seem to melt, and thaw. I want you, dear Kenneth, to read what I have just written for what it is intended, as a cry for the goodwill, and cordial confidence that I miss to a degree that amounts at times to real unhappiness. From your side, and to you it may seem irrational. Remember however that affection belongs to the realm of the irrational and that the Christian religion itself is perhaps founded on and certainly permeated with the idea of Grace – that is to say irrational craving for love.

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The foregoing is not at all intended as preface to what is coming. I thank you for the photos of the four little idylls you have recently purchased for the N.G. I am ready to believe that the photos give an incomplete idea of their attractiveness. I fear I see nothing in them that is more than Giorgionesque, nothing in the drawing and everything else that a photo. renders, which comes into my definitely circumscribed concept of Giorgione himself.171 I am here to get my teeth into tolerable condition, and in that I expect to succeed. I am not so sure that I shall profit greatly by the famous Neumann’s efforts to cure me of a catarrh that has been seriously troubling me for the last ten months. I shall have to remain here till Nov. 10 at least. But for the fact that cures take up all the day, and leave no time for sightseeing, I should have little to complain of. We have just enough friends to keep us company at meals. Above all there is music, real music, not snob or sob music. Here alone do I feel that people go to concerts or even opera as they go to their food. Such humble looking people one sees and how one feels them vibrating! The love of music seems to penetrate and equalize classes as hunting was supposed to do in the England of my youth. What keeps me away from England, by the way, is not the climate, but lack of leisure. I am more and more absorbed by the Near East, not only because, more than ever, and it has since my school days, does it fascinate me, but also because there is so much material there for the book I now am writing. Give my love to Jane and the youngsters, Ever devotedly B.B.

171 Berenson commented to Ben Nicolson who was working at I Tatti at the time: ‘how foolish of Clark to buy those “very pretty, oh yes charming” Giorgiones’; Nicolson’s diary, 29 November 1937. See Caroline Elam, ‘Benedict Nicolson: Becoming an Art Historian in the 1930s’, Burlington Magazine, vol. 146, no. 1211 (February 2004), pp. 76–87.

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1 Jan ’38 Bellevue,172 Lympne, Kent Hythe 67181

My dear BB, I must begin the new year by writing to you.Your last letter has been much in my mind. It touched me deeply, but I find it very hard to answer. I come of an undemonstrative family and my feelings are as stiff as an unused limb.You must never doubt that my admiration for you is combined with great affection – more than my way of writing will allow me to show. But to me our relations must always be those of master and pupil. It is true that in the field of administration I have arrived at an independent position; but in things of the mind and particularly in the history of art, I have advanced very little during the last year, and in those subjects which I love to discuss with you it would be foolish for me to pretend to talk as an equal. I hope that when I leave the Gallery I shall once more go into training as a scholar and critic. Meanwhile you see me so seldom that I am afraid you must sometimes be put out by false accounts of what I am doing and saying; but you know how full of malice our particular section of the world is.173 Of course I should write to you oftener, but I hate writing letters more than anything in the world, and can only do so with an immense effort of will.

172 Philip Sassoon had built a country house near Hythe in Kent, called Port Lympne, with beautiful views over Romney Marsh. The house was designed by Sir Herbert Baker (1862–1946), who was born and educated in Kent where he had his first practice but became much sought after as an architect of public buildings, especially in the Empire, in South Africa in particular. His characteristic style is a pinched and uninspired classicism but at Port Lympne he created a mansion in the South African Cape Dutch style. In Clark’s view, he had ‘a positive genius for errors of design; in his public buildings every proportion, every cornice, every piece of fenestration was . . . an object lesson in how not to do it’ (Clark APW p. 221). Added to this, Sassoon had a penchant for lavish decoration in white, gold and lapis lazuli. The best feature was the garden with its long herbaceous borders and staircases of yew hedges. Sassoon entertained lavishly and regally, his guests including, besides the beau monde, young aviators, the art world, unorthodox Conservative politicians, heiresses and the aristocracy. The Clarks were regular visitors and he persuaded them to rent his house, Bellevue, a 19th-century neo-gothic edifice, which stood opposite his main gates. Sassoon also had a life tenancy on a mansion in Park Lane and owned the historic estate of Trent Park near Enfield, where the Clarks were also frequent guests. Port Lympne is now a safari park and zoo; Trent Park mansion is now part of Middlesex University. 173 In March 1938 the Trustees formally asked David Balniel to intervene to try to defuse the bitterly bad relationship between Clark and the Keeper, Isherwood Kay, and the Assistant Keeper, Martin Davies. They were interviewed by Balniel and, after expressing their personal dislike of Clark and objecting to his policy of popularising the Gallery and its pictures, they backed down.

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Fortunately I think that all being well we shall be in Italy in the late spring, and will stop in Florence on our way to Rome.We must not miss you again, and will let our dates be controlled by yours. I have finished turning my Yale lectures into a short book on Leonardo174 which I hope will serve as a reasonable up to date introduction to his work. When the proofs are done I shall take a rest from writing for a time and do some reading instead. Are you writing down the fruits of your near eastern studies?. All our family is well, and go tomorrow for a holiday in Switzerland, Jane and I remaining behind. We are looking forward to the peace, but will miss them, all the same. I have Edith’s library175 here which has been installed as well as could be managed. Best love from Jane, and your affectionate K

19 March ’38 Ashby St. Ledgers Rugby176

My dear BB, Having a little unexpected and enforced leisure, I remember how long it is since I last wrote to you: in fact I believe I never thanked you for the kind postcard of three cheers on my k.c.b.177 You can imagine that I had my fill of letter writing after that episode. I have got used to my title by now. At first I was much ashamed, but there was no avoiding it in the Civil Service.

174 Kenneth Clark, Leonardo da Vinci: An Account of his Development as an Artist, Cambridge University Press, 1939. See also n. 95. 175 In her will Edith Wharton left her library to her godson Colin Clark, who later wrote: ‘she left me her entire library, a portrait of herself as a young girl, and her silver christening cup, but I was not told about it until I was eighteen years old, and I was not allowed to take possession of my inheritance until my father died’ (Colin Clark p. 167). 176 The Manor House at Ashby St Ledgers is near Daventry in Northamptonshire, although the postal address is Rugby, Warwickshire. The house dates from the early 16th century and the estate for a long time belonged to the Catesby family. It was in a room above the gatehouse that much of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 was planned. In 1903, Viscount Wimborne bought the manor and he employed Edwin Lutyens to work on the manor and in the village. Ivor Churchill Guest, 1st Viscount Wimborne (1873–1939) was a first cousin of Winston Churchill. He was a politician and one of the late Lords Lieutenant of Ireland, serving in that position at the time of the Easter Rising in 1916. His son, Ivor Grosvenor Guest (1903–1967), also a politician, was the same age as Clark. His wife, Alice, from whom he separated amicably in the 1930s, was a close friend of William Walton, 22 years her junior who spent much time at Ashby St Ledgers with Alice, from 1941 until her death in 1948. 177 On Friday 25 February 1938, Clark was invested with the Insignia of a Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath (Civil Division).

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You may have seen that we have been in Paris arranging a show of English pictures.178 I enjoyed the work – less so the social accompaniment. My colleagues have all made such unfortunate marriages (except M. Julian Cain179) and I can never adapt myself to the classic banality of French women. No doubt it is the foundation of Racine and Malesherbes, just as the silliness of Mrs Aspinall Oglander180 is the foundation of Shakespeare and Shelley, and my inability to converse with Madame Metman181 is a proof that I shall never really understand French poetry. By way of contrast we saw something of Marie Laure,182 much involved with Massine and the new ballet.183 How are you? We want to come to Florence in June, if you will be there: I am not going to risk missing you all again. With love to you all from us both Yours ever K

I Tatti Settignano Florence March 24, 1938

Dear Kenneth It is our intention to be here in June, and we should be glad to see you, and if we had room, to put you up. I fear we shall be full up with American and other

178 A major exhibition of British 18th- and 19th-century pictures, and modern works by e.g. Wilson Steer and Tonks, opened in the Salle La Caze at the Louvre on 4 March 1937. Clark supervised the hanging of the pictures. 179 Julien Cain. He and Clark had been in Russia in 1935. 180 Florence Oglander (1884–1961), from an ancient Isle of Wight family, was divorced in 1920 after 16 years of marriage. She married again in 1927, to a widower, Brigadier General Cecil Aspinall (1878–1959), who wrote the official History of the Gallipoli Campaign. In 1930 he changed his name to Aspinall-Oglander. 181 The wife of the good-looking, amusing and worldly wise Louis Metman, who was the head of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. 182 Marie-Laure de Noailles 183 A new ballet, based on the hallucinations of the mad King Ludwig of Bavaria, was to have been performed by the Ballets Russes, to the music of Richard Wagner, choreographed by Leonid Massine with stage décor, costumes and libretto by Salvador Dalí and costumes made by Coco Chanel. The ballet had been a year in the planning and was intended for the 1938–9 season but the prospect of war delayed the performance and the ballet finally opened two years later in November 1939 at the Metropolitan Opera, New York, when it was entitled Bacchanale.

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visitors already ‘pre-noted’. But even if we can’t lodge you, we shall hope to enjoy yr. every moment of leisure. Nick and I expect to go in about a month to Smyrna,184 and remain away till June. We shall see what can be done when we get there. If it is possible to see the ruins of the Ionian towns we shall linger there. If not we shall think of Sivas, [illeg] and Diyarbakir.185 And always we can return to Constantinople, where the mosques, apart from one Hagia Sophia, fascinate me and the museums attract me. Yes, the French squaws are a problem. I am devoted to Metman but on account of his wife who expects to be invited with him, I almost never see him. All good wishes and love to you both Yours B.B.

2 October 1938 Bellevue, Lympne, Kent Hythe 67181

Dear BB, I have been meaning to write for some months to sympathise with you on the present political situation, which you must have been feeling intensely. The last few weeks have not made things any better. For a few days it looked as if we might get the gangsters on the run, but now we’ve knuckled under again. Evidently Ribbentrop was right in his estimation of the English governing classes.186 In all

184 Berenson and Nicky Mariano visited Asia Minor (in modern Turkey) for the last time in May–June 1938. They were joined by an old friend, the former British diplomat Sir Robert Greg, who had been Britain’s Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to Romania, 1926–9. Through him they were provided with a car and driver, tents, field beds, cook and two Turkish boys to do the rough work. 185 Sivas in central Turkey was inhabited as early as 2600 bc but came into prominence in Roman times when Pompey, in the 1st century bc, founded a city on the site called Megalopolis. Diyarbakır is the second largest city in Turkey’s south-eastern Anatolia region and is the unofficial capital of a Greater Kurdistan: it has been continually inhabited since the Stone Age. 186 Joachim von Ribbentrop was the German ambassador in London in 1937–8.At his trial at Nuremberg he said in evidence (29 March 1946): ‘It has often been asserted that I reported to the Fuehrer from England that England was degenerate and would perhaps not fight. I may and must establish the fact here, that from the beginning I reported exactly the opposite to the Fuehrer. I informed the Fuehrer that in my opinion the English ruling class and the English people had a definitely heroic attitude and that this nation was ready at any time to fight to the utmost for the existence of its empire.’

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this welter of fear and humiliation I have been fairly lucky as I had a definite job to do – the evacuation of the pictures in the Gallery. We were going to send every one away to safety. Fortunately we had not got very far when peace with dishonour was announced, and they have all come back. They were beautifully packed and are really not the worse. It has been a good dress rehearsal for the next time, which I suppose will come next April – or do you think he will not be able to wait so long before adding fresh laurels to his overburdened brow. Of course the simplest thing would be to pack up the pictures and send them to Berlin: it would save a lot of trouble in the long run. The actual arrangements for packing and dispatching 2000 pictures with a tolerable degree of speed and safety were rather interesting. I now feel confident that I could move an army corps. My little show of classical antiquity in Renaissance painting was exquisitely inappropriate to the times. Of course you shall have Saxl’s booklet.187 It isn’t bad value for 6d. But I find his introduction disappointing. It is lacking in movement, and too generalized. I have been doing a popular book for the Gallery – a hundred of our details, arranged so that the comparison of the plates in each opening makes some point of interest, historical, aesthetic or anecdotal. To each I have given a short note of explanation. I think it will be a nice looking book, and the notes will at least show the number of different ways in which a civilized person can look at pictures.188 My lectures on Leonardo have been much delayed from various causes but will be out in the spring.189 I heard from Eric Maclagan that you had been suffering a good deal from indigestion. The times alone (or The Times alone, for that matter) are (or is) enough to give any one stomach ache. I hope it was only a passing seizure. Jane has been far from well all summer; at one time she was threatened with appendicitis but the doctors finally decided not to operate. She is better, but still very thin and easily tired. I have entered the better state and flourish like an old sinner. All being well we shall come to Italy next year. You will be in Syria, North Africa or Seville. It is really very unfortunate that we can’t meet, as I am now in a better position to amuse you than I was before. Please give our love to Nicky, and Mary if she is with you. Yours ever K

187 The National Gallery held an exhibition of 24 paintings entitled Classical Antiquity in Renaissance Painting. An illustrated booklet with an introduction by Fritz Saxl was published in 1938. 188 100 Details from Pictures in the National Gallery with an Introduction and Notes by Kenneth Clark, London: National Gallery, 1938. 189 See n. 95.

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20 November 1938 Bellevue, Lympne, Kent Hythe 67181

My Dear BB, Throughout this dreary autumn we have been cheered by the prospect of a visit to I Tatti, but now I fear that even this must be given up. As you know the Keeper190 of the Gallery died last August, and there has been so much delay in appointing his successor that he will not take office till January. Meanwhile I am short handed, and in any case don’t like to leave the Gallery to my junior staff, who are only too glad of the chance to do something in a way I don’t approve of. So I suppose I must stay at work, with, at best, a flying visit to Paris. I am just recovering from a mild attack of influenza, or feverish cold I suppose, which is not clearing; but it is so beautiful down here that one can momentarily forget the state of the world. This country is in a curious state. Every intelligent person foresees a violent change in our social and economic structure – except our governors who are trying to pretend that everything will be all right if we only go on as usual. Chamberlain is an honourable man with a good, active brain, but a dyed-inthe-wool materialist of the old Manchester School. His very virtues prevent him from understanding the present situation. So he has let slip the opportunity of performing (or pre-empting) a voluntary revolution and we are now waiting for a revolution to be forced on us.The average man is quite powerless owing to the collapse of the party system – and the party system hasn’t existed in this country since the end of the liberal party. But I mustn’t bore you with politics. I hear a good deal of political talk from both sides, and as I haven’t the knowledge or aptitude to join in, there is a good deal of unabsorbed politics churning about in my mind. We were very much distressed by your account of Mary.191 I knew she was more or less bed ridden, but had no idea that she was in such constant pain.What a dreadful ordeal for you.You will have read Logan’s book.192 I like it more than I anticipated. There are a few trivial facetiae, and some rather laboured jokes like

190 The Keeper’s function was to administer the Gallery’s affairs and keep control of its finances. Harold Isherwood Kay died in post in 1938. Clark appointed William Pettigrew Gibson to succeed Kay as from January 1939. 191 Letter missing. 192 Logan Pearsall Smith, Reperusals & Re-collections, 1937; Unforgotten Years, 1938.

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arriving at Oxford by the lms, but on the whole I thought it a very pleasant memorial to a vanished way of life and attitude of mind. I wonder if you have seen Connolly’s book Enemies of Promise; most people like the account of his schooldays, but I was rather bored by the sequence of adolescent intrigues, and sufferings, too vividly remembered. I am never very fond of self revelation in literature, and I know Connolly so well that the revelations were no surprise. On the other hand I thought some of the critical chapters lively, amusing and in places very true. His gift is for parody and mockery of all sorts.193 You will have seen that we have added a Rembrandt to the Gallery.194 It is a rich romantic affair, painted with real love – as if Rembrandt felt he must honour Saskia by squeezing out every colour on to his palette. I find it more interesting pictorially than the usual boring old men, but it will not be popular, as people expect any portrait of a woman to be either a beauty or a grandmother. Now we have used up all our money and are in what you once told me is the ideal state for the National Gallery – unable to make any acquisitions. I suppose you will leave Florence in the spring. If we don’t go to America to look after the British Pavillion,195 we shall certainly go to Italy, and would like to arrange our visit so as to see you. Meanwhile our love to you all, Ever your affectionate K

3 Dec. ’38 30, Portland Place,w.1. Langham 2417

My dear BB, It is with a real pang of emotion that I have just unpacked and opened the volumes of the Florentine Drawings. They are intimately connected with the

193 Cyril Connolly’s Enemies of Promise, 1938, was a critical and autobiographical work.The first section is dedicated to observations about literature and the literary world, the second is a critical assessment of what it takes to be a good writer and the third is an account of Connolly’s own early life. Overall the book is a cri de coeur as to why he was not capable of producing a major work of literature. 194 Rembrandt’s Saskia van Ulenborch, c. 1635 (NG 4930), is a three-quarter-length portrait of his wife, the daughter of a wealthy burgomaster of Leeuwarden. They had married in 1634. 195 The 1939–40 New York World’s Fair was the second largest American world’s fair of all time, exceeded only by St Louis’s Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904. With more than 44 million visitors, its theme was ‘The Future’, its opening slogan ‘Dawn of a New Day’ and an invitation to

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whole of my life: with my early ambitions and my first apprenticeship, and also with a good many regrets at the later course of my career. For all these reasons I needn’t tell you how touched I am by your reference to me in the introduction;196 and I am almost equally delighted by what you say about my Windsor catalogue in your second volume. The work I did on the Leonardos was the direct fulfillment of my apprentice work for you, and so is really my best contribution to your great book. I wish I could have done more. I am longing to read your book all through again. I have always thought it your masterpiece, especially the Michaelangelo chapter, and now that I am a little wiser I hope for a fuller appreciation. It will be a splendid holiday task for me this Christmas. I hope that things are going better with you, and leaving you some peace of mind for writing. We are all well (for a miracle, all at once), and things at the Gallery fairly calm. With love to you all, Yours ever, K

I Tatti Settignano Florence Dec. 6th 1938

My dear Kenneth, I am touched, as I seldom have been, by your words abt the book, on wh. we were to have worked together. Dear Kenneth, I shall never cease regretting what

look at ‘the world of tomorrow’. The British Pavilion displayed Lincoln Cathedral’s copy of the Magna Carta. After the outbreak of hostilities in 1939 it was deemed safer to leave it in the usa and it was deposited in Fort Knox. The British Pavilion also displayed the London Midland and Scottish (lms) Coronation Scot railway locomotive. 196 Berenson’s short introduction to vol. i of Drawings of the Florentine Painters opens thus: ‘It was more than ten years ago that I began to think seriously of bringing out a new edition of this book. The first was exhausted long before, but I had no time to give to a task that I knew would take several years to accomplish. I hoped that at last I should have the leisure, and I went so far as to induce Mr Kenneth Clark to come to assist me. He came and spent two winters learning all a youthful, eager, and keen mind can learn in that time. He went through the drawings in the Uffizi and made not only corrections but observations which have been most serviceable. Unfortunately it turned out that tasks still to be completed left me no leisure for a new undertaking. Mr Clark could not wait, and I thereby lost a partner who would have given shape and finish to this work that I fear it sorely lacks. But my loss was the public gain for on leaving me he started on a career which led him swiftly to the directorship of the National Gallery. He is not only the youngest director this noble

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might have been, but I can assure you the regret is of the most affectionate and nostalgic kind. Pity you could not come out, for it would have done me a world of good to have some heart to heart talks. Not about my own situation here, altho’ it is precarious enough, but about our common spiritual interests. In London you are busy, and I more so – if possible. Here, while I am still here, we might have had some heartening and perhaps useful talks. As yet I have no plans for the spring. With good will on both sides, a meeting could be arranged. Even if I return to the Near East, as I should like to, you could manage to come before or after, that is in Apr. or in June. Thanks for all the N.G. news in your recent letter. Mary has been very ill but is a trifle better now – had not been out of her room these last two months. Our best to you all With devoted affection B.B.

Bellevue Lympne Kent Monday Febr. 13 1939

Dear BB, Thank you very much for our lovely visit. We enjoyed every minute of it and especially our time with you and are already longing to come back. I wish we could all meet oftener. Apart from anything else there are many times when we would like to come to you for help and advice in problems. We had an uneventful journey after an enchanting few hours in Pisa in lovely sunshine. The Museum was shut to celebrate the death of the Pope197 so we could enjoy the Battistero and Campo Santo and the rest in that magic green square, with a clear conscience. We only wished you and Nicky and Umberto and ‘Clothilde’ could still have been with us.

institution has ever had, but is proving himself one of the ablest.’ The introduction was written at I Tatti in September 1937. John Walker and Nicky Mariano, who in fact did more of the spadework and hard grind, receive polite and adequate but nowhere near such fulsome thanks. 197 Pope Pius xi died on 10 February 1939. On 2 March his Secretary of State was elected as his successor, taking the name Pius xii.

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Tomorrow we dine with Anthony E and Beatrice so will try again to find out why at present he is doing nothing!198 The papers here are all full of our new ally in Spain. The books we promised you will soon I hope come drifting in to you – reminders of our deep affection. I do hope Mary is better and you no longer so worried. I will write to her tomorrow, also Nicky.The children are very well and gay and making great claims on our return! Best love and much gratitude for the enchanting time you gave us. Yours ever affect Jane

19. ii. 39 30, Portland Place, w.1. Langham 2417

My dear BB, I am ashamed to find that it is a week since I got home, and yet I haven’t written to thank you for the enchanting week we had at I Tatti. You can hardly believe the constant pressure I have undergone all that week – committees, overdue articles and letters, importunate visitors; and even now I am not in a fit state to thank you for that period of tranquillity and rational discourse. Much as I enjoyed the landscape and the library, it was your company, dear BB, which was the real joy of our visit; and that is what makes it so difficult for me to write this letter. There was a flow of reason and learning combined with a genial warmth which made me feel I was living in a golden age of culture, a sunset of culture no doubt, but none the less beautiful for that. I loved every minute of it. Since our return we have seen a good deal of our rulers, and on the whole the prospect seems a good deal brighter. The Government is a good deal more resolute. Halifax, who has always been ¾ Eden, is gaining ascendancy and is now generally spoken of as the next p.m. with Eden back as leader of the House199 – tho’ personally I doubt if the country would stand such an aristocratic government. To my mind the most serious news is the appointment of Horace Wilson200 to

198 Anthony Eden and his wife. Eden had resigned as Foreign Secretary in February 1938 because of dissatisfaction with Chamberlain’s policy of Appeasement with Nazi Germany and was succeeded by Lord Halifax. 199 Eden was Leader of the House of Commons, 1942–5. It was Winston Churchill who succeeded Chamberlain as Prime Minister on 10 May 1940. 200 Sir Horace Wilson (1882–1972) was a career civil servant, seconded for special service with Neville Chamberlain in 1937 and his Emissary to Hitler in September 1938 – prior to the Munich

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succeed Warren Fisher201 as head of the Civil Service. He is a pure politician and a passionate Chamberlain man; and I don’t at all like the idea of a politicized civil service. All your details are being finished and will follow this letter. I believe Jane is sending various books and articles, not all of which are to be taken seriously. Some of my own were written simply because I’m no good at refusing, and find myself landed by a skillful editor. Even next week I have to write about the new Picassos.202 However I suppose that as long as one is conscious of sin there is always the hope of grace. I do hope Mary has taken a turn for the better, and is at least in no discomfort. Please give my love to Nicky. It was heavenly to see so many old friends again. Ever your affectionate K

I Tatti Settignano Florence Febr. 19, 1939

Dear Jane Thank you for a letter that required no answer. I write all the same to tell you per iscritto how grateful I am for yr. visit and how much happiness it brought me. At last we are contemporaries, we are equals and friends. I have been longing for this condition between us, and now it has come about. It means a great deal to me.

Agreement – charged with informing Hitler that an annexation of the German Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia by Germany would lead to war with France and Britain, a message which, though delivered, was soon abandoned. In 1939 Wilson was appointed Secretary to the Treasury and head of the Home Civil Service. 201 Sir Warren Fisher (1879–1948) was perhaps the most influential civil servant of his generation and the first head of the Home Civil Service (in 1919). He undertook major reforms in the Civil Service, increasing the importance of the Treasury, advancing the interests of women and above all promoting the virtues of team-work, inter-departmental co-operation and high professional standards. He was an effective organiser and committee chairman, with a forceful, if unruly, personality, and was much involved in preparations for war, notably civil defence, in the period leading up to his replacement by Horace Wilson. 202 See n. 217.

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Write as often as you can, and tell me what you are doing, you and Kenneth. I don’t like yr. falling back to the pit where swarm friends who pale into mere names, because one is unable to feed their entities with events that bring them really to life. Here the weather is halcyonic, and almonds are veiling the hill sides, and new green the fields. Addie Kahn203 has been and gone. She begs you to let her know your exact dates for New York, and hopes to see you often. Mary is very fragile, poor dear, and I am not too mighty. Nick looks tired, Morra, d’Entrèves204 and the Mason Hammonds205 of the Amer. Acad. in Rome are week-ending. Love to you both Yrs B.B.

I Tatti Settignano Florence March 2, 1939

My dear Kenneth. Yr. letter of Febr. 19 made me happy. If there was one thing beyond the narrow world of one’s own home and its work a day interests that I most yearned for – and this is no exaggeration – it was to come to the relations with you and Jane that your visit has brought about. It makes me as happy as the difficulties of our condition at the moment will permit. I am so grateful to you both for coming and devoting yourselves so entirely to us.

203 Addie Kahn 204 See Appendix 1. 205 Mason Hammond (1903–2002) was a Harvard scholar and professor, specialising in Latin language and literature, from 1928 to 1970. He was also a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and in charge of classical studies at the American Academy in Rome, 1937–9, 1951–2 and 1955–7.

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You must try to come soon again. Let me thank you for the books. Isherwood,206 Runyan,207 Spender,208 Conolly209 wh. I shall read, and for the two nos. of the Listener wh. I have read already. I liked both the articles, but the one on Constable is a little masterpiece, and I hope you will incorporate it in a book some day.210 It would be a pity to have such truly constructive appreciation and interpretation lost. I dare say you know that I am trying to arrange the giving over of I Tatti and its contents to Harvard as soon as possible, retaining of course the full right to its use in my life-time. Should this come off, and should it include as part of the settlement that there should be a body of trustees, would you mind being one of them? There would be only Paul Sachs,211 Nicky, Johnnie Walker, one or at most two others and yrself. I want you not only because you are you, but because you are English. The idea is that one Engl. scholar at least should be connected with I Tatti when it becomes a working institution. I all but forgot to thank you for the marvelous details of N.G. pictures. They are a treasure. The details of the Ortolano212 stumped me. Mary remains about the same, sends greetings as does Nicky also. Do write when you can. With devoted affection B.B.

11 March ’39 30, Portland Place, w.1. Langham 2417

My dear BB, Thank you very much for your letter. I needn’t tell you how much honoured and delighted I shall be to be a Trustee of your institute. I think I have some

206 Christopher Isherwood, Goodbye to Berlin, 1939. 207 Damon Runyon (1880–1946) was an American writer noted for his short stories about the demimonde of Manhattan and Brooklyn. Furthermore and Take it Easy were published in 1938. His 1932 collection of short stories, Guys and Dolls, became commercially successful, from which Frank Loesser and Abe Burrows made the eponymous Broadway musical in 1950. 208 Stephen Spender’s book of poems, The Still Centre, was published in early 1939. 209 See n. 193. 210 Clark, ‘Constable, Prophet of Impressionism’, The Listener, 7 April 1937, repr. in R. S. Lambert, ed., Art in England, Harmondsworth, 1938, pp. 22–3. 211 Paul Sachs 212 L’Ortolano, Three Saints, c. 1520, now called Saints Sebasitan, Roch and Demetrius (NG 669).

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idea of your instructions – I mean of how you would like the Institute to be used – and I shall have great pleasure in defending it from the attacks of pedantry, catalogism, examination fever and all the other ills to which art-institutes are prone. However this will not be necessary for many years, for I assume that during your life time you will have full control of policy, and the Trustees will only be necessary as a formality. It is good of you to write so kindly of the fragments of journalism which Jane sends you. Fortunately a good many of my contributions to the Listener seem to be lost. I usually take a good deal of trouble over the ephemera, but sometimes they have to be done in a hurry with other more pressing, and then they are shameful. I cannot extemporize. Giglioli’s213 sudden death must have been a great shock to you all, and is deeply ironic. I hope it has not distressed Mary too much. We go on our round at a good pace, enjoying this interval of irrational optimism. As a rule I have no time to think of anything except the next engagement, but a light attack of influenza has allowed me 48 hours of reflection; and sobriety cannot fail to be depressing. With our best love to you all Yours ever K [Written up left edge of paper] You have only had about ⅓ of the N.G. details. Heaps more to come.

30 Portland Place London W1 Saturday 11th Febr 1939 [she must mean March]

Dear BB, I shall always treasure your letter. K and I wish Florence were nearer and we could come oftener but we hope to see you in the summer when we go to Venice to see the Paolos.214

213 Yule Giglioli had been Berenson’s personal doctor since the early years of the century. He is personally recommended by Sir Francis Vane, Walks and People in Tuscany, 1910, as an English-speaking doctor, resident at 2 via del Campidoglio, Florence. 214 See n. 234.

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And we do hope that some time this year you will come to London again.We would love you to come before we give up Portland Place. Not that anyone is trying to buy it at present! I meant to start this letter by giving you our most affectionate sympathy over the death of Giglioli. I am afraid it must have been a great shock to you all as he was a darling friend as well as being an excellent doctor. I hope the news has not upset poor Mary too much and that you are having no more periods of acute anxiety about her at present. Here everyone has ’flu. The poor twins have it slightly in the country and K has developed it this morning and is in bed feeling boiled. Thursday last week was a beano for the Clark family as the King and Queen came to lunch. He is very difficult to rouse but she is charming and K at his end of the table had great fun. They came informally, no people in waiting or even morning coats for the men and we just had the Balneils Anthony and Beatrice Eden and Freddy and Mary Ogilvie.215 They liked the magpie mixture in the house and the Queen enjoyed the pictures especially oddly enough, the late blue Cezannes in my room. She had never seen a Cezanne before, and thought them v.g. Incidentally did K tell you he took Valery216 and family round the Nat. Gall. the other day and Valery approved the Piero’s of whom he had never heard ‘Il est bien’. The King gazed at the large early Matisse but was too polite to say anything. He would not be interesting unless he were king. The children came up from the country, Alan from school and we all enjoyed the excitement. The following day lunch at No 10 with the p.m. seemed a great come down!. He remains very pleasant in private however one may presume to disagree with much of his policy. We drank very good hock sent him by a German vineyard owner and there is a new table in the drawing room filled with mysterious objects that make the presents to the Pope seem magnificent. A teaspoon ‘from the citizens of Amsterdam’, a Woolworth medal ‘from England’ a charm ‘from a lady who preferred to remain anonymous’ etc etc all with these enormous labels. Sen[t] you the current Listener with an article by K on Picasso.217 It was written in an hour at the Travellers Club and he did not want you to be bothered with it but I think it is funny.

215 Sir Frederick (Freddie) Ogilvie (born in Chile, 1893–1949), was a fellow of Trinity College, Oxford, and a lecturer in economics with a special interest in tourism. He was the Vice-Chancellor of Queen’s University, Belfast, 1935–8, and Principal of Jesus College, Oxford, 1942–9. 216 Probably the French poet and essayist Paul Valéry (1871–1945). 217 Clark wrote a complimentary review of recent paintings by Picasso, then on exhibition in London at Rosenberg and Helft, commenting on their beauty, passion and dictatorial authority; The Listener, 9 March 1939.

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The Nicholsons lunched – as nice as ever. Hope this letter isn’t too long. Much love Jane

PS Please tell Nicky Miss Arnold is working for the Windsors temporarily and writes such funny letters!

Settignano Florence March 23, 1939

Dear Kenneth. Thanks for yr. essay in the Listener on Picasso. It is very tactful, very malicieux and altogether to the point. To me he is an Academic draughtsman of genius, who, realizing at an early stage of his career that there was no public for his kind of gift deliberately took to the woods. There he acquired one thing in common with all dictators of the Hollywood– radio–loudspeaker dispensation, the imperative need of keeping his public guessing – what next. I would like to see parallel-lives of the Catalan and of yr. nearest equivalent, i.e. Augustus John. As I should like parallel lives of Cellini and Haydon.218 It is good of you to accept zestfully a trusteeship in this ‘Institooschen’ – should it come off. Should it not – I have had my fun out of it. That nobody can take away from me, even should they exile me, scatter my library to the winds and pull up the garden. Meanwhile I go on adding and perfecting as if my hopes were to be realized. So glad – more of details are coming to the – already bestowed on us. Nicky and I are going to Rome on the 25th to stay till Apr. 6 or so – Hotel de la Villa,Via Sistina. I want to see the odds and ends at the ‘[illeg]’ show. Ever affectionately B.B.

218 Although separated by more than two centuries, and seemingly with little in common artisitcally, both Benvenuto Cellini (1500–1571) and Benjamin Robert Haydon (1786–1846) wrote memoirs. The writer Mary Russell Mitford (1789–1855) said: ‘If you had known Haydon personally, his great power of conversation and constant life of mind would have carried you away. He was a sort of Benvenuto Cellini’; The Life of Mary Russell Mitford: Related in a Selection from her Letters to her Friends (1870), vol. iii, London: Forgotten Books, 2013, pp. 248–9.

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P.S. Love to Jane, and tell her I enjoyed her letter immensely, and beg her to write as often as she can. I shall write her soon. B.B.

[Typewritten letter apart from greeting] 30, Portland Place, w.1. Langham 2417 28th March, 1939 Bernard Berenson, Esq., I Tatti Settignano Firenze

Dear BB, I am sending you three photographs which you may be glad to have. The two from Liverpool I had specially taken. You will remember that the old photograph of the Bellini was very bad,219 and I thought it would be useful to have the profile portrait from the signed Catena220 as we have so very little evidence for reconstructing him. The S. Bernardino belongs to Mrs. Lionel de Rothschild and is really a very beautiful thing, as you can see in the photograph from the modelling of the hair, ear and temple. Unfortunately the far side of the face has come out badly and there is a splash of light over the crucifix which, in the original, is almost worthy of Pisanello.221 [Handwritten] We are in pretty bad mess politically, and I don’t see much hope of escaping war. In haste, with love from us both, K.

219 Berenson, Italian Pictures of the Renaissance, 1932, listed as Portrait of a Man. 220 Ibid., Madonna with Three Saints and Donor and Madonna. 221 Now ascribed to Jacopo Bellini, S. Bernardino, private collection, New York.

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I Tatti Settignano Florence Apr. 18, 1939

Dear Kenneth I got back fr. Roma two days ago. There I had three weeks of despration [sic] and frivolity. ‘Eat and drink for tomorrow we die’ is the only command we can obey just now.To this pass have Chambrella222 and Bonnet223 de Nuit brought us. Ma parliamo delle cose allegre. I thank you for the photos of Liverpool, as well as for the one after a S. Bernardino. What can it be but Mantegna himself! I enclose a postcard of the Palestrina Michaelangelo.224 In situ it looked carved out of the living rock against which the Barberini family chapel leans. I used to suppose it was lime stone and a late work. In the full glare of its present (temporary) position, it is obviously marble, and an early work. In the original it looks as if it must have been done at the same time and possibly in connection with the first project for the Tomb of Julius. It would seem (to me at least) as if it remained somewhere in the precinct of the Vatican and that Pope Barb[e]rini had the huge block upon which it was carved

222 Neville Chamberlain was nicknamed ‘Umbrella Man’ because he frequently carried one in public; he took one with him to his notorious meeting with Hitler in Munich in late September 1938. In a cartoon by David Low in the Evening Standard he was depicted as an umbrella. On 15 March 1939 Germany invaded the Czech provinces of Bohemia and Moravia, including Prague. 223 Georges Bonnet (1889–1973) was a French politician and Radical Socialist. A financial expert, between the wars he participated at international conferences on reparations and other economic questions. In 1937, though speaking not a word of English, he was appointed Ambassador to the United States. He also held office as the Finance Minister on several occasions, notably in 1937– 8, and opposed re-armament on the grounds that it was unaffordable; his stringent fiscal policy was partly responsible for the fall of the government in 1938. As Foreign Minister in Édouard Daladier’s cabinet in 1938–9, Bonnet helped to draft the Munich Pact which ceded Czechoslovakia to Germany. He was a member of the Vichy National Council (1941) which supported collaboration with Germany. After the war he entered the French National Assembly in 1956 as a dissident radical, serving until May 1968. Bonnet de Nuit is French slang for ‘killjoy’. 224 The Palestrina Pietà was a well-known sculpture attributed by some (including Clark) to Michelangelo but such an attribution was doubted by others (including Berenson). Supposedly dating to c. 1555, one of its puzzles is that there is no document attesting to its existence prior to 1736, when it is recorded as being in the funerary chapel of Cardinal Antonio Barberini in Santa Rosalia in Palestrina. It was acquired by the Italian state in 1939 and placed in the Accademia in Florence.

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carted to Palestrina. I send it to you for the light it throws on the contemporary N.G. Entombment.225 Affectionate greetings for all of you. Devotedly and nostalgically

B.B. P.S. When do you go to N.Y.?

Bellevue, Lympne, Kent Sunday Apr. 30, 1939

My Dear BB, We are off on the Queen Mary on Wed. next with Rob Hudson and hope to return on 31st on the Normandie. War seems unlikely for a few weeks anyway. Did K tell you he has got Ben Nicholson [sic] made Deputy Surveyor of the King’s pictures. K hopes to resign altogether in a year’s time. Everyone is pleased and Ben very much so. I enclose a 6” book K has just published in the N.G. His Leonardo book should reach you in the end of May if there are no more delays. Much love from us all to you and Mary and Nicky Yours ever Jane

Settignano Florence May 29, 1939

Dearest Jane, You either are back already or just returning. I am eager to learn how it has fared with you in New York and its coast and whom and what you have seen, what you have heard, and concluded. When you have the leisure, either of you, do write to me.

225 Michelangelo, The Entombment, c. 1500–01 (NG 790).

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Here we have no news. I have been trying to write, but this month I Tatti has been more like a Salzburg or Bayreuth inn during festival time than a private house. Work has been difficult. Then my negotiations with Harvard are in full swing and are pre-occupying. Did you hear anything about them while you were on the other side? Mary is better, comes out three times a day, and expects to leave for England June 25th. I expect to spend the summer here at I Tatti and the[n] at Vallombrosa. I wish you could join us at Casa al Dono.226 Love to you both B.B.

[Typewritten letter] 30, Portland Place, w.1. Langham 2417 27th June 1939 Bernard Berenson I Tatti Settignano Florence

My dear BB, I despair of ever finding time to write to you an adequate letter with my own hand, so please forgive me for sending you a dictated one, as I believe you would rather have our news in this form than not at all. We got back from America about a fortnight ago, and I must confess we were thoroughly glad to be home. You know how much we enjoyed our first visit and how many real friends we had in America, so I do not think it was insular prejudice which made us rather less enthusiastic this time. In order to enjoy America one has to abandon oneself to the general intoxication, and this time, either because the weather was so hot or because I have grown more critical, I found the immense display of undistributed energy exhausting rather than stimulating. I was also much more aware of the menace of mass-production, which is creating a situation in America not so far removed from that of Central

226 Casa al Dono was a replacement for Poggio al Spino, which the Berensons rented and which had been sold earlier in the year. Also near Vallombrosa, the Casa was a simple and austere house but comfortable, set among woods and fields, with an apple orchard and good views. Nicky bought the house in her own name in 1941, with money given to her by Berenson.

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Europe. All that matters to the chief powers is that public opinion should be dirigible, and every sort of device is used to degrade public taste and destroy all power of choice or discrimination. I think this is being very scientifically done, and I was even given a philosophical justification for it, which was a sort of mixture of Rosenberg227 and behaviourism. In the material sphere it means that one can practically never get a decent meal. Even cigars are now abolished so far as possible, because the choice of cigars involves an act of discrimination, and the ideal public must walk into the tobacconist and say ‘Camels’ or ‘Chesterfields’ as in a stupour. As for matters of taste, among many conversations I had with writers, etc., one editor of a literary magazine with a circulation of 3½ million said to me: ‘My business is to know the tastes of the most imbecile section of my readers, and I have to give them nothing which they have not thought of already’. I suggested that even the poor imbecile might occasionally like a change, but he said: ‘That would never do. If we once put in something that was first rate, we might create a taste which we could not always satisfy or control’. [Unsigned; see letter of 12 August 1939]

Settignano Florence July 11, 1939

Dear Kenneth. Let me thank you for the detail photos that I discovered on returning fr. the South a few days ago. They are a treasure. The Romaninos – so Giorgionesque in landscape with small figures,228 the Crivellis,229 the ‘Ercole Grandi’230 – what a

227 Probably a reference to Alfred Rosenberg (1893–1946), one of the main authors of key Nazi ideological creeds. In January 1934, Hitler had given Rosenberg responsibility for the spiritual and philosophical education of the Party and all related organisations. 228 Ascribed to Romanino, Pegasus and the Muses, c. 1540 (NG 3093). 229 Carlo Crivelli, The Annunciation with St Emedius, 1486, altarpiece (NG 739). 230 Costa and (?) Manieri, The Virgin and Child with St William of Aquitaine (?) and St John the Baptist, c. 1498–1500 (NG 1119). The authorship of the picture was much debated. Berenson, Italian Pictures of the Renaissance, 1932, ascribed the picture to Ercole Grandi (1491–1531), a Ferrarese painter and pupil of Lorenzo Costa (1459/60–1535). In 1937, Philip Pouncey, in an article titled ‘Ercole Grandi’s Masterpiece’, Burlington Magazine, vol. 70, no. 409 (April 1937), pp. 160–63, 166–9, demonstrated, with evidence from recent x-ray photographs, that the authorship was complex but could be ascribed to the hands of Costa and Gian Francesco Manieri (c 1460–1504). Grandi, Costa and Manieri were all pupils of Ercole Roberti (c. 1450–96).

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paste and scissors affair, and how good of its kind, and the Raphael ‘Crucifixion’.231 The last justifies Renan’s ejaculation when Ravaisson showed him a very early Raphael: ‘Qu’il a bien fait de quitter cette manniere.’232 And the Sebastianos! I wish there were more and more details of yr. great Signorelli.233 I wrote to Jane some days before you were supposed to return fr. N.Y. My letter may have been buried under all the burden of correspondence awaiting her. It was to ask for news of yr. sojourn over there. A rumour has reached me that you were flying to Geneva and thence to Brescia and Venice. I hear fr. everybody that the Veronese Exhib. is scarcely worth seeing.234 Most of the pictures have to be seen by artificial light, and there is little new. Brescia on the other hand is praised by all who have seen it.235 Contrawise all and sundry who have seen the Leonardo show at Milan scream with derision and disgust.236 I was three weeks in Naples and Pompei, etc., trying to memorise the shapes of late antiquity as in the mist of time I did those of the Renaissance. Visual memory serves me as ever but I can take in no new names nor recall the old ones. It is a curious and most inconvenient disease as bad as aphasia. Owing to a relapse Mary has not yet left for England, but hopes to go the 20th. Nick and I will probably go to Geneva (Hotel de la Paix) for a week. My best to you both, Devotedly B.B.

231 Raphael, The Crucified Christ with the Virgin Mary, Saints and Angels (The Mond Crucifixion), 1502–3, altarpiece (NG 3943). 232 Joseph Ernest Renan (1823–1892) was a French expert on Middle Eastern languages and civilisations. He wrote about early Christianity and on nationalism and national identity. Jean Gaspard Félix Ravaisson-Mollien (1813–1900) was a philosopher and archaeologist. 233 Luca Signorelli, The Circumcision, 1490–91, altarpiece (NG 1128). 234 There was a Veronese exhibition at the Ca’ Giustiniani in Venice, April–November 1939, catalogue by Rodolfo Pallucchini. 235 La Pittura bresciana dei rinascimento, Palazzo della Pinacoteca comunale Tosio-Martinengo, Brescia, March–September 1939. 236 The exhibition Mostra di Leonardo da Vinci e delle Invenzioni Italiane, May–October 1939, at the Palazzo dell’Arte, now considered legendary, was the largest showing of paintings by Leonardo until the National Gallery’s Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan, 2011–12.

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[Undated but must be after 10 July 1939] Bellevue Lympne Kent Saturday.

My Dearest BB, How K and I wish we could have been in Geneva with you and Nicky next week! We were there a fortnight ago as K had to broadcast on them last Monday.237 It was such fun, the pictures in such good light and so lovely, the sunshine, the geraniums and the Orchestre Symphonique de Geneve playing ‘You should see me dance the polka’ out of doors by the lake. We envy you it all very much. I have meant to write to you so often, but we have never been so busy as since we have got back from America.We are definitely moving the furniture etc. from Portland Place before Sept. to avoid rates and taxes and hope to sell it in the autumn if there isn’t a war. If there is we have a gas and bomb proof shelter to which the public are welcome. We have got a flat in Grays Inn and are looking for a house in the country as this place has been spoilt by the aeroplanes. Also with poor Philip dead it is no longer the same. It would make it easier to choose a house if we knew whether there would be a war or not. Winston238 dined with us a short time ago with Walter Lippman239 and we had great fun proving the b.e. was not yet decadent. The next week Walter L. flew from Paris to lunch with us to meet the p.m. which was a change. We also saw a lot of Frankfurter240 when he was over to get his hon. degree at Oxford. We got him to meet the p.m. too, also Anthony.241 I wish you could have been there to hear various stories about the Russian agreement. Tomorrow we dine at Buck Palace to meet Prince Paul. He has been very careful. I wish you were here as alas we can’t get to Italy till about 20th Sept. K is chairman of two a.r.p. committees which will have to go on meeting alas. We shall be half in London, working, moving etc. and half in the country. K’s book on Leonardo may just miss you. It was sent to I Tatti 2 days ago. We do hope you will like it. Much love to you and Nicky from us all, Jane

237 238 239 240 241

Clark spoke about the Geneva exhibition (see n. 243) on bbc Radio on Monday 10 July 1939. Winston Churchill Walter Lippmann Felix Frankfurter. He received an honorary doctorate from Oxford University on 21 June 1939. Anthony Eden.

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Casa al Dono Vallombrosa (Prov. di Firenze) Aug. 12, 1939

Dear Kenneth. I have this month finished yr. ‘Leonardo’ and I take real pleasure in telling you how much it has impressed, stirred, and delighted me. It is informing, illuminating and serene, and beautifully written. Not overwritten. No purple patches, but where the subject demanded, imposed it. What you say about the ‘Last Supper’, what you write about the ‘Monna Lisa’, about the Leda. I revel in the description of the Nymph (your plate 57). Such mots justes through out, such close-fitting epithets.242 The book as the biography of an artist is at once the plainest tale and the most rational yet sensitive interpretation of a great genius that I have come across in a very long time. What a blessed contrast to the Talmudic Hegelian writings on Michaelangelo, on the Breughels, on Durer, on Leonardo himself turned out by the Germano. phonies of Central Europe, and now – alas! – their Anglophone and even French imitators. Dear Kenneth, I send you my congratulations, and can scarcely dare to add that I now can say Nunc dimittis for fear that I may be thought presumptuous – Nicky and I got to this idyllic cottage a few days ago, and hope to remain till toward the end of Sept. Previously we spent three weeks in Switzerland, going and coming. I went to the Prado show at least a dozen times, and despite the crowd, enjoyed it more and more.243 Velasquez is – by me at least – inexhaustible.

242 Clark, Leonardo da Vinci, p. 160, described the drawing of a standing Nymph from Windsor (RCIN 912581): ‘The most magical of all these costume pieces is the figure of a woman standing in front of a little waterfall, pointing into the distance with a glance and a gesture which only Pater could have described. This should be Leonardo’s last drawing, just as the Tempest should be Shakespeare’s last play. In it he returns to the inspiration of his youth, the tradition of Fra Filippo and Botticelli, and presents it with the depth and mastery of age. It is the figure which had haunted him all his life, his angel, his familiar, transfixed at last. Unlike the St John in the Louvre, where a similar creature of his imagination is almost smothered in the labour of painting, this drawing is built of touches as broken and evasive as the latest Titian. We cannot imagine it being done part by part. A puff of wind has blown away the mist, and revealed this goddess, as stately as an elm, as subtle as a Gothic Virgin.’ 243 In summer 1939, the Spanish Republic publicised its plight through an exhibition of masterpieces from the Prado at the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire in Geneva. The paintings were sent by train and returned to Spain in September.

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In the Galleria of the Cambridge Univ. Press is reproduced a portr. of yrself wh. is both accurate and magnificent. I should greatly appreciate a copy of the photo. after which it was reproduced. Also a photo of the Wilton House ‘Leda’ (yr. plate 41).244 Let me hear where you all are, and take my congratulations to heart. Love to you all B.B.

12th August 1939 Bellevue Lympne Kent

My dear BB, I enclose one of several fruitless attempts to write to you. The letter seemed to have got into the wrong key, and I had to abandon it. We have had a miserably wet summer, with some minor misfortunes (twins with whooping cough etc) but on the whole I have been extremely happy. Gallery work has been good fun – no rows – and I have handed over some royal collections work to Ben Nicholson who does it very well. At present we are absorbed in moving house. Portland Place was too big, the children never went there, and in any case I was living beyond my means, which is agreeable for a time, but might end badly. I am immensely relieved as I was sick of the social obligations imposed on us by Portland Place.The Grays Inn flat (no. 5) is most sympathetic and should encourage good talk, reading and all the other civilized activities which are inhibited by a larger architectural scale. We shall move in in September, and are at present camping out in Portland Place, amidst mountains of packing cases, which should be picturesque, but actually are very depressing. We are having to give up this house owing to the aeroplanes. I have sent a p.c. to Nicky saying that we shall probably come to Italy at the end of September in order to see the Brescia show – which must be most interesting. I imagine that Leonardo at Milan is appalling, but I suppose I ought to go there in case I learn something about the pupils. I have written a little piece about our Virgin of the Rocks and two angels which you will see in the Warburg journal. I read it at the Congress and people seemed to be persuaded. Incidentally the Congress was quite good fun. Eric and Leigh Ashton handled it

244 Cesare da Sesto after Leonardo, Leda, 1507–10.

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very well and all our foreign colleagues felt they had had their guineas worth.245 I am glad you liked the details. I have taken a few more (v. good ones) of the Tura Madonna246 and am producing another book of them. The first one was well received.This one will be a failure like all sequels, but a few people will like to have the reproductions.247 You will find my Leonardo lectures awaiting you at I Tatti. I think the book is clearly written and relatively free from the usual clap trap, but it is lacking in depth owing partly to the circumstances under which it was produced. You know I am longing to see you again and recommence our walks and talks – I hope Prince Paul gave you our many messages With love from us both Yours ever, K

22 Aug ’39 30, Portland Place, w.1. Langham 2417

My dear BB, The day after I had written to you your letter about the book arrived. I cannot tell you what it means to me. I am touched and glad beyond words to know that you liked the book, and feel that I am, in one way at least, carrying on your work. Of course I know that my book has been much over praised by my English friends because they are so little used to books on painting being readable at all. It is a light-weight book, the product of a few holidays: still I suppose it is a sample of the kind of work I can do and hope I shall do with greater depth later on. Besides giving me great joy, your letter has had a decisive influence on me. You know, I have always believed in myself as a writer, but so many of my friends have tried to push me into the world of action that I feared this might be a kind way of indicating that I should never be a man of letters. Now after your

245 The 15th International Congress on the History of Art was held in London in July 1939. More than 700 delgates from 25 countries attended lectures at University College, London. There was a reception at the Victoria and Albert Museum in the presence of Queen Mary. Leigh Ashton was the Secretary to the Congress and Eric MacLagan was the President of the British Committee. 246 Cosimo Tura, The Virgin and Child Enthroned, mid-1470s (NG 772). 247 Clark, More Details from Pictures in the National Gallery, London: National Gallery, 1941 (without commentary).

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letter I feel that my old ambition of bringing the criticism of painting within measurable distance (as a form of literature, I mean) of the criticism of poetry is worth pursuing. There will always be some tiresome technicalities to overcome in the translation of one medium of expression into another, but not nearly as many as people think. I am so much encouraged by your letter that I am longing to set out on a new subject. But as long as I am at the Gallery I must restrain myself, for I could never undertake any serious research, and must only write enough to keep my pen sharp. I do enjoy the Gallery work very much – there is something intoxicating about administration, and then it is so easy compared with creative work. However by the look of the news this morning both writing and administration will soon end. Our pleasant life is nearly over, and I can truly say that your letter is one of the things which have made my life worth living. If we can ever return to normal pursuits there are many things I should like to talk over with you, more than I could get into a letter. It comes over me how much time I wasted on things and people who bored me in the days when it was still possible to see one’s friends. Our love to you all Ever your affectionate K P.S. I shall send the Wilton Leda. As for my own mug, my family always thought that photo rather comic. I like the romantic effect, and in any case would love you to have it.

Casa al Dono Vallombrosa (Prov. di Firenze) Aug. 25, 1939

Dear Kenneth. Thanks for the letter of the 22nd. It consoles me to read that you think seriously of returning to writing. I am confident that you can digest and assimilate all that students like myself and others, perhaps less serious, yet suggestive and stimulating, have done in the last fifty years and that you can write as none of us since Ruskin and Pater have written.

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You can expound. You can convince, and when really needed, you can soar, but soar without distortion. Now I must beg a great favour of you. It is this:– There is just a chance that if war breaks out Mary will not be able to rejoin me, but have to remain in England. I am writing to Baring Bros. to pay her out £100 a month from Nov.1. What I have there on deposit should hold out a year from that date. Should the war (if it breaks out) last longer, I may find it difficult to get money to her. In that case I would ask you to provide for her at the rate of £100 a month, and I, if alive, or my estate would of course pay you back. It looks pretty bleak, and my own situation is aggravated by the fact that a person without whom I can not carry on at all may be an enemy subject in countries like France or England. As for Switzerland there is a rumor that it will not allow Engl. or Americ. to reside if war comes.248 With love to both of you, and best wishes Devotedly B.B.

248 See Introduction to Ch. 6.

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The completeness of the separation that war brought is witnessed by the cessation of all postal services between Britain and Italy towards the end of 1939. Between then and the spring of 1945 no letters passed and for more than five years neither Berenson nor Clark had any first-hand news of the other, nor could be sure whether the other were alive or dead. Even before Chamberlain’s broadcast on 3 September 1939 to announce that the British nation was now at war with Germany, Clark had organised the removal of all the pictures from the National Gallery to places of safety. The exercise took a mere twelve days to complete, helped by a ‘rehearsal’ in September 1938 in the belief that war was imminent then, only for the pictures to come back to the gallery when Chamberlain returned claiming ‘peace with honour’ from his meeting with Hitler in Munich. All the paintings from the National Gallery and some from the Royal Collection at Hampton Court and Buckingham Palace were removed to Penrhyn Castle, the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth, the University of Wales at Bangor and to Arthur Lee’s house in Gloucestershire. However, it was soon realised that these locations were not out of the range of German bombers and therefore not as safe as they could be. There were suggestions that the paintings should be removed to North America but Churchill vetoed the suggestion, declaring: ‘bury them in the bowels of the earth, but not a picture shall leave this island’ (Clark OH p. 5). After a search, the paintings were removed to a disused slate quarry at Manod near Blaenau Ffestiniog, in remotest Snowdonia in North Wales, and there they remained for the rest of the war. The Manod Caves required considerable preparation: a road suitable for transport vehicles had to be built, the entrance tunnel enlarged and protective air-conditioned huts built inside the caves themselves. The National Gallery did not, however, remain empty or unused. The much admired concert pianist Myra Hess suggested to Clark that the central rotunda could be used for lunchtime concerts. Clark embraced her suggestion, rejecting

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her proposal for a weekly concert in favour of a daily performance. From the very first concert in October 1939, they proved to be immensely popular and have become part of the historic folklore of the doughty spirit of the British determined to carry on in the face of adversity. Clark was active in their organisation, selling the modestly priced tickets and welcoming visitors, including on one occasion the Queen. To fill the spaces on the empty walls, he first organised exhibitions of contemporary art and later, every month, one painting was brought back from Wales for exhibition as a symbolic reminder of the values for which the National Gallery and great art stood and that they were worth fighting for. The first picture to be shown, in January 1942, was Rembrandt’s Portrait of Margaretha de Geer, which was acquired in 1941 through the nacf. David Balniel who had become 28th Earl of Crawford in 1940, sold the picture to raise money to pay death duties. Thousands attended the concerts – there were more than 1700 – and the exhibitions of a single picture. Popular exhibitions organised by Clark included those on Paul Klee, nineteenth-century French painting and designs for Diaghilev’s ballets. Wartime work by contemporary British artists was also shown. The only interruption to these activities occurred in 1940 and 1944 because of bomb damage and the threat of bombing. In Wales the pictures were looked after by the scholarly Martin Davies, who had been one of the chief critics of Clark’s directorship of the gallery before the war. He devoted his time to carrying out a meticulous examination of the works and to a precise and painstaking cataloguing of them. For him it was a heaven-sent opportunity to do what he did best, undisturbed by the priorities of a director whom he considered was too inclined to showmanship and the need to accommodate popular public demand. There was also a studio for the gallery’s elderly restorer, William Holder, who carried out, also undisturbed, a thorough cleaning and restoration of the collection. Clark visited the Manod Caves regularly but the paintings which he knew well, when separated from their frames and from his loving arrangement of them on the gallery walls, had lost their appeal. As he explained in his autobiography: ‘for some reason I did not enjoy looking at them. Out of their frames, crammed close together, in no order except that imposed by the necessities of size they seemed to be dishonoured . . . I could learn nothing, and realised that I am an incurable aesthete. Unless I enjoy a thing I cannot understand it’ (Clark OH p. 8). In 1939 Clark was thirty-six years old and thus eligible for war service in the field but, partly because of his technical status as a civil servant and partly because of his standing as the head of a prestigious national institution, accustomed to administrative and committee work and well connected, he was soon asked to contribute to the many committees which were established to organise the ‘Home Front’. He joined the Ministry of Information as the head of films and

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when Sir John Reith, the formidable and evangelical pre-war Director of the bbc, became Minister of Information, Clark was asked to become head of home publicity, which included responsibility for motion pictures. Thus he came into contact with such luminaries as Alexander Korda, Michael Balcon, Leslie Howard, Danielle Darrieux, René Clair and Graham Greene. The variety of films produced was considerable and included two-minute shorts, documentaries and thrillers. These activities were not inimical to Clark and kept him busy. Through them he gained skills and experience that would play a significant part in shaping his life after the war. He began to take part in documentaries; was regularly asked to broadcast on the radio, including taking part in the wellknown discussion programme the ‘Brains Trust’; gave many lectures and was instrumental in the organisation of exhibitions. Reith was soon sacked from the Ministry of Information but Clark stayed on and, after the Dunkirk debacle in the early summer of 1940, was asked to set up the ‘Home Morale Emergency Committee’. It achieved neither focus nor distinction. Clark remained busy at the Ministry of Information until Brendan Bracken, the magazine magnate, a larger than life, red-haired Irishman, took over in July 1941, when Clark was politely and quietly asked to move on. How did Clark fill his days? In his own words,‘chiefly by sitting on Committees’ (Clark OH p. 55), as the entries in his engagement diary indicate. Occasionally there were more adventurous tasks, such as a widely reported three-week morale-boosting visit to Sweden in the spring of 1942, where he gave sixteen lectures and twenty speeches, at the same time reassuring the Swedes that the British were not done for – the King of Sweden was thought to be pro-German. Reporting the visit at length, The Times noted that he saw pictures of Winston Churchill in offices, galleries and libraries everywhere in Sweden, and never one of Hitler. Shortly after returning home Clark was elected an Honorary Member of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Sweden. (He made a further visit with lectures in March 1945.) Some of his committee work was spasmodic and not particularly onerous, such as the Royal Mint Advisory Committee (coin design), the Stamp Advisory Committee (stamp design) and the nacf (saving art for the nation). Some appointments came towards the end the war, such as his nomination in 1944 as a founder member of the Council of Industrial Design (‘to promote by all practicable means the improvement of design in the products of British industry’). The project that most actively involved Clark’s interest and time was the establishment of the War Artists Scheme administered by the War Artists Advisory Committee, part of the Ministry of Information. This project was of Clark’s devising: he chaired it and was the driving force, building on the example of a similar scheme during the First World War. His vision was to support and

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encourage the creation and purchase of paintings and sculpture by the young, as well as the leading, artists of the day to record and reflect the war effort. He needed all his political and personal skills and influence to get the project off the ground, and shrewdly brought onto his committee a variety of potentially antagonistic interests from the London art schools, the Royal Academy, the Armed Forces, the Imperial War Museum and various government ministries. The central aim was to express through art the liberal, civilised values for which Britain stood; he also had a separate agenda, to give artists a legitimate role that would save them from action on the battlefield, for which they were not best suited. Exhibitions were organised at home and overseas and, at the end of the war, the accumulated works were distributed to public galleries in Britain and the Empire and Commonwealth. More than four hundred artists were employed or commissioned under the scheme and some six thousand works of art were acquired. The visual record of a nation at war was impressive and covered every aspect and every activity at home and overseas: among the lasting artistic achievements were Stanley Spencer’s paintings of work in the shipyards, Graham Sutherland’s of bombed London, Henry Moore’s shelter drawings, Paul Nash’s depiction of the Battle of Britain and Edward Ardizonne’s homely renderings of daily life. One artist described the scheme as ‘a governmental magic carpet’ which carried some of them off to places as far away as North Africa, Greece, Italy and the Far East, there presenting them with artistic and social challenges and personal dangers, which stretched their resourcefulness and inspiration to the limit. The success of this remarkable and enlightened act of state patronage was Clark’s most significant and lasting contribution to the war effort. His other principal involvement – which extended for two decades – was with the organisation that eventually became the Arts Council. Initially, Clark was a founder member of the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (cema), which was established in 1939 with private funds from the Pilgrim Trust and from the Carnegie Foundation. Its chairman was the aristocratic ‘Buck’ (Lord) De La Warr, who had the distinction of having been the first hereditary peer to join the Labour Party in 1923 at the age of twenty-four (he closed his political career by serving as Postmaster General in the last Conservative administration of Winston Churchill appointing Clark to be the first chairman of the Independent Television Authority in 1954). The purpose of cema was to employ artists from all disciplines and to organise morale-boosting tours of the performing and visual arts. Regional offices were established and by the end of the war some 600,000 people had attended cema concerts and exhibitions and more than 1.5 million had been to its plays. In 1942 the chairmanship was taken over by John Maynard Keynes who, with public money, drove it forward until his sudden death at Easter 1946, just a few months before the establishment of the

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Arts Council of Great Britain by royal charter. Clark was Chairman of the Arts Council from 1953 to 1960. On a personal level, the glamorous and lavish pre-war lifestyle which the Clarks had enjoyed together in their house in Portland Place and over weekends with Sir Philip Sassoon at Port Lympne came abruptly to an end; for five years they were constantly on the move.They relinquished the house in Portland Place well before September 1939 and replaced it with a spacious, rented top-floor flat at 5 Gray’s Inn Square, a short walk north of Fleet Street, in the quiet collegiate atmosphere of one of the Inns of Court which is the habitat of lawyers and the judiciary.Their elegant, panelled, eighteenth-century apartment, overlooking the gardens, was furnished in some style by Jane. Sassoon had died unexpectedly in June 1939 while they were returning from a tour of the usa and in any event they knew that if war came the Kent coast would be a principal danger zone. The Romney Marshes, which Bellevue overlooked, was a likely landing-point for an invading army – indeed, it was the place that Napoleon had selected for his dreamed-of landing. Like many families with young children, the Clarks sought a safe retreat in the West Country and, at the end of August 1939, Jane and the children moved to Upton House, a rented, rambling, grand, Vanburghstyle establishment in poor repair near Tetbury in Gloucestershire. It had ample space for their family and for a succession of friends: Henry Moore, Graham Sutherland and his wife Kathleen (who stayed for two years), the musician and writer Eddy Sackville West, the composer and conductor William Walton with his family, and lengthy stays from Clark’s mother, who otherwise lived in a hotel in Cheltenham. They made space on the walls for their own collection, for Emerald Cunard’s Manets, Bogey Harris’s Sienese ‘primitives’ and works by Duncan Grant, Moore and Sutherland. Until the start of the Blitz, which did not begin in earnest until September 1940, the Clarks’ routine was to spend their weeks in London and their weekends in Gloucestershire. However, one of the early raids half-destroyed their flat in Gray’s Inn Square, rendering it uninhabitable, and from then on they were separated for long periods of time. Clark spent most of his week in London staying in hotels and clubs, although in 1941 they purchased a terraced house on the summit of Hampstead Heath, called Capo di Monte (it had once been lived in by the great eighteenth-century actress and tragedienne, Sarah Siddons). The responsibility for bringing up their three children, aged eleven and seven at the beginning of the war, fell wholly on Jane. As the Clarks’ lives became increasingly separated, the stresses and strains of this and of wartime austerity and anxiety all took their toll on Jane’s never robust health and emotional wellbeing. Clark admitted to Jane at the time that the affection and companionship that he had reserved for her exclusively before the war, and on which she depended,

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was now shared with others. Jane’s solace in times of trouble was not through an emotional relationship with another – although she is said to have had an affair with William Walton and that they had contemplated running off together – rather, she involved herself in two well-meaning projects in London: one was cheering up the otherwise drab venues of ‘British Restaurants’ (a government scheme to provide basic square meals for a minimal sum) with murals by contemporary artists. For this venture she recruited old friends, Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell and John Piper. The second venture was the organising of cultural events such as lectures and concerts at the Churchill Club, which she helped to establish, for the benefit of us forces. Here, too, she used her wide network of social contacts to recruit prominent figures. But the shared excitement and glamour of their pre-war life had gone, and the fact that her husband was finding roles that he could fulfil, and be fulfilled by, without her heightened her unhappiness. When things got really bad she took refuge in the escapes from reality that were temptingly offered by medical treatments and alcohol. Berenson had long realised that a European conflict was inevitable and that eventually Italy would be drawn in alongside Germany, with the usa alongside France and Britain. He had no intention of leaving Italy but he knew that he had, at least, to explore other options, all of which presented problems. He himself was an American citizen, as was Mary. For as long as the usa remained neutral, theoretically this status allowed them complete freedom of movement. But he was not prepared to be separated from Nicky Mariano on any account and, as she had joint German and Italian nationality from her parents, this ruled out any prospective move to the United Kingdom, for example. In early September 1939, Berenson and Nicky were at Vallombrosa and Mary, whose health continued to decline, was with her family in England. On the declaration of war with Germany, Berenson and Nicky immediately returned to I Tatti and Mary joined them there in October.At the end of September, Berenson and Nicky made a visit to Venice and Prince Paul in Yugoslavia. However, the pattern and rhythm of their lives was inevitably changing. Petrol and provisions began to be in short supply. Visitors became fewer and then stopped coming. Although Italy had not yet declared war, foreigners were packing up and leaving Florence, and even their Italian friends, who had been frequent and welcome visitors, were reluctant to come up to I Tatti for fear of being seen as anti-fascist. Berenson’s views were well known to the authorities and he and his visitors were closely monitored. Despite war’s privations and frustrations, the Berenson entourage was still able to travel round Italy. Mary spent the early summer months of 1940 near Viareggio, while Berenson and Nicky visited Rome, and then they all reunited at Vallombrosa. However, the shortage of visitors deprived Berenson

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of his favourite occupation, conversation. His immediate remedy was to write letters to his correspondents all over the world. But as the conflict deepened the international postal services ceased to operate and all mail was liable to censorship. He therefore turned from correspondence to books and started work on a project that he had long promised himself to undertake but had constantly put aside: it eventually saw the light of day in 1948 as Aesthetics and History in the Visual Arts. He also wrote, in 1941, Sketch for a Self-portrait, which was eventually published in 1949. Written at a time when the fortunes of the free West hung in the balance, and the humanist values which Berenson stood for looked as though they might be extinguished, it was a short, self-reflective, rambling soliloquy that surveyed his aspirations and failures as he saw them. Complementing this, he started to keep a diary in January 1941, in which he noted down his thoughts and observations. The diary was maintained continuously to the end of his days, the last entry being in April 1958. Extracts were published as Rumour and Reflection in 1952 and Sunset and Twilight posthumously in 1963 Italy had maintained a relaxed and tolerant attitude towards those of Jewish birth but, under pressure from the Germans, in early 1939 restrictions on Italian Jews, their persons and their property, began to be promulgated.As a consequence, Berenson became concerned not so much for his own safety as for the future of I Tatti and his desire that it be transferred, eventually, to Harvard. There were two questions: first, would Harvard want to take on I Tatti in the current political climate; second, would the Italian authorities allow a transfer to Harvard? On the latter question, he received personal assurances from Mussolini’s foreign minister and son-in-law, Count Ciano, who said that there would be no problem about such a transfer. Reassuring as this might have been, by August 1941 Berenson was afraid that the general economic and political circumstances might force them all to leave, and effectively abandon, I Tatti. Mussolini, having watched the success of the German armies, the fall of Finland, Denmark and Norway in the spring of 1940 and the ignominious retreat from Dunkirk in June, finally declared war on France and Britain in June. As a consequence, the Berensons’ loyal Welsh chauffeur, Parry, returned home, as did Elizabeth Percival, Mary’s maid. Nicky’s attempts to get a visa to Switzerland were denied because of her Italian nationality. The usa entered the war in December 1941 following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and Italy declared war on the us shortly afterwards. Until then the Berensons had enjoyed the protection afforded citizens of a neutral country. In June 1942 Berenson resisted pressure from the us Chargé d’Affaires in Rome to leave Italy with him and the remaining us embassy staff. It was not a difficult decision to make: it would be impossible for Nicky and Mary’s nurse to accompany them because of their nationalities, so such a move could not even be considered. Realistically, he

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had no option other than to sit tight, see how events played out and hope for the best. Nonetheless, their situation was extremely difficult. Congress had passed a law to say that any alien-born citizen who had been out of the us for more than five years would lose their citizenship. This included Berenson himself, who had been born in Lithuania. Representations were made on his behalf in Washington. In the event, Roosevelt extended the effective date of the law to 1944 and as a result the validity of the Berensons’ passports was extended. Complications and restrictions steadily increased. Just up the road from I Tatti there was a prisoner of war camp for British officers at the Castello di Vincigliata and the local and relatively lowly placed Fascisti were determined to harass Berenson and make his life as difficult as possible, regarding his residence at I Tatti as totally undesirable. In March 1942, on instructions from Rome, all enemy alien property was sequestered, which included I Tatti and its contents. However, although life was difficult at a local level, in high places in Rome and Florence there was a desire to protect Berenson and leave him as undisturbed as possible. The law on sequestrations could not be changed but action behind the scenes succeeded in alleviating its worst consequences.The sequestrator who was officially appointed was a well-to-do Italian lawyer and keen art collector, the Marchese Serluppi, who was both anti-fascist and had diplomatic rights, being the ambassador of San Marino to the Holy See. Under his supervision, all the Berenson possessions were not seized but inventoried in detail, not just the works of art but all 34,000 volumes in his library and 95,000 items in the photographic archive. This relatively benign environment changed in 1943. In July of that year the Allies landed in Sicily and on 24 July, when Mussolini was removed from power, the Badoglio government came into existence. This government sought an armistice with the Allies but the euphoria was short-lived. The response of the Germans was to occupy northern and central Italy in September 1943, and from then on the danger to Berenson became real and apparent. As an American and ethnically a Jew, and as a self-declared anti-fascist, he was, for the Germans, a prime target. Nicky sought advice from the Marchese Serluppi, who immediately offered Berenson and Nicky refuge in his Villa La Fontanelle at Careggi, just north of the Arno, not far from Fiesole.The thinking was that there, under the protection that his ambassadorial and diplomatic status was supposed to provide, they would have a safe refuge until hostilities ceased. There were fears that the works of art and books at I Tatti would be seized by the Germans, who were always on the lookout for treasures to confiscate and take to Germany. The most valuable pictures and sculptures were taken to La Fontanelle; others were hidden in Nicky’s sister Alda’s house in the Borgo San Jacopo near the Ponte Vecchio in Florence. The most important books were taken to Quarto, the Marchese Serluppi’s mother’s house above La Fontanelle,

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where she also hid Jewish refugees. Other books were secreted with Giannino Marchig, the painter and restorer, who was a close friend of the Berensons. At I Tatti the remaining books and works of art were re-arranged so as to disguise the departures and the deception was taken even further by removing photographs of the hidden works from local archives, and by retyping the sequestrator’s inventory. In all this they were assisted by the Marchese Serluppi, his wife and other wellplaced friends such as the German consul in Florence, Gerhard Wolff, and the director of the German Institute in Florence, Friedrich Kriegbaum. Between them they also spread carefully crafted rumours to put the German authorities off the scent, such as that he had fled to Portugal via the Vatican or was of Aryan descent being the illegitimate son of a Russian Grand Duke (Samuels ML p. 479). The deceptions held good and it seems that the rumours were either swallowed or sufficiently believed to cause the German authorities to go looking in the wrong places. I Tatti was occupied by German troops (including Field Marshal Kesselring), Mary remaining in residence, bedridden, alongside them, holed up in Nicky’s apartment. In the event, Berenson and Nicky were to spend more than twelve months at the Villa La Fontanelle, much longer than intended, for no one had supposed that the German resistance would be so fierce and so prolonged. Although letters passed backwards and forwards between Berenson and Mary, she never knew where her husband was hiding or how close his secret location really was. Everyone was afraid that if she did know she would let the information slip out, with disastrous consequences. The go-betweens who carried letters from La Fontanelle to I Tatti and back were Alda (who remained in charge of I Tatti) and her husband: being German and Italian, they could move freely. Berenson, although separated from many of his own works of art and his books, had the use of the fine library at La Fontanelle and was able to take walks in the surrounding hills. The terrace of the Villa overlooked Florence and from there, as he recorded in detail in his diary in August 1944, ‘like [in] the dress circle of a theatre’ (Samuels ML p. 485), they watched the bombardment of Florence, by day and by night, including such tragedies as the destruction of the Ponte Santa Trinità. As the front line moved gradually north, it passed through the Villa and its gardens and they were shelled by both sides. They survived but at times they were literally within inches of death.

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Casa Al Dono Vallombrosa (Prov. Di Firenze) Sept. 11 1939

Dear Kenneth. It is good of you to wire and re-assure me about Mary. I wish indeed Nicky and I were with all of you in England. But N. is a subject of this government, and for such the frontiers are already closed. Further – in England she would be an ‘enemy alien’ should this government get into war with England. I shall make an effort to get Nick permission to leave with me. But could she go to and remain in England without too many complications? Let me know if there still is time. If she cannot I shall have to remain in Switzerland if I can get out. I cannot really live without her (altho’ I might of course manage to exist) nor can I on my part leave her in the lurch. I need say no more, I am sure. I am deeply touched by your concern. We go down to I Tatti to await events. Love to you all B.B.

[Typewritten letter on National Gallery headed paper] The National Gallery 14th September 1939 Bernard Berenson Esq

Dear BB, Please forgive a typewritten letter, but you can imagine that I have a good deal to do at the moment. There is no reason at all why you should not both come to England. We have an old Italian friend, Bianca Weiss,1 living with us at the moment with her Italian maid, and apart from having to report once to the local police she has not been put to any inconvenience and, as far as I can see, can go on living here as long as

1

By 1933, Bianca Weiss was living in London and giving Italian lessons (unpaid) to Virginia Woolf, according to whom she was the mistress of Frank Stoop, a distant relation of Clark; see Ch. 2 n. 17.

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she likes. If Italy becomes an enemy country it only means that an Italian resident in England would have to report to the police before making a journey of more than five miles; but even this would present no difficulties if the ‘enemy alien’ were vouched for by a person like myself.You can well imagine that there are a great many German refugees for whom I am partly responsible and so far none of them seem to have suffered the least inconvenience. It is very hard to make them believe that we are not in the hands of a Gestapo, but they are gradually settling down and regaining confidence. So if you can get permission for Nicky to leave I think I can promise to find you a small house where you would be comfortable, and I can guarantee that you will not be put to any inconveniences other than those inseparable from our climate. It would be best of all if we could find a house for you somewhere near our own so you could use our Library, such as it is, and Edith’s. My own part in the war is still uncertain. I managed to move all our pictures out of London before the declaration, and since then have been struggling with problems of administration and innumerable committees. Jane is in the country with the children, very bored, but otherwise well. I still brood on the things you said about my book, which are an armour against any depression. With love to you both, Yours ever, K

[Letter on crested paper] Berdo Kranj2 Oct. 4 1939

Dear Kenneth Your last letter touched me deeply. I should love to live near you enjoy yr. company, yr library, and your ‘protection’. For the present there seems no likelihood that Italy will go in with Germany. It is true that we are subject to privations petrol for instance, coffee, foreign medicines and restrictions. Nevertheless I Tatti is a

2

Brdo near Kranj is an estate north-west of Ljubljana, Slovenia. The mansion house was built in 1510 by a Carniolan nobleman who was the administrator of the Hapsburg estates in the region. It passed through various ownerships and several transformations from its original Renaissance style. In 1935 it was bought by Prince Paul, who turned it into a sophisticated summer royal residence. Much used by President Tito (he had his fatal seizure there in 1980), it now hosts conferences and diplomatic meetings.

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paradise compared with anything we could hope to get in England. Besides, yr. winter climate does not like me. It hates me in fact. Of course if Italy should go with Germany we should be entirely cut off fr. our world and I doubt whether we could stand it. But leaving would be complicated by the problem of Nicky– – Now I must ask you, hard worked as you are, to offer yr. services to my Mary. She wants to return to me, but apparently there is no one near her to help her get the permit to leave. The transit visas over France and Switzerland, and the visa for Italy. (Thus far I believe Americans do not need one.) Also to arrange to make her journey as comfortable as possible under present conditions. Furthermore to let her have any reasonable amount of money, wh. I should repay you at once. – I am here with our friend for a few days.3 We mention you often, and he talks of you with real affection. He has read yr. Leonardo and enjoyed it and values it as much as I do. I have just been to Venice for a week, and spent all available hours at the Veronese show.4 You know how greatly I have always ranked him, and this time I could soak and soak, and I have come out not only tonicized by his art but prizing it more than ever. Try not to overwork. Drop me a line when you find the leisure and give my love to Jane Ever affectionately B.B.

I Tatti Settignano Florence Oct. 23, 1939

Dear Kenneth. I enclose a cheque for £100 wh. Mary tells me she owes you. It was good of you to let her have it. She got back last night and seemed no worse for the journey.

3 4

Prince Paul of Yugoslavia See Ch. 5 n. 234.

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In the Lit. Sup. of the New York Times I read that you are publishing a corpus of Leonardo’s drawings with over 100 reproductions.5 Do send me a copy as soon as it is out, and I should be grateful as well for the vol. of Fry’s memoirs6 prefaced by you also announced. I suppose your thoughts and occupations are already far from your ordinary ones. Even I in this ivory tower cannot get away from alarms and rumours so as to concentrate on my own work. I should be grateful for a word from either of you. I hope you all keep well, Ever affectionately B.B.

[Typewritten letter from the National Gallery] 1st November 1939 B. Berenson, Esq. Tatti, Settignano, Italy

After trying for several weeks to write you a letter in my own hand, I am as usual driven to mechanical aid. I have been exceedingly busy since the war began, as I have taken on the interesting but rather heartbreaking job of trying to find work for the thousands of artists who have been left practically penniless by the war. I have been doing this chiefly under the patronage of the Ministry of Labour, and really had to turn into a miniature labour exchange and Shadow Ministry of Fine Arts. In addition to this I have a good deal of administrative work connected with the Gallery, and we have taken on a series of daily lunch time concerts here, which are being a great success. Of course all the pictures have been sent away to the country, but we have made some of the Galleries habitable by hanging them with the original watercolours done for the Arundel Society,7 many of which are

5 6 7

Kenneth Clark, Leonard da Vinci: An Account of his Development as Artist, Cambridge University Press, 1939, with 68 pp. of plates. Kenneth Clark, Last Lectures by Roger Fry, with an Introduction by Kenneth Clark, Cambridge University Press and Macmillan, New York, 1939. The Arundel Society was founded in London in 1849 to promote an interest in Italian, Flemish and other paintings. Charles Eastlake, then Director of the National Gallery, hosted the meetings. The Society was named after the 17th-century Earl of Arundel who was one of England’s early patrons and connoisseurs. It published chromolithographs of Italian works of art to raise public awareness of them.The society was dissolved in 1897 and was succeeded in 1904 by the Arundel Club, which also issued reproductions of old masters in public and private collections.

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most decorative and of great archaeological [‘architectural’ crossed out] interest, as they show things before they were restored. The concerts have given me, and I think everyone else, great pleasure. We get audiences of up to 1,000 almost every day – people of all sorts who are prepared to give up their lunch in order to escape for a short time out of the ugliness and disorder of the present moment. To my great grief Jane has had to be in the country practically all the time. Just before the war began we had taken a house on the Gloucestershire [and] Wiltshire borders, not far from Malmesbury, but it was being entirely done up inside and when the war came was uninhabitable. Owing to the shortage of men and materials it has taken two months before we can even sleep there, and I don’t suppose it will be in decent order before Christmas. Poor Jane has had to spend her time chivvying workmen and imagining that I was having a very eventful, exciting life at the centre of things in London. Actually I am kept so busy that I see practically no one and hear no news. I am so glad to hear that Mary arrived safely, and thank you very much for the cheque. I wonder what Europe looks like from your part of the world. There can never have been a time when it was more impossible to see even a week ahead. I of course have had to give up any thought of writing, or preparing to write, and feel doubtful if the opportunity to do so will ever come again. It is rather disappointing when I had just been encouraged to think that I might yet do quite well in this line. We were so glad to think you had had a peaceful holiday in Jugoslavia.

Yours ever, K

Hotel de la Ville8 Roma Nov 30, 1939

My dear Kenneth, If I do not write oftener it is because I know you to be too busy to read me, and besides I might burden yr. conscience with the uneasy feeling that you must answer.Yr. last letter sounded forlorn and homesick. No wonder if you are

8

Now the Hotel de la Ville Intercontinental. Situated at the top of the Spanish Steps, it retains a penthouse suite with the view described in this letter.

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separated fr. wife and children! As for me I am watching the dawn rising.The sun has not appeared yet. Half an hour ago the moon almost full was lighting up the sky over the overlit town, with the Antonina column like a flame, and the Victor Em. Monument dazzling enough to make you blink. Nick and I have been here just a fortnight and we return to I Tatti in a couple of days. Fr. there Mary writes that she was getting better and better, and been out on longish drives. I fervently pray that my return may not bring about a collapse. Here I have spent forenoons in the sculpture galleries, in the Vatican chiefly, sniffling out decay so as to report it and study it for the book that I am planning but not writing. When I read reviews of all that is appearing on art in the abstract, and art in particular a nausea overtakes me as if I had overeaten myself. I would not mind fiddling while Rome was burning, but to add noise to noise is scarcely an old man’s job. He should be softly and silently vanishing away like the Boojum.9 Roma is more fascinating to the eye than ever, and at the same time offers a bain de multitude10 of just the right temperature. When I was a very little boy I used to wonder how it was that talk did not fill a room the way potatoes fill a sack. Now I know that it does not do anything, but I enjoy it. I enjoy conversatione more than ever, and as great cities are out of the way or out of bounds, I find (happily) all I want for my present needs, here. There is an attractive contemporary of yours at yr. embassy named Dixon,11 who seems to have been ganymeded from archeology to diplomacy by the present Brit. Ambassador12 when in the Near East. The other embassies offer interlocutors so does the Villa Medici.13 Then there are wonderful scholars like Tucci14

9

10

11 12 13 14

The Boojum was a type of Snark, a fictional animal invented by Lewis Carroll for his nonsense poem ‘The Hunting of the Snark’. A Snark is difficult to capture and various subterfuges are needed, as well as courage. In the eighth stanza of the poem the Baker goes after a Snark, only to disappear, never to be found again and leaving not a trace behind: ‘He had softly and suddenly vanished away . . ./ For the Snark was a Boojum, you see.’ In Le Spleen de Paris Baudelaire wrote: ‘Il n’est pas donné à chacun de prendre un bain de multitude: jouir de la foule est un art; et celui-là seul peut faire, aux dépens du genre humain, une ribote de vitalité, à qui une fée a insufflé dans son berceau le goût du travestissement et du masque, la haine du domicile et la passion du voyage’ (It is not given to every man to take a bath of multitude; enjoying a crowd is an art; and only he can relish a debauch of vitality at the expense of the human species, on whom, in his cradle, a fairy has bestowed the love of masks and masquerading, the hate of home, and the passion for roaming); Selected Poems by Charles Baudelaire, ed. and trans. Carol Clark, London: Penguin, 1996. John Pierson Dixon Sir Percy Loraine (1880–1961). He had been at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, as had Berenson. The French Academy in Rome is located in the Villa Medici on the Pincian Hill in Rome, by the Villa Borghese. Giuseppe Tucci (1894–1984) was an Italian scholar specialising in Tibet and the history of Buddhism. He spent nearly a decade in India before settling in Rome in 1931, where he taught at the University

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Rome is politically getting to be more and more Tyrani, and if it could but replace, while forgetting Carthage, all would be well. And that seems to be the present course. I have seen no chers collegues except Toesca.15 Like the rest of us he is more so as his age increases. His daughter of 11 is most gifted artistically. It will be interesting to watch how much of her talent remains after puberty. Ever so much love to Jane and yourself, Devotedly B.B.

I Tatti Settignano Florence Dec. 18, 1939

Dear Kenneth. I have not the heart to wish you a Merry Xmas, but most sincerely a Happy New Year. The war is a horror, and victory (of wh. I am sure) will be but the beginning of re-educating and re-conditioning the Germans. It is a positive liberation tho’ to be freed fr. the incubus of stupidity, hesitancy, pro. Hitlerism wh. seems to breed in ever widening circles over the West. The issue is clear for most of us, and we should devote all the energies left over by the fighting to thinking out a peace that will teach all continental people that force and fraud do not in the long run pay people more than they do individuals. There should be moral comfort in the hope that such a peace can be established and the moral re-education of the Germans – and not of them only – well started. I have wandered far from the very simple wish to send you our heartfelt wishes for a satisfactory 1940. When you enjoy a quarter of an hour of leisure write, or get Jane to tell us how you are, all of you, and what yr. occupations are. We are interested. As for us we can boast that we have no history. Mary happily is better than I could have hoped for. Life goes on pretty smoothly. The restrictions we feared

15

of Rome La Sapienza until his death. In 1933, with the philosopher Giovanni Gentile, he founded the Italian Institute for the Middle and Far East (Istituto Italiano per il Medio ed Estremo Oriente), based in Rome. He was a supporter of Mussolini. Pietro Toesca

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in Sept. have proved innocent enough. Opinion is on the whole more and more in accord with our own, except am’g the few anti-Brit. anti-Semitic offspring of Americ heiresses. The only complaint I have to make is of my own lack of will power to resist – giving far too much time to reading about the war and discussing it. In Rome recently I met one of yr. embassy yg. men – Dixon by name. He is called back to the F.O. If he comes yr. way, cherish him. He delighted me. Ever affectionately B.B.

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Seven Picking up the Threads 1945–1947

When the bombardment of Florence and the shelling of the Villa La Fontanelle finally ceased in August 1944, there were many threads for Berenson to pick up. As the Allies entered Florence and the Germans retreated northwards, the prospect of returning to I Tatti became a reality. On 1 September several visitors came up from Florence and brought news both of the outside world and of the destruction within Florence itself. A Major Samson, who was the head of the Allied Office for Displaced Persons, brought news that I Tatti had been left unharmed by its German occupants, as did the composer and conductor Igor Markevitch, who had been living with his family in the Villino; they also brought encouraging news of Mary’s health. The following day, 2 September 1944, Berenson was driven up to I Tatti for a brief visit. The house was relatively undamaged although most of the glass in the windows had been broken. The garden and the neighbouring farmland were in a terrible state. On 23 September, with much apprehension, he returned to take up permanent residence again, dreading the confusion and squalor in which he might have to live. His fears were unfounded. He was met at the front door by the Anreps and other servants who, ‘in a most unexpected magical fashion’, showed his study and bedroom looking as he had left them on 10 September 1943. There was no electricity and most of the necessities of life including food were in short supply or unobtainable, but he was back home. Over the coming weeks the books and works of art which had been hidden began to be reassembled. The principal loss was among those hidden in the Anreps’ house in the Borgo San Jacopo near the Ponte Vecchio, Florence. It was one of the houses which bordered the River Arno that had been dynamited by the Germans. As a result, many pictures were severely damaged or required repairs and some were lost entirely. In some respects Berenson had enjoyed his enforced isolation at La Fontanelle since it had removed all the social distractions which habitually interrupted

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his reading and writing. Out of that enforced seclusion, both at I Tatti and La Fontanelle, eventually came several books, including One Year’s Reading for Fun (published posthumously in 1960), which was a record in diary form of the books that Berenson, Mary and Nicky read, and read to each other, and of the ensuing discussions and conversations. One principal thread which had been warp, weft and embellishment in the tapestry of his life soon, however, snapped. On 23 March 1945, Mary Berenson died. Their marriage had never been the easiest of relationships but they had stuck together through thick and thin. Mary’s death did not, of course, leave him alone: rather, now that the ménage à trois had become a ménage à deux, and Mary’s constant criticisms and ability to enrage him became a thing of memory, Berenson found, as he approached his eightieth birthday, a new energy and a determination to write the books that he had for long half-planned but never got round to writing. Life at I Tatti soon resumed its traditional routine. The resumption of international postal services in 1945 enabled the voluminous personal and business correspondence to start again. Visitors became increasingly frequent. Berenson and Nicky made plans for expeditions. Travel restrictions were gradually eased and the faithful Welsh chauffeur, Parry, returned to the fold.The first tour was to Siena in July 1945. Rome was revisited in spring 1947, the last stay there having been in 1942. The annual summer exodus to the pine woods and cool seclusion of Vallombrosa was resumed. Nonetheless, post-war I Tatti was a different place. Clark recalled a noticeable change of atmosphere: if the building had not changed, and the servants had not changed, the atmosphere had. Vituperation had become very rare, explosions practically unknown. This may have been partly due to the disappearance of Mrs B who had a positive genius for enraging her husband whereas Miss Mariano had an equal genius for mollifying him. But . . . it was due . . . more to a change in Mr Berenson . . . he had regained in solitude the unclouded love of beauty which shines out of his early letters; and he had ‘come to himself ’ quite literally . . . (Clark OH p. 104). Word soon got around among Allied troops of the existence of a remarkable old man, of great but indeterminate age, of indefinable powers and cultural expertise, a known anti-fascist who was both an American citizen and a Jew, yet who had remained in Italy throughout the war and survived. Berenson had become a legend and he was more than happy to play the part of a Living Legend – the ‘Sage of Settignano’. Many whom he had never met before – journalists in particular – made their way up to I Tatti simply to have a look and to be able to go home and say that they had met him. The visitors who were more welcome were the friends, and relations of friends, from the us and Britain who were serving in the Armed Forces in Italy, who brought news and gossip, as well as

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English and American publications which had been banned from distribution in Italy during the war. An early visitor was Robert Berenson, a second cousin who was serving as aide-de-camp to General Clark. Lively, young and attractive, he was married to a daughter of the couturier Schiaparelli. Berenson followed his career with interest as he flourished in the world of international finance in Paris and became a partner of the Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis. Under Nicky’s management, life at I Tatti settled into a strict and courtly routine. Berenson worked in his study in the morning; came down for lunch at 1 pm precisely, spruce, alert, immaculately dressed, ‘his delicate blue veined hands looking as fragile and translucent as porcelain’ (Alan Moorhead, A Late Education, London: Hamish Hamilton, 1970, p. 154), when he would courteously talk to his guests in precise and beautifully modulated phrases, but eat very little and drink nothing; he took a rest in the afternoon; descended again for tea at 5.30; after tea there was a walk in the garden; in the evening, dinner in black tie took place at 8 pm precisely, after which Nicky read aloud to him. Berenson’s relationship with Italian friends and the Italian authorities was established on a new footing. The old opponent of the Fascist order was now regarded as a hero. In April 1945 he was asked to become the president of a special commission for the restoration of Florence. The Italian intelligentsia discovered an appetite for his writings and his publications were re-issued in Italian editions and sometimes an Italian translation of a new work appeared before the English version. In June 1945 he was asked to write the introduction to an exhibition of French art in Florence which had been organised by the French Consul and which was a survey from the early Renaissance to Modigliani. This increasing private adulation finally found formal public expression in the early summer of 1948 when, first, he was granted the Freedom of the City of Florence by the Mayor of Florence, thus becoming an Honorary Citizen; and then, just before his eighty-third birthday, he was honoured by the Italian government for services to Italian art at a ceremony at the Palazzo Strozzi, attended by a gathering of international art historians and critics.To commemorate the event, a new bronze medal was struck bearing his image in profile, and he was also presented with a historic bronze medal by the early fifteenth-century sculptor and medallist Matteo di Andrea de’ Pasti, which had come to light, buried in a wall of the Tempio Malatestiana at Rimini, as a consequence of the Allied bombardment there. (See Chapter Eight.) Finance could have been a worry but by 1945 Berenson had discreetly come to an arrangement with Georges Wildenstein, the gallery owner, whom he knew well. He acted as Wildenstein’s expert on Italian Renaissance paintings, in return for a substantial fixed retainer of some $50,000 per annum (something like $2 million in today’s money), at a time when living in Europe was cheap for anyone holding us dollars. The arrangement continued until Berenson’s last days.Wildenstein’s gallery had been founded in Paris in 1910 by Georges’s father,

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Nathan, who came from a family of Jewish cattle-dealers in Alsace Lorraine. The family had flourished in art dealing and in horse racing and had established galleries in London and New York as well as Paris. In 1940 they fled from Paris to New York. Georges Wildenstein was not just a shrewd and successful art dealer: he was a genuine scholar, the proprietor of the Gazette des beaux-arts, and possessed one of the world’s superlative art reference libraries. Berenson also, in all likelihood, earned additional fees from the less scholarly Italian dealer Count Contini-Bonacossi who, before and after the war, sold several hundred paintings to Samuel Kress and the Kress Foundation, Berenson supplying attributions for a considerable number of them. Whereas Berenson’s survival had made him something of a hero in post-war Italy, some fellow Americans could not comprehend how he could have survived unless he had been a collaborator. He had not, of course. Indeed, the contempt which he had previously focused on the Fascists was now turned on the Soviet Communists, whom he regarded as even more contemptible. Forever fascinated by politics and international affairs in both contemporary and historical contexts, his abiding target was totalitarianism in whatever form it raised its ugly head. A more pressing worry was the us legislation which required the repatriation of foreign-born us citizens living overseas.The future of I Tatti was also unresolved. Fortunately, when in difficulty with any sort of legal or financial matter, he had family help through another second cousin, Lawrence Berenson, who was an able New York lawyer. During their last visit to the us in 1920–21, Berenson and Mary had met three relations who had founded a law firm in Boston. Lawrence was the youngest of them and he became Berenson’s loyal attorney and investment counsellor, gaining in authority and stature over the years and never asking for any payment for all the considerable help that he provided. In 1946, Lawrence was able to report that, as a result of lobbying, the State Department was willing to grant Berenson exemption from the requirement of repatriation because of his advanced age and declining health. Lawrence diligently worked on trying to resolve the question of the future of I Tatti and acted as intermediary in discussions with Harvard. Berenson’s will specifically left I Tatti and its contents to his alma mater but he wanted a definitive commitment from them; they forever blew hot and cold as to whether or not they would take it on. Their concern was the inadequate size of the endowment that would come with it, for they did not wish to take on a permanent liability and, knowing that Berenson was not fabulously wealthy (appearances notwithstanding), that he had made significant legacies and that the longer he lived the less any endowment was likely to be, they were cautious about making an irrevocable commitment. For his part, Berenson had fixed ideas about what he wanted for the future of I Tatti as a scholarly institution, ideas that were rooted in nineteenth-century aestheticism and philosophy, rather than contemporary ideas of academic art history deriving from Germany, and he was

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anxious lest Harvard should accept his bequest and then, when they had control of it, completely ignore the free-ranging humanist values that he held most dear. If, for the eighty-year-old Berenson, the immediate post-war years consisted mostly of picking up old threads, or of weaving old and new together, for Clark, then nearly forty-five years old, there were just as many threads to cut or unravel as there were to pick up. A few days after war in Europe ended on 8 May 1945, the National Gallery reopened with an exhibition of selected masterpieces in two undamaged rooms. Clark had, however, already decided that he did not wish to take on the task of re-assembling the pictures that he had carefully dis-assembled in 1939. He fully realised that post-war England was going to be a different place and that, although not opposed to the changes, he would need to find a new role and lifestyle within it. The announcement of his retirement as the director was made in The Times in September and his last day of duty was 31 December 1945. The post-war trustees made no attempt to persuade him to stay and appointed as his successor the headmaster-ish, austere, bespectacled, ambitious Philip Hendy, who was a different animal. Whereas the pre-war trustees had tended to be drawn from the ranks of the ‘great’, in the sense of the aristocracy, the plutocracy, royalty, the Cabinet and the socially significant, the post-war tendency was to draw them from the ‘good’, in the sense of the meritocracy, academe, civil service mandarins, industrial and establishment administrators and the socially egalitarian. The one person who remained as a link between the old and the new was Clark’s close friend David Balniel, who served as a trustee from 1935 to 1960 and was the chairman in 1938–9 and 1946–9. Simultaneously, Clark also relinquished his duties as Surveyor of the King’s Pictures, handing on that mantle to Anthony Blunt, who held the post for twenty-seven years and is now remembered more for being a Soviet spy than a highly distinguished pillar of the post-war art establishment. Clark’s time-consuming wartime committee work also came to an end, although his experience and expertise were still sought. He was a founder member of the new Arts Council which emerged, under Keynes’s chairmanship, from the wartime cema (see Chapter Six’s introduction); was a member of the Royal Commission on Fine Art which advised the government on architecture and the built environment; and was appointed to the board of the Covent Garden Opera Trust. Before the war, opera at Covent Garden had been in the hands of impresarios who rented the opera house for productions which they bought in from the Continent. In between these events, the house was used for films, lectures, cabarets and dancing. During the war, Covent Garden had been leased to Mecca Ballrooms as a dance hall and, when the ending of the war became a certainty, there were various competing interests who wished to have control. In order to prevent Mecca from automatically continuing their lease when it expired, a committee was set up to explore the possibility of establishing

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a genuinely national opera company: in 1945 the Covent Garden Opera Trust was established to make it a reality, also chaired by Keynes. Samuel Courtauld, William Walton and Kenneth Clark were among the nine trustees. The idea was that there should be a national lyric theatre presenting both opera and ballet, and open all the year round. Making it happen was a large task requiring great faith, much persuasion of vested interests, and support from the public purse. However, the trustees succeeded and the reborn Royal Opera House opened on 20 February 1946 with a performance of Tchaikovsky’s ballet Sleeping Beauty in a sumptuous production designed by Oliver Messel; then, on 11 January 1947, Carmen was performed with an English cast and sets designed by Edward Burra. If the National Gallery was one thread which Clark deliberately cut, and his committee work was in some respects a continuation, an entirely new thread, and one which was well timed and fortuitous, was Clark’s appointment, in July 1946, as the Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford. It was a thread which proved to have many long and varied strands stretching far into the future. The Slade Professorship had been established in 1869 by the collector and philanthropist Felix Slade, who also created studentships at the University of London which developed into the Slade School of Art. Although the Oxford professorship was associated with All Souls College, its duties were not onerous, being the delivery of eight lectures a year to the public at large, and no one kept a strict count of the number delivered. In the early days, appointees held the post for several years rather than one, as is now the rule. Clark held the post for five years; his immediate predecessor was Philip Hendy, his successor at the National Gallery, who had held the post for ten years. John Ruskin had been the first, from 1870 to 1878. In his heyday Ruskin had been an unimpeachable authority on art and social matters, but by the mid-twentieth century his tastes and style were at their nadir. In art, he had championed the Pre-Raphaelites and the Gothic Revival and in later life he had embraced theories of advanced, anti-capitalist, social economics. His prose style was thick with moralising judgements and carefully crafted purple passages. As an undergraduate at Oxford, Clark had become interested in Ruskin and the chapter which he wrote on Ruskin in his Gothic Revival was one of the early attempts to restore his reputation. Thus, to follow in Ruskin’s footsteps, as Slade Professor, was a fulfilment as well as a challenge, and Clark’s inaugural lecture was ‘Ruskin at Oxford’. In his lectures over the next four years, Clark explored three separate themes, all of which had been in his mind for some time and each of which saw eventual publication.The Slade Professorship was, therefore, the point of departure for his future role as writer, lecturer and broadcaster. Word of his skill as a lecturer soon spread round Oxford and the handful that had attended his inaugural lecture soon became an audience of several hundred. Indeed, by the time he was invited again

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to be Slade Professor in 1961, so great was his reputation that the University had to hire a theatre in Oxford in order to accommodate the anticipated audience. The first theme that he explored was the response to landscape, a subject which had interested him since the late 1920s and on which he had already written a number of essays, including an introduction on Hogarth, Constable and Turner for the government-sponsored exhibition Masterpieces of English Painting, shown in Chicago and New York in 1946–7, which Clark attended as a cultural ambassador for Britain. The ‘Landscape’ lectures were adapted for publication, in 1949 as Landscape into Art. His next topic was Rembrandt, Clark recalling that the artist had been one of his first interests as a boy when he had come across C. J. Holmes’s book on the artist (Holmes having been the director of the National Gallery and lectured on Rembrandt in Oxford), and how he had made copies of Rembrandt etchings. His third series of lectures was on classicism and romanticism, topics which he had begun to explore in the early days of his friendship with Berenson. In his lectures Clark’s personal aesthetic engagement with works of art was always evident. He saw his subjects and individual artists as vital and living parts of the history of ideas, and as standard-bearers for the march of civilisation. His conversational style, his ability to connect the particular and the general, to put across complex ideas in a way that was vivid and readily understood together with his instinct for the harmonious sound and rhythm of the spoken word made him a deservedly popular speaker. The Slade Professorship gave him the opportunity to polish and perfect his instinctive skills. The first post-war contact between Berenson and Clark came in March 1945 with Clark seeking to get in touch via the Italian Embassy in London. Clark would have heard rumours during the war that the Berensons had left Italy, although in February 1943, and again in April 1944, he heard from the Crown Prince of Sweden that Berenson was alive and in good health, and still in Italy. Berenson would have had no first-hand news about Clark. As soon as international postal services were resumed, Berenson again took up his longestablished correspondences, including Clark, the judge and jurist Learned Hand, the journalist and philosopher Walter Lippmann, Billy Ivins, who was the curator of prints at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and Alfred Frankfurter, the art critic and editor of Art News. Berenson had an insatiable desire for friendship. Sometimes he seized on people who came his way by chance, such as the young art historian Fred Hartt, and Ernest Hemingway. At other times he actively sought people out, such as Rosamond Lehmann, simply because he had been impressed by one of her novels. Clark and Berenson had a large number of mutual friends whose company they enjoyed individually and jointly, and about whom they could exchange news

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and gossip. They continued to introduce new friends to each other: sometimes the encounter was fruitful; at other times it came to nothing, Henry Moore being a case in point. However, Clark pursued two acquaintanceships of which Berenson did not approve, and which were perhaps built more on opportunism than genuine intimacy: with Somerset Maugham and Calouste Gulbenkian. The novelist Somerset Maugham lived in considerable luxury in the South of France, where in 1928 he had purchased an exotic Moorish villa at Cap Ferrat. Although he had had to move back to England in 1940, he returned there in 1946. The Clarks were happy to accept his invitations to stay, even though the atmosphere at the Villa was notoriously prickly, Clark later observing, ‘he said he asked us to stay because we were the only people who put the lights out when they went to bed. . . . although I am almost incapable of reading a novel, some of my closest friends in the past have been novelists; perhaps they welcome the company of someone who does not talk to them about their books’ (Clark OH p. 114–17). Maugham was a keen collector with a particular sensitivity towards modern and contemporary art, and Clark advised him on his purchases, which included works by Picasso and Toulouse-Lautrec. They also both enjoyed the companionship of Graham Sutherland and his wife who lived nearby, the Sutherlands having moved to Menton in 1947. Clark had first met Gulbenkian in 1934 when he was the Director of the National Gallery and when Gulbenkian had an idea to give his vast art collection to the British nation (see Chapter Five’s introduction). Although it came to nothing, he kept in touch with Clark, even in wartime. In 1942 he moved to neutral Portugal, to Lisbon, and lived with his wife in a suite at the luxurious Aviz Hotel. The future of his collection and his ever increasing fortune constantly exercised his mind and he toyed with the idea of giving it to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, dc. In the end he set up and endowed the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon for educational, artistic and scientific purposes and, after his death in 1955, the Foundation established the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum to display his art collection. Clark’s first trip abroad after the war was not to Italy and I Tatti but to Portugal. Subsequently, the Clarks were invited several times, en famille, to Portugal by Gulbenkian and it crossed Clark’s mind that he might be invited to be head of the Foundation. However, their friendship faltered when Gulbenkian, wrongly, suspected Clark of siding with his son Nubar, who had launched a law suit against his father. For the Clarks there was one thread which, with Jane’s ill health and Clark’s pursuit of his work and romantic amours, frayed but never broke: family life. When the war ended, the Clarks moved from their Hampstead house, Capo di Monte, which Clark remembered as small and damp, to a grand house opposite, Upper Terrace House, with seven bedrooms, a walled garden and all ‘mod

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cons’. It was a comfortable environment, with servants on hand, surrounded by fresh open spaces and a village-like atmosphere; they remained there until they purchased Saltwood Castle in 1953. Alan was seventeen by the end of the war and in his last year at Eton, where he joined the territorial training regiment of the Household Cavalry based at Windsor, but rather than pursue a military career he immediately went up to Christ Church College, Oxford, to study history under Hugh Trevor-Roper. Colin and Colette were thirteen and still at boarding school. When Clark’s mother died in October 1946, his last parental thread was finally broken.

Chronology

1944 August

Allies enter Florence

1 September

Friends from Florence come up to Fontanelle to visit Berenson

2 September

Berenson visits I Tatti

23 September

Berenson and Nicky Mariano return to reside at I Tatti

1945 23 March

Mary Berenson dies Clark lectures in Sweden

April

Berenson appointed President of Special Commission for Restoration of Florence Germans in general retreat from Italy

May

War in Europe ends National Gallery re-opens

June

Exhibition of French Art in Florence

26 June

Berenson’s 80th birthday

July

Berenson visits Siena for four days

August

Clark goes to Lisbon to see Gulbenkian

September

Berenson and Nicky at Vallombrosa Berenson and Nicky visit Venice for exhibition Five Centuries of Venetian Painting Clark’s retirement as Director of National Gallery announced

December

Berenson comes to an arrangement with Wildenstein

31 December

Clark’s last day as Director of National Gallery

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1946 8 July

Berenson granted exemption from us repatriation law

Summer

Clarks go to usa

July

Clark appointed Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford

August

Clark family holiday in Portugal Clarks go to Switzerland

Autumn

Berenson and Nicky visit Siena, Pisa, Milan,Venice

October

Clark goes to Washington and Chicago for exhibition Masterpieces of English Painting Clark’s mother dies

1947 March

Clarks visit I Tatti and Paris

Spring

Berenson and Nicky visit Rome

April

Clark and children visit Portugal

Autumn

Berenson and Nicky visit Rimini, Como, Milan, Genoa, Viareggio, Lucca, Arezzo and Assisi Clark and children visit Paris and Portugal without Jane

November

Clarks visit I Tatti Berenson visits Rome

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I Tatti Settignano Florence March 21, 1945

Dear Kenneth Yrs entrusted to the Ital. Embassy had not reached me yet,1 but Walker2 read me what you wrote to him Feb. 19. I was glad to learn all was well with you despite the loss of two houses, and that yr eldest son is so much child of the Time Spirit as to be interested only in the act of war – I heard of your work in a great while during these past five years, and now that the ordinary post is already working better can I hope to hear fr. you directly and oftener.3 And send me (when printed matter can go by post) everything you have published in these years of occupation. I have heard yr. activities, & of Jane’s as well, but heard vaguely with overtones & echoes. I shall be glad to receive clear accounts. As for us I fear that I am within nine months of my 80th year.4 But my poor Mary is I fear dying. It will be hard to support the loss, altho’ she has scarcely been alive for the last year & more and that bit of life all aches & pains. – Nicky5 keeps fairly well & less bombed – her family having lost everything in Borgo S. Jacopo have been living here with us, each helping to run the place – the house has suffered little beyond broken glass, but the grounds and their walls a very great deal. The best pictures are safe. But 32 that were taken to safety to Borgo S. Jacopo were buried under the rubble.6 Excepting one that must have been near the top and stolen. The rest have been recovered in various conditions. Some are scarcely damaged, while others like the panels with Francesco di Gentile’s Annunciaton will require painstaking repairs. (Luckily we have a restorer who is a scholar as well as artist,7 and a dear friend to whom I am indebted for the transfer of the best pictures and most irreplaceable books to a place of ‘imagined’, & what turned out to be actual safety.) The picture that disappeared is the Flagellation that I ascribed to Botticini and may be a complete restoration of a Castagno.8 As

1 2 3

4 5 6 7 8

Letter missing. John Walker Postal services between Italy and the uk were completely cut off during the war years. Following the Allied victories in Italy during 1944, some mail was able to be delivered through diplomatic channels but the regular post only began to function again from the spring of 1945. Berenson was born on 26 June 1865. Nicky Mariano The house suffered a direct hit in August 1944. The Anrep family moved, during the summer of 1945, to an I Tatti estate house in San Martino a Mensola. Giannino Marchig For an illustration of this Flagellation see Mario Salmi, Paolo Uccello, Andrea del Castagno, Domenico Veneziano, Milan, 1938, pl. 177b, noted as ‘Bottega di Andrea del Castagno (?)’.

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each gets restored it is brought here and placed where it was before. You speak of coming here in the summer. Que Dieu nous exauce!9 By that time many if not all will go back on their walls. The books are all here. The library unheated is too cold to frequent.10 When I come to look over shelf by shelf I may find books missing. The photos seem complete. – I was happy to learn that the N.G. has acquired the P. Morgan Giovanni Di Paolos. They are charming as most is except those with the same subject at Chicago.11 Other acquisition? Prince of Sweden12 sent new photo of a Coronation which I had already listed as a Maso.13 & still believe to be by that Nearest-to-Giotto painter. With regard to Ital. works of art on the spot it seems difficult to understand why they are not being brought back from their various hiding places – wh. by the way hid them but doubtfully. The reason seems to be lack of transport. However much is being done by natives as well as foreigners among them conspicuously Croft-Murray14 and Pinsent15 (our architect) under the lead of Fred. Hartt of Yale.16 Has much in our field been published in these dark years? Any news of Max Friedlander17? Affectionate great hugs to all of you. Ever yrs B.B.

9 10 11

12 13 14 15 16 17

‘May God grant us our wishes!’ But not for long: the American army gave him heating oil which enabled the principal rooms of I Tatti to be warmed. The National Gallery bought, with a contribution from the National Art Collections Fund (nacf, now called the Art Fund), in 1944, four predella panels in tempera on wood, by Givanni di Paolo, which had previously belonged to Pierpont Morgan. They show scenes from the life of Saint John the Baptist: The Birth of Saint John the Baptist, The Baptism of Christ, The Head of John the Baptist brought to Herod and Saint John the Baptist retiring to the Desert (NG 5451–4). The panels have been associated with an altarpiece dated 1454 of The Virgin and Child with Saints (New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art) which includes Saint John the Baptist. They have no connection with the panels showing episodes from the life of John the Baptist in the Institute of Fine Art, Chicago, which were acquired in 1933 (Ryerson Collection). Sweden, Crown Prince Gustaf Adolf Maso di Bianco, a pupil of Giotto; perhaps The Coronation of the Virgin now in the Museum of Fine Art, Budapest. Edward Croft-Murray Cecil Ross Pinsent Frederick Hartt Max Friedländer

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I Tatti Settignano Florence March 28, 1945

Dear Kenneth You may have heard fr. Logan18 that Mary died on the 23d. Life was a burden & death could be a release only & for her. For me it is breaking habits of over fifty years in the making & not easy to get over habits of constant companionship. It seems strange forlorn and incredible that Mary can no longer be my constant pre-occupation reference & audience. Please send word with my respectful compliments to the Crown Prince of Sweden about Mary’s death and ask him to communicate it (if convenient) to Naim Lofroth19 & to Countess Sigrid Schwerin.20 I feel dissipated because I have been doing no research, no writing since my return to I Tatti. You no doubt have heard of an interesting exhibition of local painting at Siena.21 A French one is preparing here22 & a Cinquecento one. Affectionate great hugs to you. Ever yours B.B.

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20 21 22

Logan Pearsall Smith Naima Lofroth, with a ‘fine figure and pug dog face’ (Mariano p. 10), was Berenson’s fierce and humourless Swedish masseuse whose arrival at I Tatti, in about 1914, pre-dated that of Nicky Mariano, who arrived in 1919. Lofroth always considered Nicky to be a rival. She was arrested and expelled from Italy after getting into a dispute with a militiaman in 1940. Countess Sigrid Ebba Mariana von Schwerin (1890–1971) was the third wife of the five-times married Baron Ulf Nils Nilsson Trolle (1890–1948), whom she married in Copenhagen in 1932. Soon after the liberation of Siena, the Pinacoteca reopened with an exhibition of paintings and sculpture drawn from its collections and from churches in Siena and the provinces. Following the restoration of relations between Italy and France, the French Consul in Florence, Count Reynald de Simony, proposed an exhibition of French art from Florentine collections. The exhibition, which opened at the Palazzo Pitti in June 1945, was a broad survey of French art and featured 10 paintings by Cézanne from the private collectons of Loeser, Fabbri and Storni. Berenson was asked to write the preface to the catalogue.

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I Tatti Settignano Florence July 8 1945

Dear Kenneth I was glad to receive yrs. of June 2223 forwarded by Elena Carandini. No I have received no long letters and various items you entrusted to Nicolo Carandini to be sent to me.24 I did receive a shortish letter25 in which you mentioned having sent aforesaid. Second class is not allowed yet but first class, e.g. private letters now come regularly taking on the average about four weeks. I shall be glad to hear at length all about yourselves. Your own intentions and news of the N.G.’s activities and acquisitions in the last five years. Vague rumours have reached me of concerts. Of ‘a picture of the week’ and just now of the re-opening of the NG with 50 pictures.26 Purchases too. Huge paintings of 17th and 18th century for instance27 – and Mary’s death has made me aware of my own condition. Si jeunesse savait & si vieillesse pouvait. There is so much for me to do, and that I want to do, but time will’o-the-whisps away from me and leaves me staring. There is on here a very modest exhibition of French painting of the last five centuries. In eight days I wrote a sort of preface to the catalogue. I am reserving a copy for the day when I can send it to you. We expect to go to Vallombrosa in about a fortnight. Love to all of you from Nicky and myself. Yours B.B.

23 24 25 26

27

Letter missing. Nicolo Carandini Letter missing. The National Gallery formally reopened on 17 May with a two-room exhibition of 50 canonical works from the collection. The opening ceremony was attended by the King and Queen and the Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret. Between 1940 and 1945 the National Gallery acquired more than 30 works by gift or purchase, including Rembrandt’s Margaretha de Geer which was presented by the nacf in 1941 and had featured as Clark’s first single-picture wartime exhibition. Two large-scale works were Giovanni Paolo Panini’s Rome:The Interior of St Peter’s, before 1742 (NG 5362), purchased in 1942, and Nicolas Poussin’s The Adoration of the Golden Calf, 1633–4 (NG 5597), purchased in 1945.

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Casa al Dono Vallombrosa (Prov. di Firenze) July 29 1945

My Dear Kenneth Thanks for the paper on L. Battista Alberti on Painting.28 I read the well-written, informing suggestive pages with delight. You have a great gift for expository writing of the real essay type. Do let me have a copy of the finished product and indeed as soon as you can of anything else you have written during the last six years. Also any N.G. photos, shadowgraphs and publications of interest to me – and the library. I hear the critics are already shouldering and elbowing for yr. post. The gods forbid that the man gets it who was for some years Keeper of Paintings in the Boston mfa – I can’t recall his name.29 Nor would Giov. di Paolennessy [sic]30 rejoice my heart. I look forward to your papers on Piero della Francesca and L. B. Alberti.31 It is a subject wh. excites me and when we meet again, there might be some discussions of the subject. Affectionate greetings to you both. What about Jane and the boys? Nicky sends saluti. Johnnie32 will tell you how we live here.

28

29 30 31

32

Clark had delivered a lecture, ‘Leon Battista Alberti on Painting’, to the British Academy in November 1944. It was published in 1945 by Cumberlege, London, and is printed in essay form in Clark’s The Age of Humanism, London: John Murray, and New York: Harper & Row, 1983. Philip Hendy Francis Russell has suggested that this must be a cryptic reference to John Pope-Hennessy, who would then have been in his early thirties. In 1953 Clark wrote to Cecil Grayson (1920–98), the Serena Professor of Italian at Oxford and an authority on Alberti, ‘I have done no work on the subject for about fifteen years and so have forgotten anything I ever knew, and I suppose it is too late for me to take up the subject again although I have a large number of notes and unpublished articles’ (letter of 22 December 1953, Clark Archive, Tate). Clark’s aspiration to write further articles and a book on Alberti remained unaccomplished. Thanks are owed to Martin McLaughlin, the current Serena Professor of Italian at Oxford, for information on Clark and Alberti. Walker visited Europe in a semi-official capacity in summer 1945 and called on Berenson at I Tatti.

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Casa al Dono Vallombrosa (Prov. di Firenze) July 31 1945

Dear Kenneth I dispatched a couple of days ago by post a letter in which I told you how much I enjoyed reading your paper on Leo Battista Alberti on Painting. It refreshed my mind on the subject and suggested many things I would like to discuss with you. And I do look forward to the essay on Alberti and Piero della Francesca. When I wrote that letter I had not discovered yr. lecture on the Engl. romantic Poets and Landscape Painting.33 It is a charming causerie on a favourite theme. I found two suggestions that are penetrating and far-reaching. The first is that Romanticism was rooted in the Sublime. The second is that light thro’ its continuous changefulness ‘Brings into the Visual Arts that element of Time’. And the further suggestion that perhaps that is why arts that exist only spatially decayed in the 19th century. That is subject for a book, a book after my own heart, which I hope you will find the leisure to write. Make an effort to send me all you print. Give me news of Jane and of yr. boys and take my affectionate greetings to both of you, mine and Nicky’s Ever Yrs B.B.

Casa al Dono Vallombrosa (Prov. di Firenze) August 30th 1945

Dear Kenneth Rumours reach me that you already have resigned the N.G. I congratulate you. You will now be able to devote yourself to tasks more worthy of your gifts and I look forward to the results. In this note I want to ask you to find out and let me know where Wing Commander raf Cooper34 can be reached. He is member (important I am told)

33 34

Kenneth Clark, ‘English Romantic Poets and Landscape Painting’, Memoirs and Proceedings of the Manchester Literary Philosophical Society, vol. 85 (Session 1941–3), pp. 103–20. Douglas Cooper

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of the Allied-Art-Commission in Germany. I have never heard of him. Some little time ago, he was in Milan and saw my dear friend Heydenreich,35 head of the Art Institute in Florence. H. is eager to get work anywhere, best of all with yours or our commission in Germany. Said Cooper spoke him fair, but has not been heard of since and H. does not know how to reach him. You would be doing a real kindness if you could let Heydenreich get in touch with Cooper, either by writing to me or to him directly Via S. Andrea, 6, milan. We are Nicky and I in her cottage buried in the forest, enjoying marvellous views and delightful climate. Lots of books, some people and even leisure for work. I am revising products of the last five years. Tell me about yr. activities, Jane’s, yours and Allans [sic]. Affectionately B.B.

Dec. 1945 Capo di Monte, Three Judges Walk, Hampstead, N.W.3 Hampstead 1357

My dear BB, I was so delighted to get your letters and most grateful for your kind words about my opuscules.36 I have written a great deal more, decrying the war, but most of it ephemeral.There was no time to settle down to solid work, and under the circumstances one couldn’t have given one’s mind to it. Few people yet realize what a ‘total war’ we are waging – far more so than our enemies. I will send you a specimen of such ephemera, an article on art and democracy37 which I shouldn’t have published unless forced to do so. It may amuse you. However, I now hope for more leisure to write. I leave the Gallery at the end of the year, and although I shall still have to do a certain amount of committee work I shall be more or less free. Of course everybody supposes that I have left the Gallery in hopes of – or on the promise of – a better job. It seems incredible that anyone can exist except in service of the state – like Tang China, or business in America. This makes it all the more necessary to fight a rearguard action on behalf of the individual.

35 36 37

Ludwig Heydenreich Diminutive of ‘opus’. ‘Art and Democracy’, Cornhill Magazine, July 1945. Clark argued that market research and the methods used to measure and quantify mass desires were instruments in the destruction of civilisation ‘as potent as the flying bomb and the tank’.

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You can imagine that my last months of clearing up at the Gallery are very exacting. You will probably have heard by now that my successor is to be the gent of whom you formed such a low opinion when he was at Boston. He is not ideal, but far the best in the field. The scholarly Waterhouse38 has a hatred of the public which disqualifies him.You would not, I think, urge the claims of Borenius39 and you have probably never heard of another candidate, Dr. Bodkin,40 a stage historian and bluffer with no pretensions to scholarship. I had intended a long letter, but Ben Nicolson41 has just told me that he is going to Italy tomorrow, so I will bring it to an end. I am giving him a few photographs of recent acquisitions and some details, which may amuse you. All love to Nicky, from us both. Yours ever, K

I Tatti Settignano Florence December 11th 1945

Dear Kenneth Ben appeared yesterday bringing a batch of photos, yr. paper on Alberti with a dear dedication and yr. letter, wh. I wish had been longer. Now that you may dispose of more leisure you may feel like writing oftener, and at greater length. I am delighted to learn that you are withdrawing fr. active life for a while. The Brahmins42 divide life into nine parts. Till twenty one was being fitted to live. From twenty to forty one wed oneself to the community. After forty one should devote oneself to finding God, in modern speak one’s self. I shall be keenly participating in all you become and do. I only wish I could live to see you ten years hence.

38 39 40 41 42

Ellis Waterhouse Tancred Borenius Thomas Bodkin Benedict Nicolson Brahmin is the class of educators, law-makers, scholars and preachers in Hinduism. It is said to occupy the first position among the four-caste system of Hinduism. Brahmins are also fundamental in the Nine-God cult, called the Nine Divinities.

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I am sending off to N.Y. the mss of an Introduction to a Diary, Rumour and Reflection (1940–1944).43 Presumably they will appear in a few months, and copies of each will go to you. Now I am going to revise my last word (so feeble) on Art wh. I blocked out four or five years ago. All of these are less impersonal than my previous publications, and the Lord knows how they will be received. Best wishes to all of you for 1946. Affectionately B.B.

28 Dec 46 Upper Terrace House Hampstead, N.W.3 Hampstead 1357

My Dear BB, How very kind of you to send me the new edition of your beautiful Sassetta.44 I reread it recently and found it as fresh as the day it was written. May I also take this opportunity of saying how very much we both enjoyed the article on Placci.45 It was marvellously true and vivid, and we wait greedily for further instalments of your memories. It was a joy to have your news from Morra.46 He will doubtless describe to you our house, children and way of life. He seemed chiefly impressed by my corpulence, which is the mysterious result of our restricted nourishment. He may also have told you that I had been in America. The Washington Gallery is really very impressive (even if, on entering, a trifle oppressive), and I thoroughly enjoyed my short visit there. I think you would enjoy Washington, but do not recommend a tour in America: transport is too difficult and the spirit of liberty manifests itself too violently. We are always planning a visit to Italy and having to cancel it. The fact is that during the terms I have to be lecturing at Oxford, and during the holidays we cannot leave the children. However we are hoping to escape for a few days at

43 44 45

46

The book was first published in Italian in 1950 and in English in 1952. Bernard Berenson, Rumour and Reflection, 1941–1944, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1952. Bernard Berenson, Sassetta: Un pittore senese della leggenda francescana, Milan: Electa, 1946. It was a limited edition de luxe of the essay he first published in English in 1910 (London: Dent). Berenson published a portrait sketch of his friend Carlo Placci (in Italian translation) which was candid to the point of being considered defamatory, in Il Mondo, May and June issues, 1946; English version, Horizon, June 1946. Placci had died in January 1941. Umberto Morra

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the end of March. You are so often in our thoughts that it is incredible that we haven’t been able to get to i Tatti yet – but we haven’t even been to Paris. Please give our fondest love to Nicky. Ever yours affectionately Kenneth

Dec. 1946 Upper Terrace House Hampstead, N.W.3 Hampstead 1357

My Dear BB, We are longing to come to see you and were very sad that we couldn’t come in the summer. But we shall come in March. Umberto will give you our news – also a small token of love and gratitude and admiration; a symbol of the overthrow of tyrants. Yours ever K

I Tatti Settignano Florence Dec 28 ’46

Dear Kenneth Thanks for the note brought by Morra, and the gifts.The Pollaiuolo medal.47 And yr. essays on Constable’s Wain,48 and on him Hogarth and Turner.49 Admirable, as thought, as appreciation and as pleasing. I could envy you.

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48 49

There is no record of such a medal, or anything close to it, at I Tatti.Vasari, in his Lives of the Artists, attributed to Antonio del Pollaiuolo a medal commemorating the Pazzi Conspiracy of April 1478 when Lorenzo Il Magnifico and his brother Giuliano de’ Medici were attacked in the Duomo in Florence. Giuliano was killed but Lorenzo managed to escape and successfully exiled his enemies, gaining popular support from the citizens of Florence.The medal was, in fact, modelled by Bertoldo di Giovanni and four casts were made by another medalist, Andrea Guacialoti, in Prato. The doublesided bronze medal depicts Lorenzo on one side and Giuliano on the other. Kenneth Clark, John Constable: The Haywain with an introduction by Sir Kenneth Clark, Gallery Books No. 5, London: National Gallery, 1944. Clark wrote the introductory essay for the exhibition of 66 paintings by Hogarth, Constable and

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I have had emphatic praise of yr. lectures in America. We shall be glad to see you. Let us know as soon as may be when you expect to come. I Tatti has become something like Mrs Kahns50 in New York, and I’d rather see you both without too many other guests. All good wishes for 1947. Yours B.B.

I Tatti Settignano Florence January 14, 1947

Dear Kenneth Umberto brought back glowing accounts of you, your children and your beautiful house. He made me eager to see it, but more still you. Do yr. best to come back not later than early April. I heard of yr visit to the States fr. Johnnie, fr. David,51 fr. Adie [sic] all so happy to see you. We too promised ourselves to go over in the autumn but every day makes me feel more doubtful that when it comes to the act I shall be able to do it. I fear discomfort & even more fatigue. I am afraid of myself. Once there I should want to see everybody and everything. The next five months will leave me no leisure for more new writing. They will be wasted on revising translations seeing one’s prose thro’ the press and quarrelling with publishers. Nicky joins me in loving greetings. Affectionately B.B.

50 51

Turner, Masterpieces of English Painting, which opened at the Art Institute of Chicago in October 1946 and at the Metropolitan Museum, New York, in January 1947. The paintings came principally from the National Gallery, the Tate Gallery, the Royal Academy, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Royal Collection. It had required an Act of Parliament to permit the sending of works from national collections overseas. The Clarks were present in an official capacity at the opening in Chicago ‘to represent the London Museums’ (Art Institute of Chicago, press release, 23 September 1946). Addie Kahn David Finley

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I Tatti Settignano Florence Febr. 17 1947

Dear Kenneth Eric Zahle52 of the Copenhagen Museums writes as follows: – ‘I have suggested to the English Danish Society to make an exhib. of Engl. Painting fr. the 18th and first part of the 19th cent. It should of course be as good as possible now the London Museums are enabled to lend Engl art for exhib. abroad. I think it important not to submit completely to the kind assistance of the Brit. Council. When going to London about March 10, I would like to approach some personalities over there who could give time knowledge and authority to the undertaking. Who would also understand that quality is the best propaganda.’ It seems they have had an exhib of recent Engl. Painting.53 I should be grateful if you could do something for Zahle. I am writing to him to address himself to you. His address is Haelegaardsvei 47 Hellerup. I hope nothing will prevent yr. coming. I look forward to yr. visit. Ever yrs B.B.

5 April ’47 Upper Terrace House Hampstead, N.W.3 Hampstead 1357

My dear BB, Our visit to I Tatti was one of the great experiences of my life and I cannot tell you how moving it was to find you so well and so calm in the midst of that hortus conclusus of civilization.54 We shall never forget the kindness and

52

53

54

Eric Zahle (1898–1969), the Danish art historian, specialised in Italian Renaissance art and contemporary Danish art. He was the Inspector of the National Gallery of Art (1931–49) and then the Director of the Museum of Industrial Art (1949–66), both in Copenhagen. An exhibition, Modern British Pictures from the Tate Gallery, organised by the British Council, toured 9 European capitals between January 1946 and February 1947 and was shown at the Raadhushallen, Copenhagen, April–May 1946. The image of the enclosed garden is found in Western Christian art from the early 15th century onwards. Symbolically it refers to Mary’s virginity and her conception of Christ by the Holy Spirit,

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affection with which you received us.55 It was particularly good of you to give up a morning to taking us in to the doors,56 and to pour out your wisdom to us in such abundance. You can hardly imagine what an impression Italy makes after eight years in this island – and especially after the squalor and misery of the last winter. The eye has become so starved, and there seems to be no possibility of new life. Everything is either filthy and crumbling, or bleak and thread bare to the last degree.57 The sight of the olive trees and blossom in the country, and of the vigorous, confident architecture of the town was more impressive, at this moment, than any individual works of art. We have returned to find it still raining and very cold. Every one is naturally cross and exhausted, and the prosperity of Florence seems very remote. We are longing to come back, and if god is good we shall do so in September: but I shall not be surprised if by that time we are all forbidden to leave England. Spurred on by Jane I am arranging to send you various photos; also my note on Miss Sitwell’s war time poetry.58 I have already spoken to my publisher about your autobiographical glimpses – it seems too ridiculous that they are not being printed. I am off with the twins to Portugal on Tuesday. Poor Jane cannot come as the doctor wants to keep her under observation. We shall be very lost without her, but it will be good for the children to escape from this climate for a time.

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free from sin – the enclosed garden being closed off from the outside world.The term hortus conclusus is derived from the Song of Songs or Song of Solomon: ‘A garden enclosed is my sister, my spouse; a garden enclosed, a fountain sealed up.’ King Solomon’s nuptial song to his bride was seen as an allegory of the loving union of Christ and the Church. In January Nicky had written to Jane: ‘Dearest Jane, your letter has just come and delights us with the good news of your definite decision to come. We expect you on the 16th (I suppose at 10 in the evening?) and Parry will meet you at the station. It is a very short visit if you have to leave on the 21st but anyway better than nothing! We can get coffee here now and also tea though neither of very superior quality’ (card to Lady Clark, Tate Archive). No doubt Lorenzo Ghiberti’s ‘Paradise’ Doors of the Baptistery, Florence. (See Ch. 8, n. 13). The winter weather of 1946–7 was harsh all over Europe and the effects in Britain were especially demoralising. Heavy snow from January onwards severely disrupted roads and railways. Power stations closed for lack of fuel and the domestic and industrial electricity supply was sometimes cut off completely. Radio broadcasts were limited, television services suspended, magazines stopped publishing and newspapers were cut in size. In February there were fears of a food shortage. The subsequent thaw caused widespread flooding with more than 100,000 properties damaged. Industrial and agricultural production was severely affected. A currency crisis and tight currency controls followed in the latter part of the year. Kenneth Clark, ‘On the Development of Miss Sitwell’s Later Style’, Horizon (July 1947), pp. 7–17. In the 1940s Clark had developed a close friendship with Edith Sitwell, for whom he had a tender and deep admiration, and they corresponded at length, including handwritten copies of her new poems.

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Once more, my deepest gratitude for that inspiring and inspiriting week at i Tatti which has given us back hope and the possibility of a good life. With much love to Nick, Ever yours affectionately K Paris was beautiful but dead – & full of swindles. But the Louvre is going to be most beautiful and the changes are all intelligently and tastefully done.

I Tatti Settignano Florence April 23, 1947

Dear Kenneth A few days ago I received from you a parcel containing various things. First an essay on the developments of Sitwell’s later style. It interested me all the more as the subject was new to me.Your quotations justify yr. contribution. Your references and quotations to & of Yeats remind me that in that dawn of history you promised to make for me a selection of Yeats that I should (& could) read.59 Then there was the photo of the Cook earlyish Benozzo. Did you not tell me it has gone to the NG?60 Or is it still yours? The small Byzantanising early Bellini is the one that had belonged to old Mond, did it not?61 And tell me about the latish Bellini heads of an elderly man and a youth. Seine Heimat seine Sipschaft!62 The illuminated fragments look like Lippo Vanni – except the Ascension & probably the Nativity.63

59 60

61 62 63

See Ch. 5 n. 23 and letter from BB to Jane of 16 January 1934. Probably Benozzo Gozzoli, The Virgin and Child with Angels, c. 1447–50 (NG 5581), which had been acquired by Sir Francis Cook in 1881 and purchased by the National Gallery in 1945 as by a follower of Fra Angelico. See n. 72. A reference to the poem by Heinrich Heine (1797–1856), ‘Der Asra’ which has the line ‘Deine Heimat, deine Sippschaft’ (Your origin, your lineage). Lippo Vanni, Christ taking leave of the Apostles and Christ and the Apostles, Barnaba da Modena, Nativity, All three belonged to Clark.

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We have had a visit from Freya Stark who showed me the beginning of a kind of spiritual autobiography, pure poetry.64 The Alan Moorheads too.65 I had read his Eclipse and now he has left me his Montgomery which narrates like the Arabian Nights and yet has touches of deep reflection and psychology. I am finishing Trevor-Roper’s ‘Death of Hitler’. It is the first book in English on the events of the last ten years with an historical perspective & dares to stigmatise and judge in the grand manner.66 Nicky has read me aloud Iris Origo’s ‘War in Val d’Orcia’67 a most convincingly vivid account of happenings around her home. I admire it greatly and welcome it altho’ it probably will prevent the publication of my diary.68 Love to you both B.B.

I Tatti Settignano Florence Till May 20, address Hotel de la Ville,Via Sistina, Rome. Apr. 30. 1947

Dear Jane Thanks for yr. note & the photos. I fervently hope yr. health will be completely restored & that you will not have to bother about it for years to come – I had an enchanted account fr. Philomene Divonne69 of Kenneth’s visit with the twins. Ever so many thanks for photos. Yr. primitive is by Pietro Lorenzetti in every probability. Possibly if I examine the original I might suspect the hand of ‘Ugolino Lorenzetti’ but I doubt it.70 The details of N.G. paintings are invaluable. If you come across others do send them.

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65 66 67 68 69 70

Probably a reference to Freya Stark’s Traveller’s Prelude, London: John Murray, 1950, an account of her childhood in Devon and Italy, in her words ‘a bare jumble written with no arrangement of words or style or matter’ (p. 335). Alan Moorhead Hugh Trevor-Roper, The Last Days of Hitler, London: Macmillan, 1947. Iris Origo See n. 43. Philomène de la Forest Divonne Pietro Lorenzetti (c.1280–1348), Madonna and Child.

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We are leaving the 3rd of May for Rome via Siena. It is the final plunge I am preparing to take into a social world, & ‘the Lord only knows how I dread it.’ If only I could go to Rome as unknown as I was when I went there 60 years ago, how eagerly I should look forward to it! Incline yr. hearts toward Casa al Dono end of Sept. It would such fun to see Pisa and Siena together. Ever affectionately B.B.

3 May 47 Upper Terrace House Hampstead, N.W.3 Hampstead 1357

Dear BB, We were delighted to get your letters. I came back from Portugal about a week ago, after an enchanting holiday with the children to find Jane feeling rather miserable. The impact of our returning was rather exhausting but now that the children are all back at school and peace is restored she is resting, and I believe will pick up in a few weeks. I am so sorry that my secretary sent you the photos without writing – or rather let me write – on the back. The Benozzo is, alas, not ours but the N.G.71 The small Bellini is ours, and belonged to the Monds.72 The double portrait is ex Kinnaird, and belongs to a dealer named Leger.73 It is better than it looks in the photo, and I had a fancy that the older man was intended to be a posthumous or ideal portrait of Mantegna. I can’t remember which of our very numerous illuminated fragments you were sent. The ones from a Sienese book do seem to be Lippo Vanni, there is a St. John Baptist by Giovanni di Paolo, and a whole book by Nic. da Bologna.74 They all belonged to Dennistoun who bought them as material for a history of Christian art which he afterwards made over to Lord Lindsay and wrote the Dukes of Urbino instead – rather unfortunately as he was

71 72 73

74

See n. 60. Possibly Giovanni Bellini, Pagan Rite, c.1500 See Ch. 9 n. 180. The picture which belonged to Lord Kinnaird was sold at Christie’s, London, on 21 June 1946. Catalogued as by Niccolo Rodinelli, it was described in The Times saleroom report as ‘another small panel showing a middle-aged man in black with a younger man, similarly attired by his side’. It sold for £1995, presumably to the Leger Gallery. See Clark Sale at Sotheby’s, London, June 1984. Clark sold 18 miniatures by Niccolò da Bologna, on 18 June 1962 at Sotheby’s, Lot 125. They were bought for £3000 by a dealer from Milan.

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the better scholar.75 We are overjoyed that you think well of our Lorenzetti-ish Madonna – I had thought of Ugolino-L., but could not see enough Duccioesque elements. In any case it really is a most beautiful work, and I was glad to rescue it from Bond St. – I swapped it for a Bonnard for which I had paid £250.76 We are thinking of you in Rome and envying you your walks and drives, if not your social occasions. We are longing to return to Italy at the first possible opportunity. One pleasant result of Jane’s illness is an excuse to escape from almost all social commitments. She is perfectly happy in the garden and with the visits of a few old friends, and I have time for writing and sorting, which I haven’t been able to undertake since the war. The Fine Arts Commission77 and, Covent Garden78 give me my peck of [illegible]. I have asked the Director of the Lisbon Gallery to send you photos of the Piero St. Augustine which completes the saints of the St. Agostino Altarpiece. It now remains to find the Madonna.79 Much love to Nicky. Jane says she will write soon Ever yours affectionately Kenneth

Hotel de la Ville Roma80 May 12, 1947

Dear Kenneth I found yr. letter here & should have been delighted with it but for what you write about Jane’s health. It concerns me deeply & I hope she will take every measure to improve. She must find energy enough to join us at Casa al Dono late

75 76 77

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See Ch. 5 n. 13. Clark acquired the Bonnard from Wildenstein’s, Bond Street, London, in 1947. The Royal Fine Art Commission was established in 1924 to advise the government on architecture, urban design and public space in England, in order to influence and champion the creation of welldesigned buildings, spaces and places. It was succeeded in 1999 by the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE). Covent Garden Opera House Trust; see Introduction above. Kenneth Clark, ‘Piero della Francesca’s St. Augustine Altarpiece’, Burlington Magazine, vol. 89, no. 533 (August 1947), pp. 204–9, identified the panel in Lisbon as belonging to the altarpiece. Commissioned in 1454 for the High Altar of S. Agostino in Borgo Sansepolcro, it was to consist of several panels with ‘images, figures, pictures, and ornaments’. The central portion of the altarpiece is lost but four lateral panels with standing saints survive: St Michael the Archangel (National Gallery, London), St Augustine (Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, Lisbon), St Nicholas of Tolentino (Museo Poldi-Pezzoli, Milan) and St John the Evangelist (Frick Collection, New York). See Ch. 6 n. 8.

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Sept. & with you we shall go a-Roming via Pisa and Siena, & end up here. We have never been in Rome together. Try to keep Oct. free. We have an apartment here at the top of the hotel, wh. itself is on top of Rome. A huge terrace extends fr. my bedroom where I behold the Kingdom of the Earth. After sunrise Rome looks a rosy flower bed & the cupola of St. Peter’s like a pearl. I have seen few people thus far. I get tired quickly, & have to lie up to rest hours together. I have already been to the Borghese and enjoyed its great paintings of the Cinquecento – except that I was greatly disappointed in the Caravaggios.81 A large number are now temporarily there forced, brutal, hard without being plastic, but startling that such things should have been done while Titian,Tintoretto and Paul Veronese were still painting.82 I have done my best for greater part of my life to like or at least to do justice to Caravaggio, the Carraccis etc. etc. & now I have to confess failure. Only less distasteful but more infantile and more boring are the average Trecento product & provincial Quattrocentish. Give me what is called the Classical & the great Florentines. By Classical I do not mean things that look Graeco-Roman but everything done in the great tradition fr. Early Dynasty Egyptian down to Degas, Renoir & Cezanne. I will even admit the freaks whose freakishisness is but a comment on the great. Nic. da Bologna interests me to an unusual degree & I should be grateful for photos of yours. We expect to stay here till 26.You can write here till 20th. Love from Nick and myself to you both. Yours B.B. The two finest Goyas in existence, King & Queen of Spain previously at Capo di Monte are temporarily shown at Villa Borghese.83

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The Borghese Gallery (in the former Villa Borghese) displays the fine collection of paintings, sculpture and antiquities begun by Cardinal Scipione Borghese (1577–1633), the nephew of Pope Paul v (1605–21). Scipione Borghese was an early patron of Bernini and a keen collector of works by Caravaggio.The Borghese also has major works by Raphael,Titian, Correggio, Domenichino, Lotto. Caravaggio was born c. 1571. Titian died in 1576;Veronese in 1588; Tintoretto in 1594. There are, in the collections of the Musei Nazionali de Capodimonte, Naples, a full-length portrait of Charles IV as Colonel of the Life-Guards and another of Queen Maria-Luisa in Court Dress. The versions of these portraits which are indisputably by Goya are in the Prado, Madrid, painted in 1799. Those in the Capodimonte are among the six copies made by Augustin Estève, in 1800, and which have sometimes been inventoried as originals by Goya. They were, it seems, intended as gifts for Napoleon but they were never despatched to France. Estève (1753–1830) grew up and studied in Valencia. He became a portraitist to the royal family in Madrid and was much influenced by Goya, making numerous copies of Goya’s portraits. In June 1800, the King named Estève ‘Painter to the Court’.

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I Tatti Settignano Florence May 31, 1947

Dear Kenneth The pile of letters & parcels accumulated here during absence contained photos of the Fitzwilliams Laocoon.84 Ever so many thanks. But a photo. of the Lisbon Piero is still lacking.85 This forwards to a show of paintings & sculptures from the provinces wh. were here for repairs.86 It is a fascinating collection & I wish you were here to enjoy it with me. Not yet had time to go to the Flemish show at the Strozzi Palace.87 Said to be fine. Yesterday – our first after returning – head of B.M Print department to lunch. As dull as good & doubtless very good at his job.88 No one would guess it fr. his appearance or speech. He has not yet phot’d the Benozzos you told me about. Is Jane better? Affectionately B.B.

[Typewritten postcard from Alda von Anrep to: Sir Kenneth Clark/ Upper Terrace House/ Hampstead NW8 [sic]/ Inghilterra] Biblioteca Berenson I Tatti Settignano Florence June 3rd 1947

Dear Kenneth This is to ask you what we are supposed to do with your vol. on the Giotto Exhibition which you left here without instructions about it. We want to know

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The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, has two Laocoön subjects in their collection, one a small bronze sculpture dated c. 1600 and the other a 16th-century Italian woodcut, Caricature of the Laocoön Group, attributed to Niccolo Boldrini after a design by Titian.The reference is probably to the latter, which is also known as Monkey Laocoön (it depicts 3 apes instead of the male figures). See n. 79. An exhibition of recently restored works of art was held at the Accademia, Florence, in 1947, organised by the Soprintendente, Ugo Procacci. See Catalogo della mostra d’arte fiamminga e olandese dei secoli XV e XVI: Palazzo Strozzi, March– October 1947. Arthur (‘Hugh’) Popham (1889–1970) had succeeded A. M. Hind in 1945.

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if we are to send it or if it is supposed to go on sitting here quietly waiting for your return. The latter will not do it any harm. Regarding your eventual stay here in the neighbourhood, with the children next spring, I did speak about it to the Haslips89 and they thought the plan might work out very well and that they were going to write to their sister in London to get into touch with you. I do not know if anything of the kind did happen. Anyhow the ville is charming in a beautiful position and with an enchanting garden and very near here.You know that the most beautiful thing one can now see around here is the completely burned out Villa Gamberaia at Settignano90 which you of course know very well. But you could never even distantly imagine what it is now because the garden, amazingly enough, was not destroyed. So the ruin of the house is standing amongst those marvellous trees. It is like a romantic vision from another world with higher vibrations than ours are.You will see it when you come, it is worth while a journey through Europe/ I hope you are well particularly Jane. Give her my love and keep the other part of it for Yourself. Devotedly Alda

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Joan Haslip (1912–1994) grew up in Florence and for many years lived at Bellosguardo, on a hill south of Florence in a property which she rented. Her father was Irish, her mother Austrian and Joan established herself as a prolific biographer of European notables such as Catherine the Great, Elizabeth of Austria and Hester Stanhope. The Villa Gamberaia, close to I Tatti, is situated on a much favoured and strategic south-facing site with remarkable views over Florence, and with a copious water supply. Celebrated for its garden in the Tuscan Renaissance style, where water features prominently, the Villa has a long and romantic history. Originally a farmhouse, owned by Matteo Gamberelli, a stonemason, the house was rebuilt in the late 16th century by a wealthy Florentine aristocrat who eventually went bankrupt. In 1717 the villa and grounds were acquired by the Marchese Capponi who gave the gardens much of their present form and character. In the 1800s the villa, together with the much smaller Villa di Doccia, formed part of an estate inherited by Lord Westbury, a compulsive gambler. La Gamberaia was purchased in 1898 by Princess Giovanna Ghyka, the widow of a Romanian nobleman and the sister of Queen Natalie of Serbia. She lived there as a recluse with a companion called Miss Blood. Obsessed by ageing, she allowed no one to see her and she walked in the gardens, for which she had a passion, wearing a veil and usually at dusk. Among the few people whom she visited were the Berensons. Edith Wharton, Janet Ross and Iris Origo were among the occasional visitors and Nicky Mariano was taken to see her on several occasions as a child. On the death of Princess Ghyka in 1924, the American-born Baroness Mathilda von Ketteler purchased La Gamberaia and continued to maintain and develop the gardens, possibly aided by Cecil Pinsent. In 1944 the retreating German soldiers burned the villa to ensure that Allied officers could not use it as a headquarters. In 1952 Baroness von Ketteler gave the property to the Holy See, who in 1954 sold it to Marcello Marchi, who carried out a complete restoration of the gardens, and in whose family ownership the property continues.

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I Tatti Settignano Florence June 4 1947

Dear Jane Delighted to read that you have forgotten you were supposed to be ill. I hope no reminders, no matter how slight will occur. I am delighted that you have taken the Haslip’s house from September 25. We shall be at Vallombrosa still: If you are alone you must to join us there for a couple of days. If with friends then for the day. And next Easter! I look forward to the children. Sybil [sic]91 is here and as merry as a lark. She is in nothing like so bad shape as I was led to believe. She walks briskly & babbles and ripples like a sparkling brook. I am enjoying her hugely. Cecil Pinsent has been with us ever since our return. Do you know him? He architected I Tatti La Foce (of the Origos) many places in Maremma & is a philosopher and ascetic sage. Have already seen two exhibitions opened during our absence. The one of sculptures and paintings from country churches altogether charming. A fabulous show of Flem. pictures.92 The Turin van Eyck beyond all praise.93 Good the Van der Goes, the Rogiers, the Memling portraits. As for the bulk of the work they should comfort us by demonstrating that great artists work as rare in 15th & 16th centuries as in ours – up to the Picasso finimondo.94 Love to you all B.B.

91 92 93 94

Sibyl Colefax See n. 87. Jan van Eyck, St Francis receiving the Stigmata, c. 1427, Galleria Sabauda, Turin. Italian for ‘chaos’ (lit. ‘end of the world’).

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Upper Terrace House Hampstead, N.W.3 Hampstead 1357 June 1947

Dear BB, Here is a belated copy of my inaugural lecture as Slade Professor.95 It comes at an unfortunate time when interest in Ruskin is concentrated on his failure as a husband, and people are surprised that I can take him seriously as a writer on art.96 About the Lisbon Piero: I wrote to [illegible] when I was in Portugal, but had no reply. I am now publishing it in the Burlington, but as soon as they have done with my prints I will send them on to you.97 Alas, I have no fine quattrocento drawing of the kind you refer to: I have a niceish Milanese drawing – perhaps Andrea Solario – which I will get photographed and send. Would you like the catalogue of the Hilliard exhibition in the V.&A.98 – well, I will send one on chance as it is really very well done and Hilliard is charming in his insular way. I am writing an article on Roger for the DNB99 – a great sweat but it will soon be over. Love to Nicky, K

95 96 97 98 99

Kenneth Clark, Ruskin at Oxford: An Inaugural Lecture delivered before the University of Oxford 14 November 1946, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Sir William James, The Order of Release:The Story of John Ruskin, Effie Gray and John Everett Millais told for the first time in their unpublished letters, London: John Murray, 1947. See n. 79. The Victoria and Albert Museum’s exhibition on Nicholas Hilliard and Isaac Oliver, commemorating the 300th anniversary of the birth of Hilliard, opened in May 1947; catalogue by Graham Reynolds. Clark wrote the entry on Roger Fry for the Dictionary of National Biography, vol: The Twentieth Century 1931–1940, published November 1949.

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Casa al Dono Vallombrosa (Prov di Firenze) July 16 . 47.

Dear Kenneth Thanks for the lecture on Ruskin & the note enclosed – The lecture is appreciative, judicious, distinguished and agreeable all together. No easy achievement. It makes me ask whether you could do better than devote your leisure years to an un-hagiological interpretation of the whole Ruskin. His significance as a human soul, as a seer, & as an interpreter is still misunderstood, or not understood. Nor indeed did he understand himself except in Pisgah sights.100 I saw him once. It was in the Venice Accademia, his last visit there 88 or 89 of last century. He was accompanied by a rather fattish yg. man & triple my size ruddy with beaming placid eyes. I believe it was Collingwood.101 Indiscreetly I approached too close. Ruskin turned furiously & gave or rather darted a look more of hate than mere displeasure.The exact look – and looks – of Titian’s Paul iii (alone) of the Naples Gallery.102 I look forward to yr. article on the Lisbon Piero & the photo when you can spare it. I should be grateful as well for the photo of the drawing you attributed to Solario & as for the Hilliard catal. great would be my rejoicing to receive it. He has been a great pet of mine for the last 50 years at least. What a Van Dyck,

100 See Ch. 4 n. 41. 101 William Gershom Collingwood (1854–1932) was an author, artist, antiquary and Professor of Fine Arts at Reading University. He studied at University College, Oxford, where he met John Ruskin. For many years Collingwood dedicated himself to helping Ruskin, staying at Brantwood in the Lake District as Ruskin’s assistant and travelling with him to Switzerland. Ruskin admired his draughtsmanship, so Collingwood studied at the Slade School of Art between 1876 and 1878. In 1883 he and his wife settled near Brantwood. Collingwood edited a number of Ruskin’s texts, and published a biography in 1893. He founded the Ruskin Museum in 1901. He was a great climber, swimmer and tireless walker. He was friendly with, and influential on the children’s writer Arthur Ransome. Collingwood’s son was the famous philosopher and historian R. G. Collingwood. 102 The Museo di Capodimonte has two portraits, both autograph, of Paul iii, one showing him with his two grandsons (1546), the other of him sitting alone in a cap (1543).

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and how little of a Holbein! And what a good thinker & writer on his art! and craft. So you are writing an article on St. Roger da Fry! Orate pro nobis, Veritas & Fides.103 Yours with love to you both B.B.

I Tatti Settignano Florence Dec. 8, 1947

Dear Kenneth Since you left I have had no word fr. either you or Jane. Vague & I trust unsubstantial rumours have reached me that she has been far from well. Also that Balcarres104 had a miserable time getting back & ill when he did. Write (if you can find the time) & tell me. Thank you for the book on Samuel Palmer an illustrator who hitherto has been to me a mere name.105 We got back fr. Rome a fortnight ago having enjoyed ourselves over much. Consequently I have been below my so reduced normal level. lumbago. insomnia. depression. worry toute la [illeg]. I am beginning to emerge – in Rome I sightsaw a great deal going fr. church to church, to ruin to ruin & museum to museum enjoying everything classic to say 1830. Since then art has fled Italy, to France for a hundred years, & since to the Moon.

103 ‘Orate pro nobis’ (Pray for us), the Response to the invocation of the saints in the Litany of the Saints, and prayers for the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the angels and all the martyrs and saints. ‘Veritas et Fides’ (Truth and Faith) is almost certainly a reference to the closing words of a lecture delivered by Fry at the Royal Institute of British Architects, 20 May 1921, ‘Architectural Heresies of a Painter’: ‘I am the victim of a perhaps quite absurd faith – the faith, namely, that the aesthetic pursuit is as important in the long run for mankind as the search for truth.’ 104 David Balniel 105 Geoffrey Grigson, Samuel Palmer:The Visionary Years, London: Kegan Paul, 1947.

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In Rome we saw the enigmatic Hinks,106 Perkins of the Brit. School107 & Bottrall.108 My compatriots of course. All the Italians, some French heads of schools, & I received Germans. Freya Stark is staying with us, wonderful woman, such good company & so divinely gifted as a writer, as you will see if you read the book she is reading aloud to us.109 Every good wish to all of you for a Happy New Year & a satisfactory 1948. Affectionately B.B.

15 Dec ’47 Upper Terrace House Hampstead, N.W.3 Hampstead 1357

My dear BB, We were delighted to get your letter. I am afraid I am not a letter writer at the best of times, and last term my time was certainly taken up with my Oxford lectures and other work, and I have only just got free. Poor Jane is snowed under with Christmas and family arrangements. Our new form of society with all its forms, coupons, rations etc. greatly complicates life, and there is no one left to do the simplest things for one. The young ladies who used to stick photographs on card board are all either called up or writing theses on industrial psychology, so that one has to do all mechanical jobs for oneself. It is true that David got appendicitis on the way home, and had to be rushed off to a doctor. He couldn’t be operated on at once, and lay for ten days in our house. After all, it has subsided, and they have decided not to operate. Jane, I am glad to say, has been quite well, though rather exhausted. I am glad you found Sam Palmer of interest. He has had a great influence on the younger English painters – & illustrators as you rightly call them. It is

106 Roger Hinks 107 John Bryan Ward-Perkins (1912–1981) was the Director of the British School in Rome, 1946–74. His principal scholarly interests were the materials of ancient art and city topography. He was a pioneer in the use of field surveys to assess archaeological land patterns in Italy. 108 Ronald Bottrall (1906–1989), a poet and professor of English literature, was the Assistant Director at the British Institute in Florence before 1939. During and after the war, he worked all over the world as a representative of the British Council. He was in Rome from 1945 to 1950. Together with his wife, Margaret, they did much to reconstruct cultural relations with Italy in the post-war years. 109 See n. 64.

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probably just as well for the English School to resign itself to this kind of activity. How much I envy you your time in Rome. I have never been there long enough to grow familiar with it – haven’t ever been able to know which hill I’m on. It seemed abominably spoilt when last we were there, but of course there is plenty left. With much love to Nicky, and all good wishes from us both, Ever your affectionate K

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Eight Reading and Writing, Talking and Travelling 1948–1953

On 13 July 1948, Clark celebrated his forty-fifth birthday. He already had many achievements and several distinguished publications to his name, but he was clear about the emphasis of the next phase of his life. As he later wrote in his autobiography: ‘My overwhelming need was to communicate my feelings about works of art in words. I wanted to write, occasionally to lecture, indirectly to teach. This I have done with many interruptions, for the last 30 years, and thus my resignation from the Gallery was the turning point in my life.’ He also added: ‘my mind worked better from 1945 to 1955 than it had ever done before, and very much better than it has ever done since’ (Clark OH pp. 77 and 87). Clark’s Landscape into Art was published by John Murray in 1949. Each lecture/chapter focused on a particular topic such as ‘Landscape of Fantasy’ or ‘The Natural Vision’. It was a slim volume by today’s standards, but scholarly and tightly packed with observations and ideas, a personal elucidation of the subject rather than a heavyweight exercise in academic art history. As he explained in the introduction (p. xvii), the founders ‘of the Slade Lectures did not intend that the professor should give his pupils a detailed survey of the history of art, or should make them proficient in such branches of the subject as stylistic criticism and iconography. They intended, in Ruskin’s words, that he should “make our English youth care somewhat for the arts.” His next post-war publication was a book on Piero della Francesca which had been proposed by the energetic proprietor of Phaidon Press, Bela Horovitz. Clark worked on the book while staying at I Tatti in the autumn of 1949, from where he made expeditions to see works at first hand and to assess how they had survived the war years. The book takes the form of a critical essay and a catalogue with detailed descriptions and first-hand observations on technique and condition. It was a large-format book and one of its principal features was a completely new set of photographs and details, of the type that had excited Clark when Director of the National Gallery, which Horovitz now specially commissioned.

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Clark was adept at reaching out simultaneously to a specialist audience and to the public at large. He admitted that he was not comfortable with abstractions and theorising, and preferred talking about specific works of art which he would then relate to others, probing their wider cultural and historic context and scrutinising their significance and meaning in the modern world. His most ambitious book was The Nude, which he also gave as a series of lectures in Washington, dc, in 1953. But, whereas his exploration of landscape had been written and conceived specifically as formal lectures, later to be turned into a book, The Nude was conceived first as a book and the Washington lectures were abbreviated summaries of the different chapters. Like Landscape into Art, The Nude was a masterly synthesis of the thematic, the personal and the historical, with equal weight given to the aesthetic and the symbolic, acknowledgements of the influences of both Berenson and Aby Warburg. Every book required a long period of gestation, deliberation, background reading, looking and discussion. Landscape as a subject for exploration had first come into his mind during the first years of marriage, and he first outlined the idea of a book on the nude to Jane in 1940. The influence of Ruskin hovered always in the background and already in his mind at this time was a book which was eventually published in 1964 as Ruskin Today: ‘I spent fifteen years on and off in putting it together, and I believe it to be one of the best things I have done’ (Clark OH pp. 79–80). Clark wrote easily and well. His younger son, Colin, noted that ‘what my father enjoyed most was to write. No matter where he was, he would balance a pad on his knee, take out his fountain pen, and put all his thoughts on paper’ (Colin Clark p. 5). Kenneth Clark also enjoyed talking in public and putting on a performance. His lectures were not extemporised but well planned, and written first in long-hand. One of the distinguishing features of Clark’s lectures and writings was the coherence and tightness of their structure. He also enjoyed language – ‘a well turned sentence or a well constructed paragraph gives me happiness’ (Clark OH p. 81) – and his feel for cadence and rhythm made him a pleasure to listen to, and still makes him a pleasure to read. He also had the ability to beguile with one of the rarer qualities to be found in lectures and writings about art: a sense of humour. Each book was dedicated to a close friend. The Gothic Revival was dedicated to Charles Bell; Leonardo da Vinci to David Balniel; Landscape into Art to Maurice Bowra; The Nude to Berenson.The Preface to Gothic Revival concludes:‘Although I never heard Mr. Bernard Berenson mention the Gothic Revival, I owe him a debt, difficult to describe and impossible to repay, which most of those who have heard him talk will understand. To my wife I owe the greatest debt of all, for without her I should never have written more than two or three chapters.’ Almost without exception, everything that Clark published while Berenson

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was still alive contains, somewhere, a reference and an acknowledgement to ‘Mr Berenson’. In spite of writing and lecturing, Clark did not give up his committee work. The organisation for which he felt the most affection was the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden. That for which he had no particular love was the Arts Council.When Maynard Keynes died unexpectedly in 1946, Clark had hoped to take over as chairman and confessed disappointment when he was passed over in favour of Ernest Pooley, a seventy-year-old bachelor whose principal role in life had been as clerk to one of the grander and richer of the City livery companies, the Drapers. This had given him considerable experience in administration and in charitable giving to support education and young people, but he had no active interest in the arts other than as the vice-chairman of the Old Vic Theatre Company and Sadler’s Wells. The Arts Council was still an embryonic organisation and Clark had been in sympathy with Keynes’s unashamedly elitist ideas. He also had misgivings about the value of state patronage of the arts, and the use of public money in support of lowbrow or amateur activities. Pooley was a far different animal, and cynics said he had been appointed by a cash-strapped Labour government because it was thought he would neither cause trouble nor ask for money. He oversaw radical changes in structure and policy. Mary Glasgow, who was the Secretary, and by coincidence the daughter of Clark’s first Keeper at the National Gallery, was manoeuvred out in favour of William Emrys Williams, a plain-spoken forceful Welshman, who was an unashamed populist and who treated the Arts Council as his own personal fiefdom. When Clark eventually took over the chairmanship in 1953, Williams made it plain that he expected Clark, like Pooley, to do little other than chair meetings and be a figurehead, and to leave all the running, policy and decision-making to him. Clark acquiesced but he later confessed that the only activities that he had enjoyed during his term of office were the organising of two small exhibitions of drawings by Millet and Charles Keene. Clark’s balancing of his public and private life was a delicate act which was observed closely by Mary Glasgow who later wrote: he is intellectually a giant with a well-stocked mind and administrative powers to match. He ought to have taken a leading part in the affairs of the country at large let alone the cultural ones.Yet whenever he has approached the centre of things, as when early in the war, he went to the Ministry of Information, he has shied away, saying to himself something like, ‘all this is dust and ashes; I must devote myself to things of the mind.’ Then he would retire, to think, to write and to contemplate, until the pendulum swung back and he would say: ‘what am I doing in a vacuum? I must get back into the Arena.’ I think he has suffered all his life not being himself a creative artist, knowing so much, while never producing original work of painting or sculpture. (Glasgow p. 199)

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Clark was often diverted from pursuing things of the mind by both temperament and circumstance. Jane’s physical and emotional health were sources of anxiety and distraction, as were the needs and demands of his three children. Jane became the president of the Incorporated Society of London Fashion Designers. Formed in 1942, the Society included in its membership the leading designers of Mayfair and Savile Row and sought to compete directly with the French fashion houses. The Clarks allowed Upper Terrace House and the garden to be used for stylish fashion shows which featured in illustrated magazines and cinema newsreels.They gave glamorous parties and entertained leading figures from society and the arts, including the royal family. The children were sent away to prestigious boarding schools and were taken abroad during their school holidays. Both Colin and Alan went to Eton when they were thirteen. Alan went straight to university and Colin went into the Air Force from 1951 to 1953 and became an accomplished pilot, before going to Oxford. Colette went to school at Cheltenham Ladies’ College and did the ‘London Season’ in 1950 as a débutante, before also going to Oxford, to Lady Margaret Hall. All of them gave their parents their due measures of time-consuming pleasure and anxiety. Each of them was encouraged to visit Berenson at I Tatti. Needing to escape from the tensions and distractions of family life, Clark found refuge in the company of his lady friends and in overseas travel. I Tatti became increasingly important as a peaceful haven where he could think and write. From 1947 to 1959 he went at least once a year, on occasions with Jane, often on his own. When Berenson was there in person they could engage in conversation and exchange ideas. When Berenson was absent he had the use of the Villino, the guest-house set somewhat apart from I Tatti, and once or twice he was allowed to use I Tatti as his own, including Berenson’s own study and desk. In such congenial and familiar surroundings Clark could forget the rest of the world and immerse himself in his own enjoyment of art, and write. The Clarks planned many visits to France although they were often cancelled at the last minute due to Jane’s ill health. In 1946 Georges Salles had invited Clark to join the Conseil du Louvre, which met several times a year to consider purchases for the French National Museums. Clark was the only non-French national on the committee, but he was an irregular attendee. Clark was also in demand internationally in the English-speaking world as a lecturer and unofficial cultural ambassador. There were several visits to the United States, to Australia and to India. In the usa, the Berenson connection gave him the entrée to the major collectors and to the artistic, political and social elite, who welcomed him and Jane up and down the Eastern seaboard from Boston to Washington, dc. His most challenging undertaking was the six lectures from The Nude which he delivered over a six-week period at the National Gallery of Art in Washington in the spring of 1953. Clark relates how the then Director,

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David Finley, promoted them only as a series of lectures by Kenneth Clark, not daring to reveal in advance that his topic was the nude, for fear of outraging puritan sensibilities, which were still easily offended by suggestions of nudity and nakedness. Visits to India and Australia were organised by the British Council, which was often confused by those who should have known better with the Arts Council. The two organisations were entirely different and one of the British Council’s principal activities, to which Clark was asked to contribute, was the promotion overseas of British culture by means of lectures and art exhibitions. Berenson’s early writings were exercises in art criticism whereby he elucidated and commented on individual artists and set out visual and aesthetic principles which would lead to a greater understanding and appreciation of Italian Renaissance art.The Lists which then preoccupied him for the next half-century were the product of his connoisseurship. Between 1903 and 1945 Berenson published very little that was new by way of art criticism, connoisseurship and scholarship. There was the book on Sassetta (1909) already mentioned and a number of essays on early Renaissance and medieval painting. He also put his name to published catalogues of the John G. Johnson Collection in Philadelphia and the Widener Collection in Pennsylvania. What most pre-occupied him was updating the Lists and the new edition of the Florentine Drawings. It was only at this period, in old age – he celebrated his eighty-third birthday on 25 June 1948 – that he set about putting down in print those ideas and theories about art on which he had been musing for decades. Two books which had been drafted during the isolation of the war years were pulled into shape. The first was Aesthetics and History in the Visual Arts (Berenson A&H). Laconic and gnomic, it was a restatement of his cornerstone principles, in particular his belief that seeing and looking at works of art at first hand were all-important and his insistence that the direct experience of the work of art itself should have priority over all other enquiries, including the life of the artist, the technique or the history and meaning of the culture in which a particular work of art is situated. He repeated and expanded on the aesthetic framework that he had set out more than half a century before in his four essays on Italian Renaissance art. In addition he declared the necessity of universal and absolute standards, re-emphasising the importance of the life-enhancing qualities and spiritual significance of works of art. Aesthetics and History sketched the development of Western art from the Egyptians to Cézanne and was a vigorous defence of the humanist traditions stemming from the heritage of Hellenistic Greece. The second book was his brief autobiographical Sketch for a Self-portrait which was published in 1949 (Berenson SSP). There then followed, appearing first in Italian, later in English, a short essay, Piero della Francesca or the Ineloquent in Art, inspired by revisiting and experiencing

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the artist’s Sacra Conversazione in the Brera in Milan, in 1947. Here he linked Piero to Cézanne, and argued that in the greatest portraits and figure paintings the artist deliberately avoids imposing character and emotion through gesture and expression, and simply allows the figure to be what it is, to exist. In 1950 he published his only work on a living artist, a sculptor now forgotten called Alberto Sani. This was followed in 1951 by Seeing and Knowing, a survey of the conventions that link what the eye sees with what the mind conceptually knows. It also contained an attack on contemporary abstract art and Picasso. Caravaggio: His Incongruity and his Fame, also published in 1951, was an outspoken protest against the current craze for Caravaggio. In 1952 he published L’Arco di Constantino o della decadenza della forma (The Arch of Constantine: or, The Decline of Form, 1954), an exploration of what he perceived as the progressive decay of the figural arts in the ancient world, taking as his touchstone the famous triumphal arch in Rome that was created in the closing years of the Roman Empire, with re-used material from earlier buildings. Berenson had long before ambitiously planned a work in many volumes on the decline and recovery of the figural arts of all epochs but, in the end, only this short ‘first chapter’ saw the light of day. The book was also intended to be read ‘in the light of the present day anarchy in artistic standards’ (Samuels ML p. 545). Writing books did not come easily to Berenson. As he confided in his diary on 8 September 1950, ‘my Private, portable Hell is paved with intentions of writing that I let myself be distracted from’ (Berenson S&T p. 194). He did not have Clark’s instinctive mastery of formal presentation and if – to use a musical analogy – Clark’s writings of this period have the qualities of the carefully constructed, consciously harmonious, symphony or overture, Berenson’s have the character of brilliant, spontaneous, virtuoso improvisations. His style of writing in his early publications received harsh criticism from Mary and her brother Logan, and they constantly forced him to rewrite and reshape his words, at times driving him to despair. It has sometimes been suggested that his difficulty in writing arose from the fact that English was not his first language, but his letters and diary entries suggest that his problem was not with language: rather, his ideas often ran ahead of his pen and his discretion in his quicksilver mind, and he found it difficult to submit to the constraints and formality of the book form, where structure, sequence, concision and measured prose become necessary. In the introduction to Aesthetics and History he disarmingly declared: The mind as well as the intestines requires bulk. I fear I am no good at supplying it. I am not a dialectician; I have no gift for developing an argument with abundance of words and instances. So what I have done is to put down whatever happened to come into my head as I meditated on art theory and art history. . . . a pell mell of stray thoughts, desultory thinking aloud, generalisations, reminiscences, confessions . . . They exhibit the cross section,

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as it were, of a mind that for half a century and more has been dwelling upon art problems of many kinds, not only historical but antithetical . . . (Berenson A&H pp. 23–4) Berenson wanted works of art to be placed ‘in a universal scheme of things, of what it means through the ages, what it should mean now’ (Samuels ML p. 555). He thought that even the best of contemporary academic art historians fell short of this ambition. Perhaps only Clark came close. Berenson most enjoyed conversation and writing letters. In his walks with a single sympathetic companion, he could chase and explore ideas freely and allow his thoughts to roam wherever they chose to go. At mealtimes he liked to deliver a monologue and make pronouncements over a vast range of topics. The speed and nimbleness of his thought processes were remarkable. His voice was attractive and his views were supported by an extraordinary visual memory, together with a vast range of accurately remembered fact and opinion resulting from his widespread reading and travels. His daily letters to friends and acquaintances were always in pen and in his own hand, and were an extension of his love of conversation. Berenson’s daily diary in which he wrote whatever was immediately in his mind, no matter how personal, controversial, trivial or deeply contemplated, remained a habit until the end of his days. Extracts from the diaries were published as Rumour and Reflection, 1941–1944, which appeared in Italian in 1950 and became a best-seller; Sunset and Twilight: From the Diaries 1947 to 1958, was published posthumously in 1963. New editions of his books were issued in different languages, and Phaidon Press, with the financial support of the Kress Foundation, launched lavishly illustrated editions of the Italian Painters of the Renaissance (Berenson IPR) and The Lists. Berenson also wrote copious articles and contributed regularly to the Milan Corriere della Sera newspaper.This substantial output required assistants and much of the donkey work was done by Luisa Vertova (who married Benedict Nicolson), then in her thirties, and the twenty-year-old, mercurial and devoted William Mostyn-Owen. Gugliemo degli Alberti, a descendant of the Italian Renaissance architect Leon Battista Alberti, together with Vertova and Arturo Loria undertook many of the Italian translations. If post-war I Tatti was a calmer place than before, it was also busier and Nicky Mariano held it all together. The number of guests who came to stay increased and at mealtimes there were regularly twelve seated at the table. Curious strangers arrived, asking to be shown round the house to see the collection and catch a glimpse of the ‘Sage of Settigano’. Berenson was featured in Life and Time magazines, and this publicity increased the number of those who wanted to come and stare. The Library expanded so much that in 1948 Cecil Pinsent was asked to begin work on a design for a new wing.Young scholars were taken on as apprentices, to help out and to learn. I Tatti was gradually metamorphosing

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into a scholarly collegiate institution, and, although in 1952 Berenson heard that Harvard had decided to refuse his legacy, friends rallied round to raise the money necessary for the proposed scholarships. As a consequence, in 1953, Harvard finally made a commitment to accept. Berenson involved himself directly in some of these daily activities, and with some of the guests, but he allowed much of it to pass him by. Although his mind remained alert, his physical powers were diminishing and increasingly he needed rest and nurture. Nevertheless, he and Nicky undertook extensive travels, nearly always within Italy, usually to visit an exhibition or to examine a recently restored work of art or to revisit, possibly for the last time, places or people that still meant much to him. To the end of his days he put into practice his own precept about the importance of seeing and experiencing works of art at first hand.

Chronology

1948 Spring

Berenson asks Cecil Pinsent to draw up plans for a new wing to the Library at I Tatti

April

Clark in Paris

April/May

Berenson in Siena

May

Berenson visits Venice Biennale, Bologna and Maser

June

Berenson in Venice, Bologna, Ferrara, Padua Berenson granted Freedom of City of Florence Berenson formally honoured by Italian state at Palazzo Strozzi

July

Berenson in Umbria/ Assisi

August

Clarks in Cornwall

September

Clark and family at I Tatti and Cortona

October

Berenson in Switzerland

1949 January/February

Clark in Australia

April

Clark and children in Portugal without Jane Clark in Paris

June

Berenson in Venice and Lugano

July/August

Clarks in Paris and Venice

September

Clarks at I Tatti and Vallombrosa

October

Berenson at Vallombrosa and Naples Clarks in Paris Clark on his own at I Tatti

November

Clark in Paris

285

1950 March

Clark at I Tatti returning via Paris

May

Berenson in Aix les Bains, Dijon, Auxerre

May/June

Berenson in Paris

June

Berenson and Clark in Paris

July

Berenson in Grenoble and Siena Clarks in Paris and Venice

September/October Clark at I Tatti and Vallombrosa November

Berenson in Rome Clarks in Rome and Paris

December

Clark in Paris

1951 January

Clarks in usa for lectures in Washington, Philadelphia, New York

March

Clarks in South of France

April

Clarks in Paris and Amsterdam

May

Clarks in Rome and at I Tatti

June

Berenson in Ischia, Naples, Milan,Venice Clarks in Amsterdam and Holland

July

Berenson in Venice

August/September

Clarks in Venice

September

Berenson in Ischia and Naples

September/October Clark stays at I Tatti in the Villino December

Clark in Paris

1952 March

Clarks in South of France

April

Clark and Colette in Florence and I Tatti

286

May

Berenson in Ischia, Salerno, Brindisi, Naples, Rome Clark in Paris Clark and Colette at I Tatti

June

Berenson in Bari, Apulia, Naples with Nicky to study architecture Clarks at Aldeburgh Festival, Suffolk

August

Clarks at Edinburgh Festival

October

Berenson in Rome Clark and Colin in Paris, Rome, Naples

November

Clarks in Paris

1953 Spring

Clark’s lectures on The Nude at National Gallery of Art, Washington, dc Royal Fashion Show at Upper Terrace House, Hampstead

May–June

Berenson in Sicily and Naples

287

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May 13, 48 I Tatti Settignano Florence

Dear Kenneth. Thank you for Saxl’s Atlas1 and comments on England & the Mediterranean. It is a publication after my own heart & if the Warburg produced nothing less relevant to what I consider art history I should be an enthusiastic & not lukewarm admirer & supporter of the Institute. As you know Sibyl Colefax2 is here & I ply her with questions about all & sundry to wh. she seldom fails to give copious & interesting answers. Cecil Pinsent3 is here as well & so is Barbara Halpern4 my step-grand-daughter a rather astringent but clear-sighted and clear-minded woman – just beyond being called young. Tomorrow we expect Rosamund [sic] Lehman & Day Lewis5 for ten days or so. Auden6 is in the offing & we expect to see him altho’ not to stay. Our albergo notturno e diurno is filled up. I look forward to seeing you soon. I am rather alarmed at the onoranze I am to undergo. If they had come twenty years ago! Now the prospect is repugnant.7 Ever yours B.B.

1

2 3 4 5 6 7

The ‘Atlas’ is British Art and the Mediterranean by Fritz Saxl and Rudolf Wittkower, Oxford University Press, 1948 (repr. 1969), a large-format publication exploring the history of the relationship between British and Mediterranean art, which originated from an exhibition held by the Warburg Institute, London, in 1941. Sibyl Colefax Cecil Ross Pinsent Barbara Halpern Rosamond Lehmann. Berenson had been impressed by one of her novels, which he read in 1947, and invited her to visit I Tatti, not anticipating that she would bring Cecil Day-Lewis with her. W. H. (Wystan Hugh) Auden (1907–1973), the poet, playwright, librettist, editor and essayist who is considered by some to be the greatest English poet of the twentieth century. These were the ceremonies at the end of June 1948 when he was presented with the Freedom of Florence by the Mayor of Florence and a ceremony at the Palazzo Strozzi when the Italian state honoured him for his services to Italian art. A new bronze medal was struck bearing his image in profile to commemorate the event, and he was presented with a historic bronze medal by the early fifteenth-century sculptor and medallist Matteo di Andrea de’ Pasti, a medal that had been discovered in a wall of the Tempio Malatestiana at Rimini in the aftermath of the Allied bombardment. He refused to make a speech and was pleased when the Corriere della Sera reported: ‘there he sat, dumb, monolithic and probably deaf ’ (personal conversation and discussion with William Mostyn-Owen during the Convegno Berenson at Fifty,Villa I Tatti, October 2009).

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22 May ’48 Upper Terrace House Hampstead, N.W.3 Hampstead 1357

My dear BB, We were delighted to get your letter and to know that you liked the SaxlWittkover book. I agree with your general estimate of the Warburg, but their byproducts are excellent. Of course Wittkover8 is not a true-blue Warburg man, and I have found his recent articles (in the Warburg-Courtauld journal) on Palladio etc. really admirable. Incidentally, you will have seen that under our friend Ben9 the poor old Burlington has reached a ‘new low’, and ought to close down. We lead a quiet and happy life, Jane gardening, I writing on my Oxford lectures, which continue to draw large crowds. We have become socially lazy – partly because in these times and in this socialist country entertaining of any kind involves very hard work: and partly because we are like a satisfied power.We occasionally buy a few pictures and objects – I will bring photos when we come – and I am building up quite a good library of source books and early illustrated books, which no one ever looks at, and so far I have no time to read myself. A great friend of ours is visiting Florence, and we have sent a telegram saying that he may ring up. He is called Henry Moore and is a sculptor who has a great reputation at the moment, not only in England. He is going to Venice to arrange a show of his work in the Biennale.10 He is the most whole hearted human being I have ever known, with a great natural understanding of art and life. We are devoted to him, and he is the guardian of our children should we both perish simultaneously. As you know, we never send people to you, knowing too well what a nuisance they can be, but I think there is a good chance of your liking Moore. He has with him an old type called Gregory,11 who is a publisher, a modest muse of talent –

8 9 10

11

Rudolf Wittkower. His Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism (1949) was a study of Palladio’s architecture and its relationship to contemporary theories of musical harmonic ratios. Benedict Nicolson. He was the Editor of the Burlington Magazine from 1947 to 1978. The 1948 Venice Biennale was an important event. The previous Biennale had been in 1942, in the Fascist era, and the 1948 one was designed to give a comprehensive overview of European avantgarde art. Ernst, Dalì, Kandinsky, Klee, Mirò and Mondrian were featured prominently. There was strong international support from 15 nations. The British Pavilion showed works by Henry Moore and J. M. W. Turner. E. C. ‘Peter’ Gregory (1887–1959) was the chairman of the publishing house Lund Humphries. Collector, patron and philanthropist, he met Moore in 1923 and took an immediate interest in his work. He was also a patron of Hepworth, Nicholson and Sutherland and helped to found the Institute of Contemporary Art in London in 1947.

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rather a Henry Jamesian figure. He will not speak at all, so will do no harm. But perhaps you will be away in Venice all the time they are in Florence. It is lovely to think that we shall be seeing you soon. Unlike many of my countrymen, I see no great objections to living in England; but that doesn’t make a visit to Italy any less welcome. With love to Nicky, and love from Jane Ever your affectionate K

May 26. 48 I Tatti Settignano Florence

My dear Kenneth. Of course we shall receive Henry Moore with open arms. If he appears before we leave for Venice in four days it will be here. If not I hope to see him in Venice. If you can communicate with him please tell him to look us up at Hotel Europa. We mean to stay in these parts till June 21. May 28. while writing the last sentence Nicky came to tell me Moore had just telephoned. He lunched here yesterday. I took to him at sight, his candour, his naturalness his freedom from himself. I took him to see all the bits of sculpture & he gave side glances at the pictures. Never more appreciative looker. I do not wonder that you have taken him to your hearts.12 I am distressed over the Burlington. When Ben was here audiendum verbum I urged him to avoid articles of interest to very few specialists only. Instead he has published the snobbish kind of stuffy rubbish about due & tre cento unprofessionals. I also urged him to reduce the Burlington ‘temporarily’ at least to a quarterly so as to give a less consumptive aspect.

12

In his diary for 28 May 1948, Rumour and Reflection, 1941–1944, London: Constable, 1952, p. 81, Berenson wrote: ‘Henry Moore lunched here, still provincial in clothes and accent, but one of the most appreciative persons I ever took round the house.We looked at sculpture chiefly, and he dashed forward without prompting to what best deserved attending to. He talked understandingly about everything.Then how account for the fact that his own sculpture is so revoltingly remote from what I feel about art? Is it due to the obstruction of the channels through which the creative spirit of the last six thousand years has worked? Why does this so sensitive so honest-minded man produce such horrors of distortion, misinformation, and abstraction? More incomprehensible still are his ardent admirers, Kenneth Clark for instance. With them it may be a still further exoticism, along with Negro and Polynesian art.’

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We are leaving for Venice stopping over at Bologna, Ferrara, Padua & Maser on the way. At Venice to June 21 the address will be Hotel Europa. Must be back here 22nd for a house over full of guests fr. Rome for the replanning of the Baptistery gates.13 Needless to say how much I look forward to the visit of both of you. Yours truly, B.B.

[Post Office telegram] ++ tsb 12 c cr 21/5 venezia 38800 22 9 0100 lady clary [sic] upper terrace house hampstead londra= greatly distressed alarmed and disappointed keep us informed here till twentyfirst = bb nicky+14

Upper Terrace House Hampstead, n.w.3 Tuesday [August 1948]

Dear BB, It was very kind and dear of you to write so sympathetically about poor K. I waited to answer till the heart specialist had given his final report and then got so involved in long leave from Eton festivities with the twins that I hadn’t a moment till we got here. K is much better and if he takes care for the next month should be completely recovered by the time we come to Italy.We are at the Grand Hotel Folkestone for a week which is hideous but v. comfortable and he can lie out in what is called a sun parlour out of the sitting room. There has been no sun since May – then we go home till we take the children to Cornwall for three weeks in August. Alan is in Portugal with other undergraduates (after hair-raising experiences in Spain. They were rescued by Mr G.15 and Sir Nigel Ronald!).

13

14 15

Lorenzo Ghiberti’s Baptistery (‘Paradise’) Doors for the Duomo in Florence were restored in 1948 and casts were made of the panels. They were restored again in 1966, after the Flood, and are now preserved in the Museo dell’ Opera del Duomo.The doors currently in place on the Baptistery itself are copies taken from the 1948 casts. Clark was laid low with whooping cough and therefore faced the prospect of cancelling a proposed visit to I Tatti. Calouste Gulbenkian

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I can’t tell you how much we are looking forward to seeing you in Sept. and showing the twins Florence and being at I Tatti. It is very kind and generous and thoughtful of you to let us come there and we will try to give as little trouble as possible to the servants. As Kenneth need not be back in London till early October we would like to send the twins home alone about September 12 and stay on ourselves till end of the month – we can move to a hotel when it suits you and we also want to go to Borgo and Arezzo and we shall see more of you and Nicky and make up a little for our lost visit in June. We are still sad about that. K has written an introduction to Praeterita (which is being republished) when he was ill which we will send you when we get the proofs.16 I have also a bundle of photographs for you to send off when we get home. We are very sad about poor Emerald’s death17 and shall miss her very much – we saw her at least every week. Best love to you and Nicky from us both Jane

Vallombrosa (Firenze) 7.27.48

Dear Jane. I am glad to hear that Kenneth is getting better & better & will be fit to come here in Sept. N and I say we look forward to seeing you both & making the acquaintance of the young ones. By the way what were their hair raising escapes in Spain? How interesting that Kenneth has written a preface to a new edition of ‘Praeterita’. I look forward to reading it as Ruskin is very much to the fore in my mind. Do send over parcel of photos & please send one of an Antonellesque panel that Morra18 said you had just acquired when he was last in London.19

16

17 18 19

John Ruskin, Praeterita, his autobiography and last major work, is a luminous account of his childhood and youth, recounting the formation of his taste and intellect through education, travels in Europe and encounters with great works of art and artists. It was first published in 28 parts in 1885–9; new ed., intro. Kenneth Clark, London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1949. Emerald Cunard, Nancy Cunard’s mother, died on 10 July 1949. Umberto Morra Jacometto Veneziano, Portrait of a Woman (A Novice of the Order of San Secondo), c. 1490, purchased by Clark in 1948 from Baron Rochdale; sold by Clark in 1975 to Eugene Thaw; acquired by the Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio, in 1976.

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We returned a day before yesterday fr. five days spent in Umbria ie Perugia, Assisi, Spello, Gualdo, Nocera. What a paradise is Italy & how easy life as compared with other lands! Ever affectionately B.B.

Carlyon Bay Hotel St Austell S. Cornwall Aug 8

Dear BB, I hope you have had the first lot of photographs by now – I put in the little panel tho’ it was not a good photograph and K was going to get another taken. I am sure you know the picture which was in one of the Burlington Club exhibitions about 1911 called Jacometto – it was sold at Christies a few months ago and K wasn’t able to go to the sale so bought it from Agnew and Drey after. We will bring you out the better photograph and also I hope the introduction to Praeterita in proof. We are here for three weeks holiday with the children. K feels very well but is not allowed to bathe or play golf yet. He is very happy reading the Bible and working on Rembrandt for his Oxford lectures next term! When we get home on 19th we are going down to Oxford to see the M.S.S. exhibition at the Bodlean [sic]20 and will get some of the most interesting pages photographed for you as many have not been done. I am sorry Alan is not coming to Italy as it would amuse you to see anyone as unlike K as his son! Spain is now open to tourists but when he drove to Portugal with his Oxford friends it was impossible to change English notes or travellers cheques. Various Christian innkeepers lent them money to pay for the food they had already eaten but when they got to the Potuguese frontier post they had been directed to, high up in the mountains, the Spanish let them out with difficulty but the Portuguese soldiers would not let them in.The Spanish would not let them back without re-entry visas, they had a gallon of petrol in the car and no food or drink and the nearest open frontier post was 180 miles away. They were therefore on the bridge between the two lots of soldiers. Alan telephoned Mr G from the hut – not knowing any Spanish or Portuguese – Mr G. then rang them up on the

20

Italian Illuminated Manuscripts from 1400 to 1550, Bodleian Library, Oxford, 1948.

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bridge every 3 hours to say it was all very difficult.Twenty hours later dust could be seen rising round the bend of the twisting mountain road and the chief of international police arrived and took them to Braganza for the night and stood them all dinner and they drove round the town with him all hooting his car like mad and the police chief very drunk and saying no-one in the town would love him because he was a policeman. David Finley21 and his wife dined the night before we left. I can’t tell you how much we look forward to coming to you. We have got sleepers for the twins on 13th Sept and ourselves 30th and hope to go to Venice. We leave for Florence Monday 30th August – it will be heavenly. Have you read Flaubert and Mme Bovary by an American called Steegman?22 If not we’ll send it. Best love Jane

23 Aug. ’48 Upper Terrace House Hampstead, N.W.3 Hampstead 1357

My dear BB, I must not arrive in Italy before you have had a letter from me saying how truly grateful we are to you for letting us go to I Tatti.You could not give us a more wonderful treat. We are all looking forward to it immensely, and for the children to see Italy first under these conditions is fortunate beyond words.What would I not have given for it at their age – but I was lucky enough. I only wish Alan was coming. Though in some ways the least sympathetic member of the family he is also the ablest, parents included. I am greatly tempted to bring you the Giacometto [sic] – it is a pet, and you would enjoy it.23 But what a nuisance if it was stopped by the Italian customs on the way back, and I had to abandon it. I will hope for courage at the last moment. He is an interesting artist – Wilde24 has found out a great deal more about him, but will not publish it.

21 22 23 24

David Finley Francis Steegmuller, Flaubert and Madame Bovary: A Double Portrait, New York:Viking, 1939. See n. 19. Johannes Wilde

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I would also like to bring the Ottonian ivory which is far more beautiful than you could guess. It is by the same artist who did the passion scenes in Munich – Goldschmidt thought a Milanese.25 Jane has sent Nicky a line saying that we arrive on the 31st – apparently the train gets in at 7.10 or so instead of the dreadful midnight. It is many years since I felt so excited about anything. I hope we shall see you very soon after, and look forward to longer talks than were possible – I don’t know why – last year. I am better, but not mended and have to rest if I am to show a light face. Love from Jane. Ever your affectionate K

Upper Terrace House Hampstead, N.W.3 Sunday 10th Oct

Dearest BB, I am so ashamed not to have written you since we left Italy. Since we got home we have hardly had a moment’s peace and it will be a great relief to fly to Paris tomorrow strikes or no strikes! We can never tell you how grateful we are to you for your great kindness in lending us I Tatti. It would always have been heaven but with K not well and on the twins first visit to Italy it was heaven.You are used to the beauty of the pictures, objects, library and views but to us it is always a fresh surprise and delight and quite unforgettable each time. And then we enjoyed so much our visits to you at Vallombrosa and I shall never forget the beauty of the walk we took together.Thank you for everything from all the Clarks! The proofs of the Praeterita introduction have just come and we are sending you a copy. I hope you will like it. We have ordered the Donatello reliefs from Lille26 and I hope these will reach you soon. We have not seen David27 since we have come back but he is coming to stay here in 10 days – when we are back from Oxford after K’s first Rembrandt lecture and I will write again then.

25 26 27

Adolph Goldschmidt Donatello’s marble relief, The Feast of Herod, c. 1435, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lille, is one of his finer works. David Balniel

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Sybil [sic] is as well as possible – she has at last succeeded in getting Henry Moore to dine! I sat between him and David Bowes-Lyon28 and was neutral while Henry tried to explain the point of Picasso! We have seen no exhibitions in London since we got back as too many people have been to the house but I hope life will be more peaceful when we get back from Paris in between the Oxford lectures. The first night of Aida was great fun, the best thing Covent Garden has put on so far. K is so much better. His visit to you did him all the good in the world and the heart specialist is very pleased. From the first night he stayed with you at Vallombrosa – whatever you said to him – he has been better! Best love dear BB Jane

30 Oct ’48 Upper Terrace House Hampstead, N.W.3 Hampstead 1357

My dear BB, A short lull on a grey wintry afternoon gives me the opportunity of writing to you. We have been in perpetual movement since we left i Tatti, but so far the stores of health which we accumulated there have kept us going. I am now well into my two series of lectures, in Oxford and London, without serious mishap, although like the poet, Donne we are ‘blasted with sighs and surrounded with coughs’.29 You see how much we owe you, and always shall, for that marvelous holiday. The work I did there on Uccello has also turned out fairly well, and makes me realise how much better I could do if I had regular spells in such auspicious surroundings. Jane says that she promised I would send you my introduction to Praeterita. It looks a very small pack of wool about which to have made so much cry – but it may occupy you for a few minutes. As you will see, it was impossible to write without the consciousness of the recent, distasteful book on Ruskin’s marriage,30

28 29 30

David Bowes-Lyon (1902–1961) was the younger brother of Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon who married the future George vi. He was more interested in orchids than art. Misquoting John Donne’s ‘Twickenham Garden’. He actually wrote: ‘Blasted with sighs and surrounded with teares, Hither I come to seeke the spring’. See Ch. 7 n. 96.

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and perhaps I have made too much of this. But at least it is something which has never been treated candidly in other writings on Ruskin. I have just had a glance of the American edition of your book.31 It looks most exciting – and seems to bring one closer to the fullness of your mind than anything else. I look forward to it with the greatest eagerness. It was particularly comforting to find on the few pages I read the expression of many of my own unspoken thoughts and feelings. Perhaps after all it is true ‘that wise men are but of one religion’. I do hope that this letter isn’t too difficult to read – my writing has grown crabbd with use, but a typewriter seems discourteous. I have been able to fulfill a good many of your commissions. For example, I hope you will find at i Tatti photos from the Bodleian mss; I have got those of all the Italian pictures at the Barber Institute (you will certainly have them all already), and Colin Agnew has had a new one taken of the Bellini St. Jerome since cleaning.32 I promised to tell you the provenance of my little portrait of a lay sister. It belonged to Lord Rochdale, and was exhibited in the Burlington Fine Arts Club in 1924, called Antonello. I saw it then, and loved it ever since. Of course it would be the perfect Alvise Vivarini if he retained his original splendour.33 I wonder if, after all, you went on your trip to Switzerland. I long to hear your account of the Reinhardt34 and Hirsch35 collections. Please tell Nicky that Colette has her two little wooden figures36 in her room at school, where they look beautiful – but her companions can’t make them out, and ask why they are broken – a first experience of Anglo Saxon philistinism. Please give Nicky heaps of love from us both Ever your affectionate Kenneth

31 32

33 34

35 36

Berenson’s Aesthetics and History was published in New York by Doubleday in 1948. Giovanni Bellini, St Jerome in the Desert, c. 1455, was acquired by the Barber Institute Gallery, Birmingham, in 1949 from Agnews. Colin Agnew (1882–1975) joined the firm in 1906, retiring in 1967. He ran the Agnew Berlin gallery before the First World War and set up premises in New York in 1925. See n. 19. Oskar Reinhart (1885–1965) was a Swiss arts patron and art collector. His collection, of mostly European art, is now housed in the Museum Oskar Reinhart in the centre of Winterthur, and in the Collection Oskar Reinhart am Roemerholz, his former home, in Winterthur. Robert von Hirsch Colette Clark recalls that she and her twin Colin had chosen and bought these figures with great enthusiasm while enjoying their first visit to Florence. They remain in her collection and are ‘even more broken!’ (private conversation, autumn 2013).

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Settignano. Nov. 48.

My dear Kenneth. How did you receive my ‘Aesthetics & History’? I meant to send you one with a dedicasse directly copies reached me fr. N.Y. Fact is I should have not seen one as yet, but that my sisters have brought us a copy. Sinister in binding & poor print & paper. No luck with my publication. Do send me yr. introduction to ‘Praeterita’. You should ignore the private personality of a writer even when writing about himself & Ruskin had a double one if anybody – for wh. reason I have found ‘Praeterita’ as dry as dry – I have no photos of the Barber Institute & those you promise are not here yet. Those of the Bodleian have arrived & I am truly grateful. The three Triumphs are of course Florentine & close to the so-called ‘Paris Master’.The two representing ‘Arrival of Aeneas’? & ‘Building of Carthage’ are even closer to Francesco Di Giorgio while the four fr. a Gonzaga ms are, one ‘Venus & Cupid’ by a close follower of Cossa & the other three by a miniaturist betw. Giraldi the Ferrarese37 & the yg. Bart.Vivarini.38 Yes we spent a fortnight in Switzerland including some days in Lucerne to study the Lichtenstein coll. I took the double miniature in my hand & studied it minutely.39 I took into account a figure & landsc. in gold on the back of the male head done exactly as in Contarini his figure in prof. seated. The heads are to my eye (now) indistinguishable fr. Giov. Bellini’s style & work c.1475. Yours I must to see in the original. Is it conceivably (only the merest suggestion) by Ercole Roberti – if your Australian trip permits you should see the collection of Lombard art at Zürich,40 open into March. Practically except for Brera everything in all Lombardy worth seeing. Love to you both fr. Nicky & B.B.

37

38 39

40

Gugliemo Giraldi (1445–1489) was a favourite illuminator of the Duke of Ferrara and one of the foremost exponents of Renaissance book illumination. The Venetian painter Bartolomeo Vivarini (active 1450–99) worked mainly in tempera. See n. 20. Italian Illuminated Manuscripts, Bodleian Library, possibly nos 33, 37, 38, 82. The ‘double miniature’ to which Berenson refers was once in the Liechtenstein Collection, now Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, where it is catalogued as by Jacometto. It shows A Portrait of a Woman, possibly a Nun of San Secondo; (verso) a scene in grisaille; and A Portrait of Alvise Contarini(?); (verso) A Tethered Roebuck. The Metropolitan’s catalogue makes the same connections to Bellini and to Clark’s painting by Jacometto that Berenson here tentatively suggests. There was an exhibition at the Kunsthaus Zurich in November 1948–March 1949, Kunstschätze der Lombardei: 500 vor Christus, 1800 nach Christus, catalogue ed. Constantino Baroni and Gian Alberto dell’Acqua.

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Nov. 28. 48 I Tatti Settignano Florence

Dear Kenneth. Derek Hill41 yesterday brought yr. gifts. I have not owned the Kelmscott copy of the Ruskin extract on the Nature of Gothic, so I am delighted to annex it & grateful.42 Moreover I shall re-read it delighting in the page as a work of art – then there is yr. preface to Praeterita. I have read it with delight. It is not only written with lucidity & charm but contains the gist of the book I should like you to do on Ruskin as revealed in his writings. It is a magnificent & important theme worthy of the whole of you. All in all there never has been another man of his gifts who has devoted himself to the study of art & its relations to society. I hear fr. Jane that you are reviewing my book. It makes me happy for I could not be in better hands & in a mind more attuned to understand what I mean to say. And you are off to Aussie lands. Have me in your thoughts if you see Italian pictures & bring back photographs & catalogues of museums. I find a little energy left for writing; yet I dream of a book. If only I can pull it off! All good wishes dear Kenneth. Your devotedly affectionate B.B.

Dec. 12. 48 I Tatti Settignano Florence

Dearest Jane. Presumably K will have left when this reaches yr. address, wherefore I write to you to thank you for photos just received. Also so welcome, particularly of the marvellous Donatello at Lille.43

41 42

43

Derek Hill John Ruskin, The Nature of Gothic; a Chapter of The Stones of Venice, London: George Allen, [March] 1892, printed at the Kelmscott Press by William Morris, Hammersmith, edition of 500, all on paper (none on vellum but all with stiff vellum cover), 30 shillings. See n. 26.

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Do you remember to whom the early St. Jerome by Bellini belongs?44 No news here of transmittable interest. Waley45 has been here for 12 days & remains another night. I hope he has been comfortable for in other respects he has given few signs of enjoying our company & mine least of all. What a noble intellectual face & head, & how precious the rare – so rare – utterances that come so reluctantly from between his teeth. We are having marvellous weather & I cannot recall sunsets so romantic & foliage so fascinating. I get immense delight out of both. How one learns to love ‘natura’ with age & the muses!46 When visitors & correspondence do not absorb me I am writing some ‘Supplementary Essays’. Three are ready & two more in view. My most loving good wishes to each & all of you for a Merry Xmas and Happy New Year & a satisfactory 1949. May the coming year bring you here again & again. Keep us informed of how K is faring in Australia & its coasts. Yours B.B.

Upper Terrace House Hampstead, London NW3 Friday Dec 17th 48

Dearest BB, It was very nice to get your letter. I do not know if K had time to write before he left on Tuesday but he was really touched and delighted with the angelic letter you wrote him about his introduction to Praeterita – nothing has given him so much pleasure for ages as what you said. After K left I retired to Claridges to an enormous suite to collect myself before the Christmas holidays – it was great fun having no responsibilities for

44 45 46

See n. 32. Arthur Waley In Aesthetics and History, Berenson quoted with approval the following passage from St John Chrysostom, written about ad 400, which mirrors his references to the beauty of nature in other letters written at about this time:‘When you look at gleaming buildings, and the aspect of colonnades allures your eye, then turn at once to the vault of heaven and to the spacious meadows where herds graze at the water’s edge. Who does not despise all the creations of art, when at dawn in the stillness of his heart he admires the rising sun as it sheds its golden light over the earth; or when resting by a spring in the deep grass or under the dark shade of thick-leaved trees he feasts his eye on the far distance vanishing in the haze.’

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48 hours! Walter Lippman47 and his wife were also there and I had a drink with them and the Rex Bensons48 the night before Walter left and then dined with Rene Massigli.49 The night K left Alan dined with me and left about 11 pm to motor to Oxford and then on to Wales at 7 am next morning to climb mountains in Wales for two days. I felt relieved to be no longer young! Now I am back here with the twins and their friends. Robin Balneil50 stayed here last night arriving unexpectedly on the doorstep at 6.45 with a heavy suitcase and saying he needed a bed, had had no lunch or tea and was due to meet Princess Margaret at Covent Garden at 6.45 in a dinner jacket, so I fed him and lent him a car and thought Alan was no different to anyone else! About the photographs glad the Donatello’s reached you at last. I seem to think the early St Jerome belongs to Agnew51 but will check up on this on Monday and let you know. Poor Sybil [sic] is I think very ill – she won’t give in but had to cancel a party for Walter Lippman and then struggled up next day. She won’t go to America paid for entirely and said if I get better I might go in the spring – which is very unlike her. She is supposed to be going to Juliet Duff 52 for Xmas but I have asked her to come here and stay in bed for as long as she likes if she can’t go to Wilts. One dinner she gave for Larry and Vivien53 she should clearly have been in bed and I wanted to bring her home with me but she wouldn’t give in – what she needs is a month in bed. I don’t know if you could influence her? I sympathise over Arthur Waley! I have heard nothing from K since he sailed but he went off gaily – he had really too much to do before he left and I think he will enjoy the peace and change. I’ll keep you informed and he will send you photographs of everything in each gallery.

47 48

49 50 51 52

53

Walter Lippmann Reginald Lindsay (Rex) Benson (1889–1968) was the second son of Robert Henry Benson, who sold his collection of pictures to Duveen in 1927. Rex Benson had a swashbuckling and successful career as sportsman, soldier, spy, farmer, musician and chairman of the merchant bank Kleinwort Benson. René Massigli (1888–1988) was a French diplomat and an expert on German affairs. David Balniel’s eldest son. See n. 32. Juliet Duff (1881–1965), the daughter of the 4th Earl of Lonsdale and widow of Sir Robert Duff, 2nd Baronet (killed in action in 1914, age 37). She was a close friend of Winston and Clementine Churchill. Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh

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We had several amusing evenings before he left – one with Larry and Vivien and the Stafford Cripps.54 She is total loss as a guest but one can’t help liking him in spite of the fact that he gets up at 20 to 4 each morning! Sorry to inflict such a screed on you – my best love to you and Nicky and every good wish for New Year – am very glad you are writing supplementary Essays. Jane PS We flew over to Paris for 2 days with David for a Louvre meeting just before K left and the Louvre and Paris were lovely

Dec. 29. 48 I Tatti Settignano Florence

Dearest Jane. I am distressed to learn how ill, this time seriously ill, Sibyl is. On receiving your letter of the 12th I wrote at once urging her to come here at once for a long rest. From others I hear that it may be too late. I am anxious & if you have any precise news of her condition please let me have it at once. And any news of Kenneth. I have received no letter from him for some time. Raymond55 & someone else have written that K. was going to write about my book for the Burlington. It would make me happy if he would. Our good news is of matchless sunsets & crystal skies which have lasted for months even when the cold came at last as it has a few days ago. Influenza is raging everywhere & at I Tatti all the servants have had it & now Nicky is down with it & I feel helpless as an infant without its nurse. Luisa Vertova56 does her best to play hostess & attend to guests. Still they come & far too often with ‘I am here today & tomorrow only.’

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Stafford Cripps (1889–1952) served in the post-war Labour government, under Clement Attlee, as President of the Board of Trade and then, in 1947–50, as Chancellor of the Exchequer. During the war he had been the ambassador to the Soviet Union. From a wealthy family, he was a deeply committed Christian and Socialist, and famously ascetic and hard-working. His wife, Isobel, took a close interest in Chinese political and social affairs. Raymond Mortimer Luisa Vertova Nicolson

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Derek Hill is staying in the Villino & gathers guests whom he brings over. Love to K when you write & every good wish to all of you for 1949. Affectionately B.B.

Upper Terrace House Hampstead, N.W.3 Tues, Jan 5th 49 From Old Quarries, Avening, Glos57 till 14th Jan

Dearest BB, Sybil [sic] has been put to bed for a month as Lord Horden says her cough has affected her heart and that has to be rested and the rest will help the cough. So she couldn’t travel for some time – Alan and I visited her just before the twins and I came here last Saturday (Alan’s now in Switzerland) and she looked much better and is very cheerful. I think if only she will stay in bed she will recover and be able to visit you later – I am sure your invitation must have encouraged as well as given her immense pleasure. I am sorry K evidently did not write to you as he meant before he left. In the letter I had today from Aden he has finished the proofs of his landscape book and is deep in your book and the review he is writing. He will send this home air mail as soon as finished and is full of excitement over it. I hope that when this reaches you that Nicky’s flu will be ended. It is a horrid winter plague and I do hope you escape.

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Arthur Lee purchased Old Quarries, at Avening near Tetbury in Gloucestershire, in April 1936. He enlarged the relatively modest early 19th-century house by adding an annexe which he designed to be ‘the gallery of my dreams’ to house his picture collection. The gallery was completed shortly before the outbreak of war and, anticipating the evacuation of pictures from the National Gallery, Lord Lee personally designed and had constructed a sophisticated system of storage racks for his annexe.When the National Gallery pictures were evacuated first in 1939, some 230 works, including both the Vermeers, the Arnolfini van Eyck and pictures by Bellini, Rembrandt,Velásquez, Raphael, as well as the Wilton Diptych, were sent to Old Quarries; they were then later despatched to the Manod Caves in Wales (see Introduction to Ch. 6). Lord Lee died in July 1947 and in his will he left the Gatcombe estate to Samuel Courtauld and his descendants, and the Manor House to Kenneth and Jane Clark, subject to his wife continuing to live there if she wished, but with conditions: that they use it as a residence and that they look after his picture collection until such time as it was transferred to the Courtauld Institute. It seems that the Clarks declined the gift and that a proposal by Lady Lee to leave the house to Alan Clark on her death never materialised. Although frail, she died in 1966, aged 93. Old Quarries is now a care home for the elderly.

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I am down here for 10 days before the holidays end. It is bliss to have Xmas over – I will write again when I am in London end of next week and have seen Sybil [sic]. I had a letter from her this morning and have replied firmly she is not to write and must stay very quiet. She is being well looked after as she now has Norah Lindsay’s58 maid. Much love and please forgive this dull note but the holidays have been exhausting. Ever affectionately and love to Nicky Jane

Claridges Brook Street, w.1. Feb 11th 49

My dear BB, Kenneth is now on his way home and arrives on March 1st. He enjoyed Australia to the last, although when the sirocco blew and he had to make speeches at 100 in the shade it was oppressive. I hope he is bringing lots of photos for you if he has not already sent them off from Australia. I think the bushman drawings remained the most exciting things he saw but the Melbourne Gallery has more interesting pictures than he thought tho’ the rooms are too big and it was v. badly hung. However I gather he has rehung it! He enjoyed immensely all his visits to the country and meeting wallabys on walks. Sybil [sic] is about even if she looks very bent and ill – she is coming to my box at Covent Garden on 17th with various people and is giving a party for the Oliviers on 21st. I have been to their three first nights but Richard iii remains the best. I wish you could see Larry do it. Antigone last night (Jean Anouilh)59 I found puzzling and rather disappointing – not Vivien’s part and no scope for Larry as the Greek chorus with modern dress and slang but they both think the play is wonderful so I shall see it again with K. I went to the Chantrey Bequest with Henry60 – not a single good picture alas. If any painter had any merits they chose his worst picture with great skill.

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Norah Lindsay (1873–1948), who was born into an Anglo-Irish military family, established herself as a garden designer in the footsteps of Gertrude Jekyll. She and her husband were given Sutton Courtenay Manor, in Oxfordshire, as a wedding present. Richard III and Antigone (in a version by Jean Anouilh) opened in 1949 at the New Theatre, London. Probably Henry Moore. The sculptor Sir Francis Chantrey (1781–1841) bequeathed over £100,000 in trust for the President and Trustees of the Royal Academy, the income to be used to buy contemporary paintings and sculpture made in Britain, with a view to encouraging the establishment of a ‘public national collection of British fine art’.

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Do hope the influenze epidemic is over and you escaped? David61 has been down for two days and sent his love when I told him I was writing. Best love to you and Nicky and to Alda.62 Ever affectionately Jane I do hope your writing is going well. Am here for four days as the house was full of workmen and it is great fun.

Febr. 17. 49 I Tatti Settignano Florence

Dearest Jane. Thanks for such a nice letter wh. I should have answered sooner if I was not in the grips of a horrid cold. I really suffer while it is on & then it leaves me a wreck unable for quite a while to get anything good out of my pen. And that, silly dodderer that I am, is what counts first. We are suffering from the most enchanting winter weather that ever threatened the earth. Radiant sunshine, crystal skies, romantic sunset, sparkling air, nipping temperature but not cold, daffodils already out – but no rain for months! Streams drying up fields powdered as you plow electric power & light more & more restricted. I never thought I should get utilitarian enough to dread good weather. You know Derek Hill. He is in the Villino where he paints charmingly and intelligibly. He drops in & out & shares his guests with us. Recently there was Molyneux63 & a little earlier Hague [sic].64 Just now Morra is again with us & tomorrow arrive the Nicholsons (Edith’s friends)65 to stay a fortnight & the Bonners66 fr. Rome for a long weekend. We seldom are alone – just Nicky & me – almost never in fact.

61 62 63 64 65 66

Probably David Balniel. Alda von Anrep Edward Molyneux Dawyck Haig Simon and Molly Nicholson, to whom Berenson had been introduced by Edith Wharton while staying with her at St Claire in 1932. He was a member of the Colonial Service. Paul Hyde Bonner (1893–1968) was an American diplomat, who wrote novels about international intrigue. He was with the us Department of State (Division of Foreign Services), based in Rome and Paris, in 1946–52.

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I am so glad that K is returning. You must yourself or get him to write at length about his Australian adventures & about Bushman paintings & whether they are just like those of S. Africa. Much depends on this. It would take too long to write about now. Love fr. both of us B.B.

28 Mch ’49 Upper Terrace House Hampstead, N.W.3 Hampstead 1357

My dear BB, I promised myself to write to you as soon as I got back from Australia, but of course there was an Augean stable of papers and arrears of business to be dealt with, the family to visit, and a trip to Paris for a Louvre meeting, so that only now can I sit down to it. Actually we are staying with the Oliviers in the country, which means a long, quiet morning. As you will have learnt from Jane, I enjoyed Australia far more than I had expected to do. I find it hard to explain why without seeming patronising, but the brilliant climate seems to have had a magical effect on the Anglo Saxons, removing their inhibitions and hypocrisies. Of course they are very naïve – hardly out of the pioneering stage – but they are a gifted people, only held back by laziness. It was fascinating to be in an entirely democratic country, without even the respect for oneself, or shame of dispossession, of the usa. The landscape, as Jane may have told you, is most beautiful and I can only convey it by saying that it is like a Piero della Francesca. The grass is white, the trunks of the trees pinkish white, the leaves glaucous, exactly as in the Baptism.The light comes through the leaves, so the woods are all lilac – like the most extreme impressionist Renoirs of the late 70’s. It is a country for painters, and in fact they have quite good ones – at least no worse than anywhere else in these years of dearth. Jane has told you of my enthusiasm for the aboriginal paintings. They are extraordinary, and totally unlike African bushman drawings or the Paleolithic cave paintings. They do not represent a total impression of movement but an analytic. As you know the Australian aboriginal always draws the inside of his subject as well as the out, and he makes the heart, liver, intestines etc., into a decorative pattern. Most of

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the paintings are life-size, on bark lined with white clay. By some freak the abos had what we call perfect taste – all their objects are pretty, delicate colouring, and their fantasies are gentle, whereas those of the neighbouring Papuans are ugly and violent. Altogether, a study of Melanesian culture is a good corrective for the art historian, for each island and district has an art-form independent and fundamentally different from the other. All the material is in Australia, and has not been properly studied, nor even exhibited. Of course I was there too short a time to learn anything – except how ignorant we are. When I returned I handed over to Ben my short appreciation of your book.67 I’m sorry it has to appear in that moribund organ (slightly redeemed by a very interesting article, I thought, on Florentine stained glass68). I do hope you like the review. It is truly a great book, from which I have learnt more than from any book for years. But it is so often contrary to current beliefs that I had, up to a point, to forestall criticism. I am now preparing lectures on the beginnings of romantic painting – Gericault, Delacroix, etc. All this is so closely connected with English literature, yet almost unknown in England – tho Gericault, the complete equivalent of Byron, spent two years here. I hope that you have escaped wintry diseases. Jane had a bad go of ’flu a fortnight before I returned and is still not quite better. With much love to Nicky, ever your affectionate Kenneth Vivien has just come down and sends you heaps of love

Settignano Apr. 2. 49

Dear Kenneth. I heard of yr. return but imagining how much you would find to attend to I did not expect to hear fr. you for some time. So I am doubly grateful for yr. letter. Let me thank you d’avance for having taken the trouble to write about my aesthetics & history. For me the important thing is that you have appreciated my effort. As for the art-book-reading public, when in art matters they have ceased playing the Philip drunk & become Philip sober I wish them to follow my lead rather

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Clark’s review of Aesthetics and History was published in the Burlington Magazine, vol. 1, no. 554 (May 1949), pp. 144–5. Arthur Lane, ‘Florentine Painted Glass and the Practice of Design’, Burlington Magazine, vol. 91, no. 551 (February 1949), pp. 42–8.

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than Read’s – let alone the German Jews who run all art matters now in all Western lands. Indeed they are spread so thick that I cannot hope to penetrate them and get a hearing in either London or N.Y. In the last named metropolis of taste & sense in cultural matters the reviews of my last book have been what one could expect. Almost they make me regret that I published there.69 Ma parliamo delle cose allegre. – the arts of the Australian natives. What you tell me about them rouses my curiosity to the boiling point. I have read innumerable ethnographical works about the aborigines but nothing about their art. Have you brought back photos? Do illustrated accounts exist? Let me tell you why I am so keen. It is this. If there is a spot on earth uncontaminated by influences fr. outside it is Australia. What its inhabitants have produced must therefore be the expression of their minds accompanied by the animal pleasures of successful functioning. Their artefacts should therefore be as spontaneous as those of the seals & beavers of bees & ants & termites, as free as a birds song.What I am driving at is that producing artefacts is almost a physiological necessity the which, when satisfactory, can become a work of art. In that last phase it may profit from very distant contact with more evolved forms or be utterly crushed by too hastily & rashly approached influences. When you find time write & send me any printed information you have brought back. Let me hear more about the lectures you now are giving. When will yr. preface to ‘Praeterita’ appear. Love to you both Yours B.B.

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Philip of Macedon was a wise ruler, fair and just. However, one day, after he had been drinking, he gave a decision against a woman. His judgement seemed unfair to her and influenced by drink. ‘I appeal’, she said to the King, who answered, ‘To whom do you appeal?’ ‘I appeal from Philip drunk to Philip sober’, she replied. The next day the King reconsidered her case and decided in her favour. In Aesthetics and History Berenson does not mention Herbert Read by name but makes explicit his disapproval of any aesthetic approach which prioritises the appreciation of colour and form over the content of a work of art. Read was one of the apostles of modern art and of abstract art in particular. Although never uninterested, Berenson struggled to come to terms with modern art and abstract art. In Aesthetics and History he attacked the sterility of art theory, and targeted German art historians, notably Josef Stryzgowski, Max Dvorˇák and Franz Wickhoff.

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Apr.8.49 I Tatti Settignano Florence

Dear Kenneth. Thanks for the brochure on the Shallal Mosaic.70 Every scrap of that kind is treasure for me and my library. And this morning’s post brings word fr. Victoria (Australia) that they are sending me photos at your request. I am grateful. I work a little & see too many people, read far too many periodicals & write too many letters & get very tired & have to waste most of the waking hours resting. That’s what it’s like after 80.Yet better alive! Love to you both B.B.

Apr.12.1949 I Tatti Settignano Florence

Dearest Jane & Kenneth Both yr. letters reached me yesterday & touched me deeply [letters missing]. Both of you made me feel as if you were my children filled with filial devotion. I must say that I enjoyed it, & look forward eagerly to recapturing it. So you must bend the stars in their courses so as to come here again toward the end of Sept. I am distressed & alarmed to learn that all is not well, dear Jane, with yr. something-or-other & have to be ‘under observation.’ I pray the results may be propitious. It is a pity though that you cannot accompany Kenneth to Lisbon.

70

The brochure was probably sent by post from Australia. In April 1917, during the second battle of Gaza in southern Palestine, a group of Australian signallers discovered a mosaic that had been partly uncovered by Turkish troops, who had built a trench on a mound in the Wadi Ghuzze near the town of Shellal. Created in ad 561–2 under the reign of the Eastern Roman Emperor Justinian, the Mosaic is one of the finest examples of Byzantine art in existence. After tortuous diplomatic wranglings to prevent the uk government claiming it for the British Museum, the Mosaic became part of the Collection of the Australian War Memorial near Canberra and is on permanent display in the Hall of Valour.

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When there he might look up an ardent student of Portug. painting named Jirmounsky,71 who lives Rua iveus 6III, Esq. I daresay he haunts the picture Gallery. He is a Petersburg Jew whom I knew in Paris before he took refuge in Portugal. One of our most enchanting friends is Contessa Philomena de la Foret Divonne72 whose address is Quinta da Borroca Cacem (near Lisbon). There may be a telephone. If K announced himself as coming from us to see her he would not regret it. Trevy73 is here with Julian his son. George his brother & Mrs are staying at Poggio Gherado74 & we have seen them. Freya Stark75 is staying here. I am reading a sort of confession of her faith, exquisite. With devoted affection B.B. [Added in Nicky’s handwriting in margin of page 1] Darling Jane, a thousand thanks to your delightful letter. I wish it did not contain such bad news of yourself. Would it not be better for you to get some high air? Had also very charming letters from the twins from which I gather that they both are sick on the plane! It was so lovely to have you here and to enjoy your beauty and elegance. Ever yours Nicky

Settignano May 1, 49

Dear Kenneth. Yesterday after tea Nicky read aloud yr. review of Aesthetics & History.76 Je me trimoussais de plaisir as she read & made me very happy. It was in the best sense of the word an appreciation. So-called criticism i.e. telling the writer how he could have done better & telling the public what he, the critic, thinks they should think about it profits neither author nor public. An appreciation can gladden & encourage the writer – continuez continuez la vague – & guide the

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Myron Jirmounsky (1890–?) was a Russian émigré living in Portugal. An art historian who had taught in St Petersburg and then at the Sorbonne, he became attached to the Academia das Belas Artes in Lisbon. He wrote about Portuguese art and Berenson took an interest in his writings. In the war when communications were difficult, Berenson was able to get news, e.g. to Lawrence Berenson in the usa, via Jirmounsky. Philomène de la Forest Divonne Robert Trevelyan See Janet Ross Freya Stark See n. 67.

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reader as to what to expect & how well worth his while to invest time in reading the book. As appreciation no book of mine has had a more sympathetically intelligent and more exciting. Nor do I in the least resent the objections. When as a youngster I listened spellbound to Prof. Paulsen77 on philosophy at Berlin he used to start his way of thinking on a given subject & then would add Aber man Kann sagen & would say all that from another point of view might be said against or supplementary to his own view. I feel the same about yr. review. Indeed nothing is more refreshing & stimulating than genuine criticism wh. like yours is without a speck of facetiousness & only points to another approach & another lighting. Let me hope this review of yours will appear without any omissions. X Sibyl arrived evening before yesterday a little more bowed than a year ago but as gallant & as keen. She was almost Mardrusian [sic] in her description of yr. country house78 & even if one deducts a good bit of her magical view of things it must remain a miracle of comfort & taste. Shall I live to see it? I am getting cowardly about Paris & London & the coasts. I get tired so easily & collapse follows & colds & every kind of unpleasantness. If I could count on doing only so much each day! But I should want to see everybody & every thing. What are your plans & do they not include a visit here or at least to Italy? There is a gathering of pictures supposed to have been done in Lorenzo de Medici’s day.79 That here in Pal. Strozzi, & in Doge’s Palace a Bellini show that really may be important.80 Don’t forget my interest in the art of the Australian aborigine. Love to you all B.B.

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Friedrich Paulsen (1846–1908) was appointed the Professor of Philosophy and Pedagogy at the University of Berlin in 1878. Berenson matriculated there in April 1888, staying several months and attending lectures. In fact, Upper Terrace House, Hampstead. The city of Florence held a number of events, including an exhibition at the Palazzo Strozzi, The Quincentenary of Lorenzo de Medici 1449–1949. They brought together a diverse range of works of art produced in Florence during the period of Lorenzo Il Magnifico. A total of eleven nations lent to the events which ran May–November and attracted 93,000 visitors. The Bellini exhibition, June–October 1949, organised by Rodolfo Palluchini, held in the Palazzo Ducale, Venice, was a landmark in the reappraisal of the artist. It showed works mostly from the Veneto and Italy.

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May 27. 49 I Tatti Settignano Florence

Dearest Jane, Your friends have just been here, too much in a hurry.They had another party to go to.Yet I enjoyed them & they seemed happy to pass an hour with us. We are off tomorrow morning on a jaunt northward as far as Lugano & Hotel Splendid – where we are due June 6 to stay 2 or 3 days studying the Thyssen Coll. June 15 we are due in Venezia to study the Bellini’s. The 180 [sic] panels will be shown. Would you could you join us. We shall be there till June 28 or 30th. Love B.B. No plans of coming here?!!?

Sat 11th June [1949]

Dearest BB, Alas I wish we could join you in Venice this month but alas we haven’t any free time till end of July – we go to Paris for a week and in between there is Eton long leave and various engagements daily which make it impossible. We hope to propose ourselves for a short visit end of Sept or early Oct. whichever would suit you best? We stay here till middle of August and then plan to go to Venice with the children for several weeks.They can bathe on the Lido and we can see the Bellini exhibition – if we can only get rooms in Venice. Otherwise we shall have to go to Venice in October. K has put off his Oxford lectures till Nov. so as to leave us free. We enjoyed Umberto’s visit immensely – tho’ he was so busy we did not see as much of him as we would have liked. Since then – apart from David Crawford81 who is always here off and on, we had Rene Huyghe82 from the Louvre which was great fun – you will know him well. He gave a brilliant lecture on Delacroix.

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See David Balniel René Huyghe

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It was very kind of you and Nicky to have Freddie and Margot83 who both adored their visit. I have just been staying with Loelia Westminster84 who also much enjoyed meeting you at last! We have not yet seen Sybil [sic] but dine with her on Wednesday so look forward to hearing your news. K’s lectures are now over at Oxford which leaves us freer! This term it was on David, Gericault Ingres and Delacroix which was v. interesting for him and me! Very few people in Oxford had heard of any of them so the lectures were even more crowded. Do hope you and Nicky are having a good holiday and wish we could come to Venice now however it will be lovely to see you in the autumn. Yours ever affectionately Jane

24 June ’49 Upper Terrace House Hampstead, N.W.3 Hampstead 1357

My dear BB, The Oxford terms being over, I have some leisure in which to thank you for your very kind letter about the review in the Burlington, which cheered and relieved me mightily. I was so very anxious to show people what riches were to be found in the book – yet I had to prepare them for certain points of view which are not easily accepted nowadays. We are having a pleasant summer. I have been lecturing on Ingres and Delacroix, and thoroughly enjoying it. The relevant literature is so entertaining and the criticism about the best ever written. In fact art criticism in France in the 1840s with Gautier, Beaudelaire, Thoré, Sylvestre Delécluze etc is still worth reading, which can’t be said for the similar productions of any other epoch. We have been adding to our odds and ends in a last reckless burst before all our money disappears, and amongst other things have got the beautiful copy by Degas of the double portrait by Bellini in the Louvre;85 also a screen by Kano

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Frederick Ashton (1904–1988) was the chief choreographer for Sadler’s Wells Ballet (later the Royal Ballet) at Covent Garden. Margot Fonteyn (1919–1991) was the prima ballerina. They were soon to undertake a triumphant tour of the usa. Loelia, Duchess of Westminster (1902–1993) had recently divorced the 2nd Duke after an unhappy and childless marriage. Edgar Degas, Two Male Figures, 1859–60. Degas copied Heads of Two Young Men in a Landscape, then considered a Giovanni Bellini but now catalogued as 16th-century Venetian School.

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Masonobu86 and a gilt copper object of about 1210 which is a real beauty.87 This last should by all the laws of probability be a fake – but it isn’t. I will send you a photograph of it. We are coming out to the Bellini exhibition88 in the end of August bringing the children to bathe on the Lido while I slink around the churches. Sibyl, whose broomstick seems to have got her there on the opening day, says that the pictures have been taken out of their frames and let into the walls, which sounds unattractive. I am longing to see the Besancon Noah, which I have never seen.89 I hear that your self portrait will be out in a day or two, and am looking forward enormously to reading it.90 Extraordinary how, in the end, and perhaps as a result of the war, you have been able to achieve with the world the kind of communication which was reserved for your friends. I am filling in a fortnight and trying to produce a new edition of the Gothic Revival.91 It has been out of print for over twenty years. I find it a mixed entertainment.The early chapters in the B. Litt style are very dull; the latter ones quite amusing.The whole is rather vitiated by inconsistencies of values; however I am enjoying pointing this out in a series of fatherly notes. We hope to come on to see you after Venice, probably at the end of September. Will you be at Vallombrosa then? We shan’t have the children, who will be back at school. I must spend some time at Assisi, as I am proposing to talk to my flock about Giotto. Much love to Nicky from us both And from Jane to you, Ever your devoted Kenneth

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Sold in the Clark Sale at Sotheby’s, London, June 1984, Lot 12: ‘Kano School: A Six-Fold Screen . . . bearing signature of Masunobu (Kano Town 1625–1694) and seal Shoin-shi; 18th century.’ Sold in ibid., Lot 127: ‘Gilt bronze Romanesque candlestick c. 1200.’ See n. 80. Giovanni Bellini, The Drunkenness of Noah, 1515, Musée de Beaux-Arts, Besançon. Berenson SSP was dedicated ‘In Memory of my wife and fifty years of companionship’. London: Constable, 2nd edn 1950.

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16 July ’49 Upper Terrace House Hampstead, N.W.3 Hampstead 1357

My Dear BB, Thank you so much for the self-portrait. We have both enjoyed it greatly; it is in many ways the most fascinating of all your writings, full of wisdom, insight and encouragement for those who love beauty. I think you make too much of your supposed lack of skill as a writer.You have always had a remarkable command of words and (as Logan92 used to say) a rare plastic sense of language. Writing is not so much of a debatable technique as you imply. Le style c’est l’homme is a permanently true platitude, and yours will survive just as your personality will survive, when others less rich, but more conformative have evaporated. I must also thank you for a kind letter93 containing the good news that your journeys had not proved too exacting. We set out for Venice on the 16th August, and after the family have returned in September, I hope I may take advantage of your very kind invitation to stay alone at i Tatti for a week or two in order to work. I can imagine no greater luxury. I shan’t need much in the way of food – Nicky needn’t worry about that. But if it is at all inconvenient I can stay in Florence, or Fiesole, and simply work at i Tatti. During that time I hope I may come out to Vallombrosa whenever you lack a companion for your walks. Work has been almost impossible here during the last three weeks; and we have been away in Paris where the social atmosphere is detestable, but the works of art more marvellous than ever. If only the French could take photographs! But I have now almost given up hope of lecturing on pictures which are in French galleries, knowing that illustrations will be impossible. Please thank Nicky for a postcard from Verona. I have thought a great deal about our tour, and was reminded of it even in Australia, where I met an architect whom we had met in Bergamo or Verona, and had taken us to a Romanesque templar church. Strange that even now, twenty three years later, no one has attempted a book on Lotto.94 One would have thought that with the present craze for mannerism, neurosis etc., he would have been a gift.

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Logan Pearsall Smith Letter missing. See Ch. 1. Clark went to the Veneto and Bergamo with Berenson and Nicky soon after they met, in autumn 1926.

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Jane will be coming back to Italy to join me in the end of September, and looks forward to seeing you then. She sends her love, and a special word of thanks for the book, which she greatly enjoyed. Ever yours affectionately Kenneth Clark Someone came in at this moment, and I automatically signed my name.

Sept-29-49 Villa I Tatti Settignano Florence

My dear BB, I must write one more word of thanks for the happiest fortnight I have ever spent – I can’t call it a holiday, as I have managed to do quite a lot of work, but it has been more refreshing than any holiday. It was so generous of you to let me stay here so long. Conditions are perfect, both for discourse and for lucid enjoyment. Jane tells me that advance copies of my landscape book95 have appeared, so you will be finding one at i Tatti on your return. Don’t expect too much. They are only lectures, with that awkward combination of exposition and potted information which the form involves – at least for a professor. I gave the Alberti to Alda, who has put it on your desk. The incredible fact is that the original Latin text has never been reprinted. The book is known only from a very inaccurate 16th century Italian translation which has served as the basis of translation into other languages. As the 1485 edition is pretty rare scholars don’t usually bother to look up the original (even Wittkower96) and make some serious misinterpretations.97

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Clark’s Landscape into Art was first published in 1949. Rudolf Wittkower, Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism, Warburg Institute, University of London, 1949. It was a seminal book that explored the relevance of mathematical proportion and influenced both scholars and practising architects. Professor Martin McLaughlin says: “this refers to Alberti’s Latin treatise on architecture, De re aedificatoria, Florence, 1485. Despite what Clark says, in fact the Latin text was reprinted twice in the 16th century: Leon Battista Alberti, De re aedificatoria, Paris: Bertholt Rembolt, 1512, and Strasbourg: Jakob Cammerlander, 1541.Then there was no reprint until the 20th century.There were two Italian translations in the 16th century, the first by Pietro Lauro from Siena (Venice: Vincenzo Valgrisi, 1546), but Clark is probably referring to the second and more accessible one by Cosimo Bartoli, Della pittura e della statua di Leonbatista Alberti, Florence: Lorenzo Torrentino, 1550, repr. Venice: Francesco de’ Franceschi, in quarto, and Mondoví: Lionardo Torrentino, both 1565.

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I wish I had had time to visit the Palazzo Strozzi98 before staying atVallombrosa. It is rather a dull show from many points of view (too many cassoni), but there are some strange curiosities. What about those grotesque drawings connected with the engraving of the woman with the hotcakes – they look just like Pollaiuolo. A sad blow for the Leonardo theorists if Pollaiuolo turned out to have preceded him in this genre. I have made a note of all the books I promised to send, and they will come, if they are to be had. I shall also send a new set of Piero photos – yours are all very faded, and were originally a little out of focus. By the way, I forgot to tell you that I bought the other day all Augustus Hare’s99 photographs of Rome and Italy generally, some of them of the ’50s – eleven volumes.100 They ought to be in the Tatti library, and I will convey them there one day, if ever I come by car. They show Sta. Maria Maggiore rising above a few farms and huts, with grass growing in the streets; and many of the Venetian palaces before they were restored. I wonder what happened to all Ruskin’s photos. He took hundreds of buildings about to be restored or pulled down. It’s sad that you won’t be in Paris with us next week. But I hope that the Naples expedition goes well and that your sinus clears up with the change of air. I was deeply touched by your farewell benediction, dear BB, and determined that in the next year I shall yet be able to show you something worthy of your confidence. Ever your affectionate K

Sept 30. 49 Casa al Dono Vallombrosa (Prov di Firenze)

Dear Kenneth Thank you for one of the few most heartening letters ever addressed to me.You encourage me to believe that I have earned my passage on the ship of life.

98 99

See n. 79. Augustus John Cuthbert Hare (1834–1903) was a prolific writer and raconteur, born in Rome, educated in England. He wrote books about his aristocratic relations and travel books for the publisher John Murray. 100 In his will Hare left to his cousin Mary Shaw Lefevre ‘two volumes of Spanish photographs all the volumes of photographs bound in white vellum’.

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Thank you for the Alberti which I shall con eagerly when back at I Tatti. It would be interesting to see & keep at I Tatti Hare’s material for his walks in Italy. Do you, will you, believe that I still glance at the books with pleasure? Have you read Hare’s Autobiography101 – such a picture of Victorian life in & out of England as lived by an English gentleman on the margin of the great world. I look forward to your lectures on landscape. X Jean Rouvier102 who has been here for three days has been giving me curious glimpses into the character of Georges Salles103 – to whom, when you see him – my best remembrances. Love to you & Jane from Nicky & B.B.

Oct 20 1949 I Tatti Settignano Florence

Dear Kenneth Came back home – this morning & now I find on my desk the 1st ed. of the authentic Alberti that you gave me. I thank you for myself & for all that will follow me. The South was more ravishing than ever. Fr. Clotilde’s104 it was but a few minutes to Pompeii & there and at Naples I was disposed to realise that I shall never write as for 50 years I had planned, a book on Antique painting. It is so beautiful here. I have perlustrated105 the garden & it is lovely.

101 Augustus Hare, Story of My Life, London: George Allen, 1900. 102 Jean Rouvier, the son of a French diplomat, was the French Cultural Attaché in Munich. He and Berenson first met in 1936. He was a frequent visitor to I Tatti. 103 Georges Salles 104 Clotilde Margheri, whose Villa La Quiete was at Torre del Greco near Herculaneum, a popular summer resort for rich Italians. The sea there is full of coral. 105 Perlustrate: to go through and examine thoroughly.

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The Walter Lippmann’s this p.m. for a couple of days & then our friend the Swede106 for a whole week. I look forward to your ‘Landscape’. Ever affectionately B.B.

Nov. 9. 49 I Tatti Settignano Florence

Dear Kenneth. Your ‘Landscape into art’ is a delight. I have read every word with zestful interest, and it has given me a delicious feeling of repletion. ‘I am satisfied quite No more can I bite.’107 Not only have you reached full maturity in the possession of your materials, in the way you intellectualize them, but you now have achieved an instrument of expression which enables you to say exactly what you want to put into words no matter how slippery and squirmy the subject matter. I agree with the whole trend of yr. thoughts & delight in yr. epithets & illuminating discourse & I thoroughly enjoyed your parallels between painters & poets & musicians. In short, dear Kenneth, you have written on a very difficult subject a book entirely after my own heart. You now can launch out freely & leave breaking stones on the road to ‘Eothens’ happy sanity.108 Wherefore I wish you would treat some such arguments on the course of English painting [illeg], art meaningful, no, not meaningful, but created or at least revealed by Constable, by Ruskin, by Burne Jones, by Pater down to Roger Fry. Avoiding notions of ‘historical necessity’ & still more the Ass-thetics [sic] of the meta-fascists. By the way in the course of the last two years I have scribbled tant bien que mal four essays on subjects which au paysage du Danube I tangent point in your so stimulating book.

106 Sweden, Crown Prince Gustaf Adolf 107 A quotation from The Table, the Ass and the Stock in Grimm’s Fairy Tales. 108 Perhaps a reference, albeit obscure, to A.W. Kinglake’s Eothen which became a best-seller in the mid19th century. A travelogue of a journey undertaken by Kinglake, an aloof character, to the Middle East in 1835, Eothen was aimed at the ordinary intelligent person who wished to read a good story; by bringing the experience of his pilgrimage alive, his book hit its mark.

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I am better than you saw me at Vallombrosa. It turns out the collapse was due not so much to ‘hayfever’ as to puss poisoning from the teeth. I have had some pulled out, and shall return to the charge. The stay with Clotilde on the slopes of Vesuvius did me good. Of course I re-visited myself at Pompeii, at Herculaneum & Naples churches & museum. The Crown Prince of Sweden has been here, so sorry to have missed you in Paris when you seem to have been there same time. As I write in bed, the stone pine109 stencils its dark branches its twigs, & its sunlit hair against the window pane, & in the mirror opposite I enjoy a Van Eyck landscape. Love to you both B.B.

Paris, le 16 Nov 1949 Hotel De Crillon Place De La Concorde

My dear BB, I can’t tell you how cheered and delighted I am by your letter about my landscape lectures. They are only sketches and I was very reluctant to publish them: I know I could have done better if I had had the patience and energy to take out and work up certain motives which they contain. Still, if you found in them something to interest you it is all the justification I require, & all the reward. I have had this much confirmation of balanced judgement – that any passage which one set of people dislike particularly another likes the best. Thus, half a dozen people have told me that I have grossly over praised Turner, an equal number that I have treated him shabbily. Most people think that I have been too tepid about the impressionists, a few feel violently that they are overrated. I can think of at least one reader who will feel that I have made too much of Seurat, but I can assure him that the young consider my strictures on Seurat the most disgraceful thing in the book. All of which shows how important it is to introduce the sense of value into this kind of quasi-historical writing. It is an approach which I owe entirely to your little introduction to the Florentine & Central Italian painters, which makes me the more delighted that you think my book will pass.

109 Pinus pinea, more commonly known as the umbrella pine.

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I am so glad that you have got to the root of your sinus trouble, and are now feeling better. Naples must have been enchanting. My life, since I left I Tatti, has been too exacting, and I am condemned to it till after Christmas. We are here only for two days. My lectures take up all my time, and the thought of any peaceful writing is remote. But I have it in mind partly to fulfill your project, for I thought I would balance my inaugural on Ruskin with a valedictory on Pater (I give up the Slade next summer). In the end I hope to have enough writing on these figures to put together into a book of related essays. I don’t think I can undertake a continuous, worked out study of the whole subject. I still think it might be interesting to begin with an essay on Hazlitt – nothing good on his art criticism has been written, yet he remains, at his best, the most painter-like critic we have had.110 I do very much hope that I may some day read the four essays of yours which you mention. If they are typed may I see them! I have not forgotten the books I was to send you – also the photos of our limoges plaque,111 when we can have them taken. The Ashmolean have acquired a very interesting Giorgionesque picture – a Virgin and Child, not far from the Allendale & Benson holy families in quality, but a little later.112 The Virgin’s robe is painted exactly like the Castelfranco Madonna. It comes from an old English collection, but I had never seen it. I have asked Parker113 to send you photos, and shall be most interested to hear what you think. Not Palma, nor Sebastiano, nor of course Titian. One needs Mancini114 for such occasions but it isn’t to be. In any case, it comes in very handy for me to show my pupils how Giorgione laid on the paint. We are here for the opening of our friend Henry Moore’s official exhibition.115 The French are a good deal disturbed by the thought of an English sculptor achieving such eminence, and were not all wholly co-operative. This gave me

110 William Hazlitt (1778–1830) was regarded in his day as one of the finest critics and essayists of the English language, noted for his essays on the humanities, philosophy and social issues and for his criticisms of art, literature and drama. He is currently little read and mostly out of print. 111 Possibly Lot 125 from the Clark Sale, Sotheby’s, London, June 1984: ‘An interesting Limoges Champleve Enamel Fragment . . . decorated with a standing figure of St Peter, with reddish hair and beard . . . second quarter 13th century.’ 112 The Virgin and Child with a View of Venice (The Tallard Madonna) was acquired by the Ashmolean in 1948, from the 6th Earl Cathcart, as by Giorgione but is now considered more likely to be by a pupil in Venice, such as Sebastiano del Piombo, or an artist close to Giorgione, such as Giovanni Cariani. 113 Karl Parker 114 Johannes Wilde, ‘Die Probleme um Domenico Mancini’, Jahrbuch des Kunsthistor-ischen Sammlungen, vii, Vienna: Schroll, 1933, pp. 97–135, argued for the attribution of some difficult to pin down Giorgionesque paintings to the Venetian painter Domenico Mancini about whom, and of whose works, little is known. 115 Henry Moore’s first solo exhibition in Paris, Musée National d’Art Moderne, 1949. His work had been acclaimed at the Venice Biennale earlier in the year.

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the pleasure of exercising my old metier and arranging the show with my own hands. It has made a pleasant break in the town. Love from Jane to you all, Ever your affectionate Kenneth

Dec. 15. 49 I Tatti Settignano Florence

Dearest Jane. What a happy idea to send me a book of praise, appreciation; & hymns to cats.116 I shall turn its leaves often & recall I owe my pleasure in them to you. Percy Lubbock117 has just left after a week’s stay. More than ever the compendium of aristocratic qualities. As compendious were the Clarys118 Austrian Durchlaut119 who were here the previous week. We reminisced about the past, & such a wonderful [illeg] gay decently human past. How I enjoyed my glimpse of it ever since 1888, and even until 1938! Sinclair Lewis120 suffers from the winter & so we shall see him often. He is quick, English, & free from solemnity & self-importance altho’ a Nobel Prize Americ. novellist. I had a long & dear letter from K sometime ago for which I have not thanked him yet. Will you do so for me! What satisfactory reviews his last book has been having. I am not surprised. Love to all of you & best wishes for 1950. Ever affectionately B.B.

116 Christabel Aberconway, A Dictionary for Cat Lovers: XV century–XX century AD. With five legends concerning cats, and with notes on the cat in Ancient Egypt, London: Michael Joseph, 1949. Visitors to I Tatti were greeted by a life-size bronze cat, dating to the Late Dynastic Period of Egyptian art, which sat on a cassone in the entrance hall of I Tatti. 117 Percy Lubbock 118 Alphonse Clary-und-Aldringen 119 German for ‘illustriousness’. 120 Sinclair Lewis

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Upper Terrace House Hampstead, N.W.3 Jan 17th [1950]

Dearest BB, I am delighted Christabel’s book on cats amuses you – I hoped it would – I ought to have written sooner but Christmas makes more demands each year and after it we had to see Alan off to u.s.a. for about 6 months to find out what it is like. Before he went about a fortnight ago, poor Sybil [sic] was angelic with helping him over plans. Alas I am afraid she is now dying – I heard from her a few days ago but so incoherently I was afraid – yesterday when we got back from the country I telephoned to know when K and I could see her, but she now has 2 nurses can see no one and is just tired and has lost interest in life. She just looks at the list of people who have telephoned and sleeps – I do hope she can die in her sleep but K and I are very distressed and feel so helpless – and I know you will feel the same. If she rallies and we can see her I will wire you but I fear you will soon read of her death. I hope I shall see you and Nicky in the autumn. After Venice I shall bring the twins back and when they have gone to school I hope to join K in Florence for a week before we go back to Paris together. He will not have the Slade lectures to come back for as he resigns after the summer. He has almost finished the book on Piero and is writing to you himself about this and arranging for you to have the new photographs which are lovely. In the middle of March we go to stay with Somerset Maugham121 at Cannes – after K may go to Milan and Bologna for a few nights and is writing Nicky about hotels. I shall wait and join him in Paris. Much love to you both – I can only think about poor Sibyl Yours ever affectionately Jane

121 Somerset Maugham

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Jan 22. ’50 I Tatti Settignano Florence

Dearest Jane Yr. dear letter of the 17th did not surprise me. I have been hearing from many that poor Sibyl was very ill. Her letters became notes of a few scribbles & then ceased altogether.Yesterday we had yr. wish saying she was a bit better. I can not wish her a lingering death much as I should & shall regret her. She is my last link with the London that was the world’s capital socially as well as politically. I wish you were coming here instead of going to Somerset Maugham’s. And if Kenneth strays as far south as Bologna he surely will come to us if only for a night or two. Bologna is only an hour & a half by train fr. Florence. We had a long visit fr. Trevor Roper122 whom we like more & more. Now Morra is here & Salvemini.123 We expect Freya Stark and husband next week. Does Alan write? I want to know what he feels about u.s.a. Much love to you both from Nick & B.B.

3 Feb. 50 Upper Terrace House Hampstead, N.W.3 Hampstead 1357

My dear BB, You were so kind as to suggest, in your letter to Jane, that I come to i Tatti for a night or two during my dash to Bologna. I find that by a little contrivance this can be managed, and if it is convenient to you I could turn up on the night of March 23rd, and stay two or three nights. My reason for going to Bologna is to see the Piero della Francesca from Rimini,124 which I understand is still there. I haven’t seen it since it was cleaned, and clearly it has undergone changes which

122 Hugh Trevor-Roper 123 See Appendix 1. 124 Piero della Francesca worked in Rimini for Sigismondo Malatesta. In 1451 he executed the fresco of St Sigismund and Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta in the Tempio Malatestiano, as well as Sigismondo’s portrait. The Kress Foundation gave $50,000 towards its restoration in 1947. It is possible that the Rimini fresco had been detached and sent to Bologna for restoration.

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make it very different, not only in detail, but as a total impression. My Piero introduction was finished before Christmas, and I think it has turned out quite well.125 In any case the new photos taken for the book will be of value.This leads me to ask if you would allow me to dedicate the book to you – or would you rather I offered you the dedication of a book of studies in English art. I do realise that it might be inappropriate for your name to be associated with amateurish efforts to write about Italian art, whereas a book on English art (though probably equally amateurish) wouldn’t be in your field, and so a dedication might be less embarrassing. But I would very much like to dedicate one of my next books to you, as a very small token of all that I owe you. Please let me know, dear BB, exactly what you feel. We have just been to see Sibyl. She has ups and downs, but on the whole is still improving, and this evening was the best I have seen her this year. She is completely uncomplaining and unselfish, talking and thinking only about her friends, books and plans for the future.We are both well and working away at our respective employments. Jane has her hands full with semi-public commitments, and I continue to prepare my Oxford and other lectures. My landscape book has sold well, beyond its deserts; of course I was fortunate in that it co-incided with an exhibition of French landscape painting at Burlington House (which, incidentally, is a triumph for Claude).126 But its success makes me more than ever anxious to give up lecturing and concentrate on bringing a few books to a fairer shape than has hitherto been possible. I believe I have never thanked you for the off-print of your article on Sani.127 It is really fascinating: the strongest case of a ‘throw back’ I have ever seen, almost as if he were a medium. Incidentally they teach one a good deal about early Christian art. I gather from his letters that Alan is having a good deal of difficulty in supporting life in the usa. Why he is there instead of the raf is a long story, but briefly, the Ministry of National Service refused to call him up. I suppose there was some administrative muddle and they wouldn’t go back on it.128

125 Kenneth Clark, Piero della Francesca, London: Phaidon Press, 1951, with 219 illustrations and tipped-in colour plates. 126 Landscape in French Art 1550–1900, Royal Academy, London, December 1949–March 1950. 127 The contemporary sculptor Alberto Sani had an exhibition in Milan in 1950; reviewing it in Commentarii, Berenson stated that Sani’s sculptures were not merely ‘like’ late Roman ones, they were just as good. Also in 1950 he published Alberto Sani: Un artista fuori del suo tempo; An Artist out of his Time, bilingual edn, Electa, Florence, 1950. Berenson was introduced to Sani by Dario Neri, the founder of Electa, who published almost all Berenson’s books in Italian. Neri was also a painter and landowner: Sani worked at Neri’s country estate at Campriano near Siena. 128 The muddled story of Alan’s avoidance of National Service is explored in Ion Trewin, Alan Clark: The Biography, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2009, but it remains unclear if the reason was administrative confusion by the authorities, rejection on medical grounds (poor eyesight) or Alan’s manipulation of the system. Nevertheless the fact remains that he did not do National Service like

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This letter, as is shown by the change of ink, has been interrupted more than once, and must now be finished or it will never be sent off. I am delighted to think that I shall be seeing you in March. Now that I am middle aged I count my blessings more avariciously, and there is none I take more than the pleasure of your company and the thought of life at i Tatti. With much love from Jane Ever your affectionate Kenneth P.S. Please give heaps of love to Nicky from us all, especially her godchildren,129 who often speak about her, and complain that they don’t see her.

Febr. 10. 50 I Tatti Settignano Florence

My dear Kenneth You will be more than welcome for three days or three times thereon next month. Indeed considering how little time fastest trains now take between Bologna & Florence I wonder whether you would not be more comfy staying here & excursing to Bologna. I am deeply touched by your offer to dedicate a book to me. And first let me write you to cease being apotropaic130 with me. I regard you in every way as at least my equal. If I have a vague advantage over you it is because I have had at least twice as much experience & time for remembering. To come back to yr. offering me the choice of a book on Piero or one on Engl. landscape I leave it to you to judge. It is something like this. If what help I may have given you thanks to my being so much older & more experienced has been stronger in Italian art then the dedication should be of the Piero. If on the other hand it has been more diffused & penetrating then the Engl. Landsc. Either would delight me.131

his peers or his younger brother, who served in the raf. Jane Clark, according to Colin (Colin Clark p. 26), was furious and accused Alan of ‘treason’. 129 Colette and Colin Clark 130 Apotropaic = intended to ward off evil or bad luck. 131 Clark dedicated his Piero della Francesca to Henry Moore.

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The Ital. transl. of my diary of the war years is out at last132 & lest the original be too long delayed, or never be published I am sending it to you. Here & there may be a page to interest or stimulate. You must remember to tell me all about Alan. Much love fr. both of us to you & Jane. Yr. B.B.

31 March ’50 Upper Terrace House Hampstead, N.W.3 Hampstead 1357

My dear BB, The inordinate delay in my writing to thank you for heavenly days at i Tatti is due to the fact that when I got back I found that Jane was far from well, and the next day she was laid low with a peculiarly ill form of ’flu which seems to be inflicting everyone in London at the moment. The children are just coming back from the holidays, and she had arranged a full programme, which I had to take over: so my life has been a great contrast to the leisurely, philosophical existence of the week before. Jane is just beginning to feel better now, but will not be on her feet for a few days. It is very sad for her, as she had got so fit in the South of France, and seemed to have collected strength to face family life, which is always rather a [illeg] to her. Alan was also here to greet me. His adventures in America are fascinating but depressing. Having started with the most hopeful view of the us., he now says that it is all the creation of advertising agents. In fact the dirt, poverty and disease were appalling, and even the middle classes are all made miserable by debt. But I will send you a copy of a letter which he wrote to Sibyl after his return, which is a fair summary. I have found a photograph of Lee’s ‘Giorgione’,133 and am posting it in another envelope: also of our portrait of an architect (not Michaelangelo I fear)134 which is interesting as a likeness. The Lee Giorgione is unpublished, and so I suppose ought not yet to be put with the general material in case the Fiocco135 de nos

132 Berenson, Echi e riflessioni, Arnoldo Mondadori,Verona, 1950. 133 Arthur Lee’s Moses and the Burning Bush is now attributed to Giorgione rather than accepted as autograph. 134 Sold in the Clark Sale, Lot 185: ‘Portrait of an Architect, Bolognese School, 16th century.’ 135 Giuseppe Fiocco (1884–1971) was a pioneer of art history in Italy, much in the Berenson mould. He trained as a lawyer and focused more on detail and connoisseurship than iconography. He held professorships at Florence (1926) and Padua (1929). His principal interest was Venetian Renaissance art. He was known for his willingness to write certificates of authenticity.

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Jours gets hold of it – it would hurt Lady Lee’s feelings to see it published in a derigatory [sic] manner. Passing through Paris I had time to visit the Albertina drawings at the B.N.136 It is an enchanting and illuminating exhibition, and will still be on when you arrive. How very nice it is to think that we shall see you there. I enjoyed i Tatti more than ever. Of course the last two years you have been at Vallombrosa, and so I have missed the pleasure of garden walks. It was so particularly nice to have those meals alone with you and Nicky. I was conscious of being treated like a spoilt son, and as my parents never treated me in that way it was a very nice new sensation. It is so good of you to say that I can come back in September. I really feel that i Tatti is my home, and when I am there I can use whatever faculties I posses with the confidence which is possible only in one’s natural environment. – I put off posting this for a day and can now report that Jane is a little better, but still very miserable at all the hoarded health which has been disipated. She sends her love to you and Nicky, and greatly looks forward to seeing you in Paris; as do I. Ever your affectionate Kenneth

I Tatti April 6th 1950

Dear Kenneth. I do hope Jane is over her cold if not yet herself again. Colds are one of God’s most effective ways of undoing the good that such a change of air can do for one. What Alan reports is most interesting. I should greatly enjoy interviewing and discussing with him – Thanks for the two photos. Of the ‘Giorgione’ I have nothing to say except that as you recommend it shall be kept apart. The portrait is perhaps by Jacopino del Conte but scarcely of Michelangelo, altho costume and even look do reach him. But nobody who had seen M. could have ignored nose and expression. The frivolous essay on Piero will be out in a few days and a copy will be dispatched to you at once.137 What weather – cool, bracing and radiant, with such ‘enamelled meads’138 and flowers as in Wagner’s bucolic scene in Parsifal – House

136 There was an exhibition in 1950 at the Biliothèque Nationale in Paris of 150 drawings from the Albertina in Vienna. 137 Bernard Berenson, Piero della Francesca or the Ineloquent in Art, London: Chapman & Hall, 1954. 138 A reference to Robert Herrick’s poem ‘Country Life’: ‘This done, then to th’ enamelled meads/

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full, Salvemini, Raymond Mortimer, Nina di Cesaro139 and Ruth Draper140 indoors. Derek Hill in The Villino, and Everyman down in Florence. I see them at meals, walk with them in the garden and doze the rest of the time. Of what I call ‘work’ I am doing nothing, having neither the leisure nor the disposition.Yet it makes me feel constipated and nervous not to be up and doing. I fear I must learn to live in a past.You will carry on what I leave undone. Who better than I should know that so much, and no more by a man of a given generation can be achieved in his field! Ever affectionately B.B.

April 28th to May 5th [1950] Upper Terrace House Hampstead, N.W.3 Hampstead 1357

My dear BB, I have now had time to read and re-read your book on Piero, and have enjoyed it increasingly. I like very much the form of using an artist or a single work of art as the starting point for pursuit of a critical idea – the form of Lessing’s Laocoon,141 and that is what you have done to perfection. And of course the wide range of allusion is what I enjoy most, especially when it is as telling as your Jacques Blanche and Degas. I had immediate confirmation of your point in a piece I have been writing on art and photography.142 I found that modern flash light photographs of orators etc. have absolutely no spatial quality, and compared to those photographs by D. O. Hill and Mrs Cameron look quite like works of art because the sitters are allowed their independent existence. So you see that I have already profited by your essay. But alas, it comes too late for me to alter

139

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141 142

Thou go’st, and as thy foot there treads,/ Thou see’st a present God-like power/ Imprinted in each herb and flower’. Nina di Cesaro was the widow of Giovanni Colonna, the Duke of Cesaro (1878–1940), a radical Italian politician and a follower of Rudolf Steiner’s theosophical ideas. Briefly a government minister in 1922–4, he was implicated in an unsuccessful plot to assassinate Mussolini in 1926. Ruth Draper (1884–1956) was an American actress who dazzled her generation with her brilliant on-stage monologues: see Iris Origo’s portrait of her in A Need to Testify, London: John Murray, 1984, pp. 79–127. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoön: An Essay upon the Limits of Painting and Poetry, 1898. The text of a lecture, ‘Art and Photography’, given by Clark at the centenary meeting of the Royal Photographic Society in 1953, was published in The Penrose Annual: A Review of the Graphic Arts, vol. 49, 1955.

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anything in my Piero, and when I touch on the point of his detachment I treat it rather differently. We have had a busy time since I was at I Tatti, with little opportunity to enjoy the pleasure of our house, garden and friends. Morra has been staying but will tell you that he has hardly seen us. Poor Sibyl seems to have taken a turn for the worse. For the first time since January she was too ill to see me this evening. She had a number of friends to the house last week to greet Thornton Wilder,143 but she couldn’t leave her bed, and we went up to see her one by one. I must say she looked terribly ill, and I doubt now if we can hope for even a partial recovery. I wonder if you are really going to Paris, and if so where you will be staying. We shall arrive there about the 7th June and stay about four days – at the Crillon. I think that you will find a good deal to criticise in the painting department of the Louvre, but the others are quite good. Cluny is not at all successful – in the most sonderaustellung144 style, quite inappropriate to its setting. As for the Musee de l’art Moderne! But you will only need to go there if you feel it necessary to stimulate the liver – and then it might have the effect of blank depression rather than stimulating indignation. This letter was begun days ago, and was left unfinished in a press of activity, so I must send it off now, without a coda and without saying half the things I meant to – except ‘thank you’ for the wholly enjoyable book, which will leaven my mind for many months. Ever your affectionate Kenneth

I Tatti Settignano Florence May 10th 1950

Dear Kenneth. It is good of you to give so much thought to my Piero so ineloquent. By the way I cannot forgive myself for having omitted to put as an intro Verlaine’s: ‘Prends l’eloquence & tords lui la cou’145

143 Thornton Wilder (1897–1975), the much acclaimed American playwright and novelist, received three Pulitzer Prizes, notably for The Bridge of San Luis Rey in 1927. 144 German for ‘special exhibition’. 145 ‘Grip eloquence by the neck and squeeze it to death’, from Verlaine’s ‘Art poétique’, in Jadis et naguère, 1884.

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I trust you know that this essay was, but for revisions ready two years ago long before I knew you were writing on the subject of Piero.146 Yes, we mean to reach Paris the evening of May 26th & to put up at Hotel Prince de Galles Ave. George v (xvie). If I get there alive I shall wait impatiently for your coming June 3. We leave here the 16th and motor via Turin, Chambery Autun Dijon Beaune, Auxerres and Laon – all of which I am eager to show to Nicky and to see again for myself. My next will be the publication as a booklet of the Sani147 article with additions and many more illustrations. It seems to have attracted notice in the States as well as here. Paris frightens me. I shall want to see so much and so many people and unfortunately many others whom I am not over anxious to see, will want to see me. All so fatiguing and I have less and less energy to give out. – I am, I hope, getting over a peculiarly disgusting and virulent attack of ‘hay-fever’ With love B.B. I am anxious about Sibyl and very unhappy. I wrote directly I received yours imploring her to take good care of herself and ‘to put being over her health’.

2 June ’50 Upper Terrace House Hampstead, N.W.3 Hampstead 1357

My Dear BB, We are delighted to hear that you had reached Paris safely and had enjoyed the trip through France. By now Nicky will have had a letter from Jane giving her news. On the whole she is going on well, but of course far more slowly than she had hoped. The doctor will not hear of her coming to Paris next week, which cuts down my stay. She is terribly disappointed not to see you and Nicky. I am arriving at the Crillon late on Tuesday evening, and will ring you up on Wednesday. I have no engagements (except the meeting on Thursday morning) so can fit in with any plans you may propose. I shall have to return at lunch time on Friday, as I don’t like to leave Jane too long. In the last week I have also had Colin ill in bed and our only sane servant also out of action, so there have been a good many domestic duties in place of art history.

146 Clark’s Piero della Francesca was published in 1951. 147 See n. 127.

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Thank you very much for what you say of my note about Bogey.148 The Times, which had completely ignored his death, cut my original draft – but it was better than nothing. It will be a joy to see you. Love to Nicky, Yours ever Kenneth

Upper Terrace House Hampstead, N.W.3 Hampstead 1357 1 Aug ’50

My dear BB, You were so good as to say that I might once again stay at I Tatti in September, and I am writing to tell you of my dates. I shall arrive, all being well, on Sept. 6th, in the evening, and would like to stay till the 27th, if that is not too long. I needn’t say that I shall love to come up to Casa al Dono at any time convenient to you and Nicky during that three weeks, but as I shall have no arrangements of any kind, my visits to Vallombrosa can be fitted in at the last minute, according to the needs of more occupied guests. We have had our usual busy summer but Jane has grown stronger, and we should have few cares if the future of civilised humanity did not look so black. I wonder how the rest of your visit to Paris passed off – and the drive home. It was fun seeing you there, and I still laugh at the way I began to show you round the Louvre. I only hope that you didn’t suffer from a reaction on your return. With much love to Nicky from us both, Ever your affectionate Kenneth Do let us know if you are likely to come to England in October, and we will plan accordingly

148 Bogey Harris. An obituary with an appreciation by Clark appeared on 25 May 1950 in The Times.

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Aug. 6. 1950 Casa Al Dono Vallombrosa (Prov. Di Firenze)

My Dear Kenneth Delighted that you are coming Sept. 6 to stay till 27th at I Tatti. During that time I shall hope to see you once a week, and when a bed is free (and we shall do our best that it shall be free) for week-ends. The rest of the visit passed of[f] in looking and in talking with friends. Salles, Huyghes, Noailles149 etc. One Sunday at Royaumont wh. bowled me over. Another at Fontainebleu and Courances.150 On way back took in Chantilly, Chartres, St Sevigny-de-Pres, Orleans, St Benois and Charite-sur-Loire, Bourges, Lyons, Grenoble, Nice. In last saw Matisse, content de lui meme.151 Got back and collapsed. I still am not fit to make plans for autumn, but looks improbable that I shall think it in order to spend Oct in London. And the [illeg]! I suspect the Soviets are forcing us to starve so as to ruin our economy, the which they may be fearing was not failing as fast as their calculations.152 Edgell just came here for two days, full of talk about museums.153 Likewise Constable.154 Love to Jane and tell her I wish she too was coming. Ever affectionately B.B.

149 Charles de Noailles 150 The Chateau de Courances near Fontainebleau was built in the 17th century and its gardens epitomised the formal French style. Royaumont Abbey is a 13th-century Cistercian abbey, located near Asnières-sur-Oise c. 30 km north of Paris. 151 Berenson called on Henri Matisse on 9 July 1950, recording in his diary that day: ‘Found him placidly in bed, looking very comfy and nanti.Very different from the anxious, half starved, apostolic peasant I first met. He recalled that I owned a painting of his and talked of the Steins.Was happy over what he was doing in the chapel at Vence, which he was sure would be his masterpiece.’ 152 Probably a comment about the Soviet Blockade of Berlin (June 1948–May 1949) and its aftermath. 153 Harold Edgell (1887–1954), a Harvard professor and Italian Renaissance scholar. He remained a leading figure within the University of Harvard until 1935, becoming the Director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1935–54. 154 W. G. Constable

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I Tatti Settignano Florence Nov 11th 1950

Dear Kenneth I Tatti at last and I have discovered Piper155 and Summerson156 but not yr. landscape book. When it does come, I shall approach Bompiani about the translation.157 Rome was more and more captivating and a morning spent at Perugia revealed the Nic. and Giov. Pisani fountain – a resurrection far more important to our studies than the Baptistry gates here.158

Love to you all B.B. Have received lots of photos fr. Ashmolean including Bogey’s Leonardo159 the which looks like a Piero di Cosimo.

Old Quarries, Avening, Gloucestershire Telephone: Nailsworth 201 8 Dec ’50

My dear BB, Thank you very much for your letter. I am glad that some of my promises have fulfilled themselves: by this time I hope that the two volumes of the 2nd edition of the Landscape book will have arrived, and other promises will trickle in gradually.

155 Penguin published a small illustrated book, Romney Marsh, by John Piper, in 1950. 156 John Summerson, Heavenly Mansions and Other Essays on Architecture, London: Cresset Press, 1949. 157 Berenson did approach the publishers Bompiani about an Italian edition of Landscape into Art but they were not interested. 158 The Fontana Maggiore in Perugia was built to celebrate the completion in 1278 of the aqueduct that brought water to Perugia from the springs of Paciano five miles from the centre of the city. Designed and built by Nicola Pisano (1220–c.1280) and his son Giovanni (1245–1320), it consists of two polygonal basins, one above the other, decorated with reliefs that illustrate civic pride, and over the upper basin three bronze statues who pour water from amphorae. 159 Bogey Harris bequeathed to the Ashmolean a painting, The Virgin and Child with the Young St John the Baptist, in the style of Leonardo and related to a drawing in the Metropolitan Museum, New York. It is catalogued by the Ashmolean as Studio of Leonardo da Vinci.

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I would have written sooner but have no news which could interest you. We returned home in fine spirits, but soon became overwhelmed by small troubles, visitors, family affairs, committees and commitments of every kind. Before we had gone under completely Bogey’s sale took place, and I managed to attend. We got some lovely things for little money – the small relief of the Virgin and Child which he called Jacopo della Quercia for £30, and the low relief of the Rape of Helen which he called Francesco di Giorgio (but it isn’t) for £35.00. Also his enchanting gilt gesso cassone for £100. I have absolutely no place to put any of them, but I couldn’t bear to see them all be bought by small dealers to be shovelled away in to their cellars.We also bought his little Barnaba da Modena of the Nativity – very expensive but so beautifully preserved and portable as to be worth a sacrifice.160 We shall bring it out to you when next we come. You may remember me telling you that I had found the two other Apostle panels from the Sta. Maria Maggiore Masolino. I am thankful to say that these are now safely in the National Gallery.161 Like Mrs Sutton, the owner sold them at the price I had suggested to him when I found them in 1936. David Crawford162 and the trustees constrained Mr Hendy to ask me to publish them,163 which I shall do after I have had another look at the Johnson pair. Each pair, by the way, is a back and front, and the front was far more Massacioesque than the back, which excuses Vasari’s mistake (in fact Longhi,164 when he sees one of the new panels, will say that it wasn’t a mistake). I shall send you photos as soon as I can. I haven’t had any myself yet. I am delighted to see Zanobi Machiavelli165 – and just as I left the house I saw an off print of the B.M. mgs [illegible] which you most convincingly give to the

160 Works from the Henry Harris Collection were sold over several days at Sotheby’s in October 1950. Clark attended the sale on 25 October and the annotated auctioneer’s catalogue records that in his own name he bought a Florentine copper-gilt shrine (Lot 28, £65); a Flemish bronze mirror (Lot 45, £5); a gilt-bronze plaque (Lot 48, £9); several marble columns and capitals (Lot 153, £56). Barnaba da Modena’s Nativity (11.4 x 8.9 cm; 4½ x 3½ in) was sold to the dealer Frank Partridge (Lot 156, £480), presumably bidding anonymously for Clark. The other works mentioned by Clark cannot quite be reconciled with the catalogue record. Partridge also bought a white marble relief, Virgin and Child ‘after Desiderio da Settignano’ (Lot 139, £120); a Florentine relief, Holy Family (Lot 137, £45); a marble plaque, Rape of Helen (Lot 146, £45). 161 Masolino, St Jerome and St John the Baptist, c. 1428–9 (NG 5962), and Masolino, Pope Gregory the Great (?) and Matthias, c. 1428–9 (NG 5963), form the two sides of a single panel that was divided. The panel had been one wing of a double-sided triptych in Santa Maria Maggiore, Rome. They were purchased by the National Gallery in 1950. The other side panel of the triptych, also sawn in half, showed Sts Peter and Paul on one side and St John the Evangelist (?) and Saint Martin on the other. One side of the central panel depicted the Assumption of the Virgin while the other depicted the Miracle of the Snow and the Founding of Santa Maria Maggiore. See also n. 212. 162 He was then the Chairman of the Trustees (see David Balniel). 163 Published by Clark in the Burlington Magazine, vol. 93, no. 584 (November 1951), pp. 339–47. 164 Roberto Longhi 165 See Bernard Berenson, ‘Zanobi Machiavelli’, Burlington Magazine, vol. 92, no. 573 (December 1950), pp. 345–9.

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master of S. Miniato.Thank you so much for sending it. I am just back from Paris where I stayed two days, lunched with Paul166 and Charles de Noailles. MarieLaure167 is cleaning all her pictures with an eye lotion called Optrex – as it is an alkaline, with soda in solution, it does nothing except leave a white smear, and is quite harmless. It would be disastrous if she began to use a real solvent. We are glad to know that the stay in Rome didn’t prove too exhausting. Jane has become rather run down and wretched, as she always does after a few weeks at home. She takes things so hardly and has no idea how to rest and defend herself. Alan is working for the bar, Colette has just taken her Oxford entrance, and we are praying that she may be successful. Colin is chiefly occupied in learning to fly. As you know, we are going to America in January,168 and will be in Washington for a fortnight. In spite of many kind friends there, I must confess that I am dreading it. I can’t face the mixture of heartiness and competition. One has the feeling that culture is a sinking ship in which everyone is trying to get a seat in the last boat; and quite prepared to stab their neighbour in the back in order to get there. However, this may be bracing after the quiet apathy of our home town. Much love to Nicky. I hope we may all be together again in the spring in spite of the threats which pile themselves up on our heads.

Ever your affectionate Kenneth

I Tatti Settignano Florence December 16th 1950

Dear Kenneth What a dear and delightful letter you have made the leisure to write. And some time ago I had one fr. Jane as yet unanswered. Thank her from me and take thanks for yourself. – I congratulate you on the purchases you made at Bogey’s sale. I should be ever so grateful for photos, except of the Barnaba da Modena of which I have the photo already.

166 Prince Paul of Yugoslavia 167 Marie-Laure de Noailles 168 The Clarks went to the usa for January and February 1951. Clark gave lectures in Philadelphia (Museum of Art), Washington (National Gallery of Art and Phillips Collection) and New York (Museum of Modern Art and the Frick).

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I wish you and Jane were going to have the leisure to write fully fr. u.s.a. It is strange how little news I get therein regarding museum collections, dealers, etc. All too driven spinning too fast for any leisure. Even fr. Johnny Walker169 I get the skimpiest notes generally s.o.s’s. So far as I can infer most art matters whether museums universities or dealers are in the hands of Germans or German-minded persons. I almost have given up interest.Yet yr. account would revive my interest if only you could let me have one, as Isaiah Berlin did of Americ. universities in general.170 I have received two copies of yr. landscape book. As soon as the holidays are well on I shall approach Bompiani about the translation. I dread his making a condition that I preface it. Another’s preface is always a kind of patronage and I could not consent to pretending to be yr. superior. Glad yr. offspring is flourishing. Please let me have the address in u.s.a. Every good wish to each and all of you for a Happy New Year and a satisfying 1951.

Love to you both from Nicky B.B.

Upper Terrace House Hampstead, N.W.3 Hampstead 1357 19 Jan ’51

My dear BB, Although the eve of departure is not a propitious moment for writing letters, I must write to tell you that the Caravaggio171 has arrived, and a quick glance shows me that it will give me a real treat. My only trouble will be an occasional twinge of envy – you have put in so many things which I thought no one had observed but myself. I shall read it in the airoplane [sic], and write about it at greater length in a bulletin from the us. We are more or less in condition to go, although slightly nervous of the influenza plague, which has been knocking out our friends like ninepins. The sooner we get away the better. I have written all my lectures – one of them on

169 John Walker 170 Isaiah Berlin was one of the founding generation of ‘Oxford philosophers’ to make regular visits to American universities from the late 1940s. He wrote three short articles for Time and Tide (November 1949) comparing university education in the usa and Europe, in which he argued for the justification of curiosity and the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, rather than for their contribution to any social or economic benefit. 171 Berenson’s Del Caravaggio delle sue incongruenze e della sua fama, Florence: Electa, 1951.

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Rembrandt and the quattrocento is really interesting and, as far as I know, new. The others will do, although I doubt if they will please the Sephardim.172 The most agonizing assignment is a ten minute pep talk which I have to give at the Philadelphia gallery. It will probably be printed, and if so I will send it to you, as I have managed to include one good idea: at least, it still seems good to me, though God knows what it will seem like on the day. Altogether, the expedition has cost me a lot of time which could have been better employed, and I hope will in future. The chief event of interest in our profession has been the Holbein exhibition at the R.A.173 It is done in order to show Holbein’s influence in England, but unfortunately shows England’s influence on Holbein. You would find some splendid examples of the degradation of form. It also shows how the word ‘derivation’ has come to be used in a pejorative sense, for one doesn’t know how else to describe the tricked out and flattened imitations of Holbein which the English produced, except as decorative transcriptions. The same show includes some Venetian pictures, of which one, the Titian of Three heads, lent by that horrible Francis Howard, is really fine.174 The R.A. Michelaengelo tondo has been washed, and looks split new – but this has added to its beauty, for one has a most vivid sense of communication. It seems as if each stroke of the chisel had only just been made. I bought an illustrated souvenir of the show to send you, and a few minutes after saw Francis Toye,175 who said that he was taking one out next day – which will reach you in better condition. I am sending a photo of a drawing which I discovered last week in the Folkestone public library.176 I needn’t tell you anything about it. I believe that the Dottoressa Toesca published another copy of the Sagra in 1945, but I haven’t seen her article.177 The Folkestone drawing is interesting as it includes the figures also copied by Michaelangelo. They had a lot of other drawings there, mostly seicento; I had one photographed, but it was a spirited affair – a sort of Schiavone178 – and send a print. I think I shall publish the Sagra copy as any scrap of information about Masaccio is so precious.

172 Sephardi refers to the descendants of Jewish settlers who trace their origins to the Israelite tribes of the Middle East and who were resident in the Iberian Peninsula until their expulsion in 1492. 173 Works by Holbein and Other Masters of the 16th and 17th Centuries, Royal Academy, London, December 1950–March 1951. 174 Titian, Allegory of Prudence, c. 1550–65, now in the National Gallery, London (NG 6376). Francis Howard (1874–1954) was a genre and portrait painter, art critic, collector and journalist. He was the stepson of T. P. O’Connor, the Irish nationalist politician and journalist. 175 John Francis Toye (1883–1964) was the Director of the British Institute in Florence. First appointed in 1939, he had to leave in 1940 but returned in 1946 and remained in post until his retirement in 1958. He was a composer, novelist, art critic and bon viveur, at one time being the managing director of the Restaurant Boulestin in London. In retirement he bought a vineyard near Florence. 176 See Hugo Chapman, Kent Master Collection, Christie’s, 1991, p. 14, no. 9, catalogued as Andrea Boscoli. 177 Elena Berti Toesca, ‘Per la “Sagra” del Masaccio’, Arti figurative (1945), pp. 148–50.

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Please thank Nicky for her letter. I am sorry that our plans are turning out so awkwardly, but April is Colin’s last holidays before going in to the raf, and in early May I must be in London for the opening of our wretched exhibition, of which I am on the Council.179 So we shan’t be able to come out till about the 15th May – exactly the date when you leave. Nicky doesn’t say where you will escape to. Might it not be somewhere where we could join you for a day or two. We shall be in Rome for about ten days, and might go to Naples. I think we shall have to be back in London in June, and shall probably come to Italy again in September – even if Jane doesn’t come then I shall hope to have my ‘retreat’.

Much love to all at I Tatti Ever your affectionate, Kenneth

I Tatti Settignano Florence March 2nd 1951

My Dear Kenneth. I dare say you are home again fr. N.Y. and ‘waystations’ and I can resume our correspondence. – The enclosed fr. Bompiani speak for themselves.180 I am truly sorry – My thanks for the enamel of the Entombment – a masterpiece. Likewise for the photos of Zurbaran. The ‘George & Dragon’181 – is what it says at top R. by Luca Cambiaso. The ‘Sagra’ drawing is most interesting. I vaguely recall seeing a reproduction of it in old, old book. I do not remember Ilaria Toesca’s article on

178 Andrea Meldolla (c. 1510/15–1563), known as Lo Schiavone (The Slav), was a painter and etcher, born in present-day Croatia, who worked in Venice. 179 On 3 May 1951 the King opened the Festival of Britain on the South Bank in London, a popular celebration and demonstration of Britain’s contribution to civilisation, past, present and future, in the arts, science, technology and industrial design, marking the centenary of the Great Exhibition of 1851. The Arts Council and the Society for Education in Arts promoted an exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, called Black Eyes & Lemonade, which explored a variety of popular British art and craft such as toys, souvenirs and printed ephemera. The Arts Council also commissioned new works from Jacob Epstein, Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore, which were included in the South Bank exhibition, and a touring exhibition, 60 Paintings for 51. 180 Letters from the Italian publisher declining any interest in publishing Landscape into Art. 181 See Chapman, Kent Master Collection, p. 10, no. 3, where it was catalogued as Nicolosio Granello, noting the traditional attribution to Cambiaso.

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a similar drawing. I look forward to yr. article on the subject182 – as I do to yr. Piero wh. I read is to appear at once. It would interest me to hear about yr. American adventures but I fear you will find no leisure to tell me and by the time we meet again I will be buried under other interests. Life here is usual socially but my energies diminish and I get lazier and lazier, and my assistants are too busy with managing the ‘Institooschen’ that I Tatti has become to help me in research. So I write nothing, except a rare snippet of a short article, or a preface. I have become the old, old man whose blessing is asked for – as a matter of routine. Luckily I still enjoy reading and have delighted in Turrell’s ‘The French Novel’183 and now Knox’s ‘Enthusiasms’184 and the ‘Life of Florence Nightingale’,185 etc. etc.

My best to both of you Affectionately B.B.

[Undated letter] As From Upper Terrace House Hampstead, N.W.3 Hampstead 1357

My dear BB, I was delighted to get your letter which Jane forwarded to me in the squalid capital of North Wales, where I foolishly agreed to give some lectures. Needless to say that they were not written when I came back from America, and the frenzy of putting them together in the last ten days prevented me from sending you my promised report on your country. Needless to say that we met with great kindness, and saw many friends, Johnnie, the Lipmanns [sic], Felix Frankfurter186 and others. But personally I found the general impression very depressing. It really is an asphalt jungle. The economic pressure weighs on one’s spirit all the

182 Clark published the drawing in his review of Krautheimer’s monograph Ghiberti in the Burlington Magazine (May 1958); see Ch. 9, n. 218. 183 Martin Turnell, The Novel in France, London: Hamish Hamilton, 1951. 184 Father Ronald Knox, Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion with Special Reference to XVII and XVIII Centuries, Oxford University Press, 1951. 185 Cecil Woodham-Smith, Florence Nightingale, London: Constable, 1950. 186 Felix Frankfurter. The story of how Jane Clark achieved the ending of the enmity between Lippmann and Frankfurter on this visit is told in Clark OH p. 90.

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time. New York is more stupendous than ever – more Babylonian. One can’t help feeling that the whole thing is out of hand, and that the earth must open and swallow it up. However, you won’t want my naïve reflections on America, but a little information about the arts. The National Gallery, on a prolonged visit, is a little depressing, because it is like someone who is always trying to live beyond his means. Of course there are very fine things there, but the scale and the circumstance with which they are exhibited would smother the contents of the Louvre and Uffizi combined. Nice little pictures which would give pleasure in the cabinet of an amateur look painfully inadequate when hung – three to a wall – in these terribly clean galleries. The Johnson collection with (I suppose) fewer fine things,187 gives far more pleasure simply because the display is less pretentious. Moreover, it encourages hope – one may overlook something and have to come again. And of course the Johnson pictures are dirty, which also encourages hope. The Washington pictures are horribly clean and shiny – Duveenised. Pichetto188 was as bad – or worse, as he was also completely incompetent. One realises how much one resents this when one comes on a picture like the Otto Kahn Byzantine Madonna,189 which has escaped, and gives one a real shock of pleasure. (Incidentally the Frick pictures, cleaned by a man named something like [illeg], are very well done.) I wouldn’t be in Johnnie’s shoes for any money. The Kress Suida190 combine are completely lacking in taste or scruple, and prepared to try and force any rubbish on him. His colleagues feel that he should take a firmer line with them, not only for the good of the National Gallery, but to strengthen the hands of all directors of local galleries who are being bullied by local millionaires. But I recognise how difficult it is for him – there are so many border-line cases. Of course all this applies chiefly to the Italian pictures. The Rembrandts are really fine, and the newly acquired French and Flemish pictures are also admirable. The pleasantest place in Washington is still the Freer, which goes on quietly adding fresh masterpieces of Chinese art, (all very well photographed, by the

187 The Johnson Collection was assembled by John G. Johnson (1841–1917), a Philadelphia corporate lawyer who was the son of a blacksmith. He was counsel for many of the large us corporations and banks and declined several offers to be nominated to the Supreme Court. He collected early Italian Renaissance paintings, Spanish, Flemish and Dutch works and modern artists such as Manet, Monet, Sargent and Whistler. In his will he left his collection to Philadelphia on condition that it continued to be exhibited at his house. In 1933 the collection was transferred to the newly built Philadelphia Museum of Art on a ‘temporary’ basis where it remained for more than 50 years as a separate collection. In the 1980s it was integrated with the museum’s permanent collection. 188 Stephen Pichetto 189 Enthroned Madonna and Child, 13th century, tempera on panel, National Gallery of Art, Washington, dc, Gift of Mrs Otto H. (‘Addie’) Kahn. It is said to have come from a church or convent in Calahorra, La Rioja, Spain. 190 Samuel H. Kress; William Suida

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way), and displaying them with admirable discretion. Of course it is empty. The Philips Gallery is also a pleasure to visit, because it is an old-fashioned house, and the pictures have been collected by people who really love them.191 In New York there are hardly any private collections left. Much the best are Philip Lehmann192 and John D. Rockefeller, the latter most beautifully shown. The Metropolitan is all in disorder, most of the pictures packed away, and the sound of hammering in every room. But the objets d’art are inexhaustibly marvellous. I gave three lectures in Philadelphia which was rather a waste of time, as the first was on Uccello, and no one knew who he was. On the whole people do not like a critical approach – they want information, or uplift.193 The strong Salvationist character of America is very evident in their attitude to art. I was practically hissed in the Museum of Modern Art for saying that ‘significant form’ was less a critical term than an advertising slogan to comfort the undecided.194 Apparently it had being [sic] giving perfect satisfaction as an equivalent of ‘Alleluja, I’m saved’, and my blasphemy resulted in a number of my audience having to find an extra session with their psychiatrists.The lectures in Washington seemed to go better: perhaps I was luckier in the choice of themes.195 My pep talk in Philadelphia was considered frivolous,196 and may have sounded so after Dr. Offner’s holy, portentious discourse on method197 – although in fact he was frivolous and I was serious. Now this is enough Americana for one letter. I was sad to read that you had given up writing, but I can well understand how the constant pressure of those who seek wisdom at I Tatti prevents every other creative activity. Thank you for

191 Duncan and Marjorie Phillips 192 Robert Lehman (1891–1969), who was a banker and head of Lehman Brothers, formed a distinguished art collection. Acquired over a 60-year period, it displays Western European art from the 14th to the 20th centuries, including paintings, drawings, manuscript illumination, sculpture, glass, textiles, antique frames, majolica, enamels and precious jewelled objects. On his death some 3000 works were donated to the Metropolitan Museum in New York and and are housed in a separate wing which bears his name. 193 Clark’s lectures at the Philadelphia Museum of Art were ‘Three Scientific Painters: Uccello, Piero della Francesca, Seurat’. That on Uccello was repeated at the Frick Collection, New York. 194 The lecture at moma was ‘Form and Association illustrated from the Work of Henry Moore’. 195 The lecture at the National Gallery in Washington was ‘Rembrandt and the Italian Renaissance’. Clark also lectured on Delacroix at the Phillips Collection there. 196 The Philadelphia Museum of Art celebrated its Diamond Jubilee in 1951 by organising, jointly with the American Philosophical Society, a 3-day conference to which they invited leading scholars and art historians from all over the world, each to deliver a short paper. 197 Richard Offner

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your kind efforts with Bompiani. You ought to receive Piero della Francesca shortly after this letter. I am now conscious only of its defects.

With love from Jane, Ever your affectionate Kenneth Please tell Nicky I shall write about dates in a day or two.

I Tatti Settignano Florence April 2nd 1951

My Dear Kenneth. I delayed answering your letter about yr. American experiences until I received yr. ‘Piero’. It has not come yet and at last I discovered that Derek had it & I borrowed his copy. Let me say at once that I find it satisfactory in every way. Piero becomes intelligible under yr. pen and alive as well and worthy of the admiration now tributed to him.The suggestions about his relation to Fra Angelico are most interesting. I am inclined to believe that they were as from Angelico to Piero. Angelico seems to have had a Pisgah-sight198 of landskip as modern as Cezannes and lacked the measurements only for achieving it.Yet with all drawbacks, he still depicts the Florentine distances as nobody has done since – when you write in yr. wonderful letter about America provides the other side (as it were) to Isaiah Berlin’s articles on education there, that appeared about a year ago in ‘Time & Tide’.199 How I understand what you say about the up-to-date hospital and operating room display of works of art at the Washing n.g.! I confess that I rapturously enjoy the pell-mell, helter skelter arrangements of pictures at The Pitti – I am unhappy because I cannot get used to the loss of the illusion that one is still creative. Perhaps in consequence I am not too well. James Pope-Hennessy200 at last has crossed my horizon – so like and so unlike his ultra laborious and productive brother, our colleague. And I greatly enjoyed Mary Kessell.201 Such candour naturalness and intelligence all combined, and so

198 199 200 201

See Ch. 4 n. 41. See n. 170. See John Pope-Hennessy Mary Kessell

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much warmth. How I wish she was living here! Her hair Derek could paint if he had the leisure. Jean Seznec202 has just been here and confirmed my feeling for him. I recommend him if you want entertaining as well as scholarly companionship. I look forward to seeing you in May and I hope you will return for the whole of September. Our plans are to leave for Milan, Venezia & ‘Way-Stations’ towards the end of May. With love to you both Ever Affectionately B.B.

Upper Terrace House Hampstead, N.W.3 Hampstead 1357 9 April ’51 My Dear BB, That your copy of the Piero should have been held up is a flagrant example of diabolical intervention. Actually I had it sent off before any of the others, as I was anxious that you should have it before it reached Derek or Morra. Well, the Devil is always watching for opportunities like this, and in this case he has been cheated by your generous appreciation of the book, even in someone else’s copy. I am so glad that you think that it will do. Your news of i Tatti was most welcome, and I am particularly glad that you like my dear friend Mary Kessel [sic]. She is indeed an extraordinary product for a Clapham School, and a series of scholarships to art schools. Her culture is so genuine and individual. She is also a most remarkable artist, although in the last year or two she has rather lost heart. However she tells me that you helped her greatly by your sympathy and imaginative understanding. We are greatly looking forward to coming in May for a few nights, with our dear daughter who doesn’t seem at all clever in spite of all her academic honours. And I am truly grateful to you for saying that I can once more settle in to i Tatti in September. If I can claim to have a soul at all, it only manifests itself when I am there.

202 Jean Seznec (1905–83) was the Assistant Director and then the Director of the French Institute in Florence, 1934–40, and taught at Harvard and Oxford from 1941 to 1972. His considerable scholarly achievements were in the field of classical mythology and its representation in Western art.

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I can imagine very well how you feel about a life in which you do not do a certain amount of creative work each day. Heaven knows, you have done enough and still do through talk and inspiration – for example the help you gave to Mary. But there is a certain magic about the written word which makes one feel that the only real work is covering a blank sheet of paper. With love from Jane and renewed thanks for your kind letter, Ever your affectionate Kenneth

Upper Terrace House Hampstead, N.W.3 Hampstead 1357 9 Jun ’51 My dear BB, We are delighted to learn from your postcard, and also from Nicky’s letter to Derek, that you are feeling better, and that it was really the hayfever which was causing your troubles. I expect that by now you are in Venice, but will address this letter to i Tatti. What with our festivals and Colette’s dance we are having a very full summer – and from my point of view a very empty one. I must confess that both activities have been agreeable. The dance was really very pretty and Colette was incandescent with happiness. The only cloud was that our dear Colin was away in the Air Force, and that some of our closest friends also had to be abroad then. After all the fatigues involved (for Jane, not for me) we took refuge in Aldeburgh, which as you may know is the scene of a comically modest, but very pleasant festival.203 Walks by the sea and music in the evening restored us to such health as will carry us through the next epreuves. We saw a lot of Derek, who gave us all the news. Now we have Colin back on leave, with great family rejoicing.

203 The Aldeburgh Festival was founded in 1948 by the composer Benjamin Britten, the singer Peter Pears and the librettist/producer Eric Crozier. The English Opera Group provided the initial programme of operas but the vision for the festival developed over time to include readings of poetry and literature, drama and lectures, and art exhibitions. At first modest in scope and housed in small local venues, the Festival developed dramatically after 1967 when a large mid-19th-century maltings at Snape, near Aldeburgh, was converted into a concert hall.

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I envy you seeing the Caravaggios.204 I can’t fly out on purpose, and have no chance of getting to Milan till September, when I suppose it will be over. I console myself by thinking that a mass of Caravaggios might be rather oppressive: moreover, I’m never quite sure how much I learn from a ‘one man show’ of this kind – I know that I went to the Bellini exhibition for 5 weeks – every day, and was no wiser at the end of it – in fact learnt far more next year by seeing the pictures one by one in their churches. However, I suppose that the study of Caravaggio is in such a pre-Morellian condition that close quarter comparison will be valuable. We are just off to Amsterdam, and thence to Utrecht where I am lecturing – very rashly – on Rembrandt and the quattrocento.205 I am worried that the Dutch will be rather hurt – but I can’t help it – it amuses me, and I may learn something, which I certainly shouldn’t if I spoke on an English or Italian subject there. If all is well we hope to arrive in Florence about the 1st September. It will be a great joy to see something of you under the peaceful conditions of Vallombrosa. Please tell Nicky that I shall write to her with precise dates in a week or two – and give her a hug from me.

Ever your affectionate Kenneth

Hotel Europa E Britannia Venezia June 27 1951

Dear Kenneth. Here we are frivolously enjoying Tiepolo206 carefree and unconcerned as to which he did or did not paint, or what he meant. Such a contrast to the Caravaggio Show which I profited by seeing again works I could not hope to see again, or see at all, like those in u.s.a. in German lands or even Sicily. I fear my travelling days are over. Going about takes it out of me so – But to return to Caravaggio, the only ‘really truly’ Caravaggesque work shown is the ‘Calling of Matthew’.207 All the others are by an orthodox classical artist, who might have worked in the early cinque-cento.

204 There was a legendary Caravaggio exhibition at the Palazzo Reale in Milan, April–June 1951, with a catalogue by Roberto Longhi. 205 The lecture was arranged by Roger Hinks who was the British Council representative in Holland. 206 There was an exhibition of paintings by Tiepolo at the Ca’ Rezzonico, June–October 1951. 207 Caravaggio, Calling of St Matthew, 1599–1600, San Luigi dei Francesi, Rome.

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I feel less and less glad of seeing works of art. I see so many of my own making every step I take out of doors, every time faces come my way. Yet when I do come across real (ie representational paintings or carvings) I enjoy them more than ever. I am so glad Colette’s coming out here was such a success. Do send me yr. lecture on Rembrandt and the Sphinx. It is a subject that greatly interests me. We stay here another eight days. It is ecstasy to be here without a problem in my head. Then Vallombrosa, and the hope of seeing you there in Sept. Let it be early Sept. Ever Affectionately B.B.

Upper Terrace House Hampstead, N.W.3 Hampstead 1357 Aug ’51

My dear BB, There has just arrived a generous consignment of your writings, all of them promising interest and pleasure. Thank you very much for sending them. The only one I have read so far is the Tiepolo,208 which I have enjoyed immensely – a piece of true appreciation, which carries the reader along on the tide of your enjoyment. I much like your comparison with Lautrec and Cheret209 – which proves that the poster was the only living decorative art in the late 19th c, for Cheret is only tolerable as a poster artist, and the recent Lautrec exhibitions in Paris left me with almost the same feelings about him.210 No doubt about the brilliant talents displayed in the pastels, but they were odius and exasperated, whereas in the posters his graphomania is liberated. Poor Cheret! I admired the posters so much (so did Seurat) that I made a pilgrimage to the Musee Cheret in Nice – but, alas, the paintings are vulgarity itself, with a kind of Bonnard incandescence which ruins their colour. I wish I had something to send you equivalent at least in bulk, but this has been a poor summer for work. However, I am sending, as you asked for it,

208 Berenson wrote two articles on Tiepolo: ‘Tiepolo à Venise’, Chronique des arts et de la curiosité, no. 317, 29 June 1951; ‘Giovan Battista Tiepolo’, L’Illustrazione italiana, vol. 80, no. 6 (1951), pp. 57–66. 209 Jules Chéret (1836–1932), the French painter and lithographer of the Belle Époque. He has been called the father of the modern poster. 210 L’Orangerie des Tuileries, Paris, held a Toulouse-Lautrec exhibition in 1951 to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of his death.

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my Rembrandt lecture. It can’t be understood without the illustrations, and I have put in all the references to the drawings in Valentiner’s Klassiker der Kunst volumes.Unfortunately I don’t think that they are at i Tatti – at least I have never been able to find them – and they are difficult to obtain. Still you will know most of the drawings I refer to, and of course all the etchings and paintings. I am also sending an off-print of an inaugural lecture I gave at Edinburgh.211 It is roughly written, but it contains so many ideas which derive ultimately (or immediately!) from your writings and conversations that it may amuse you to glance at it. I hope you will have had from the National Gallery details of the new panel from the Sta. Maria Maggiore triptych. I am sending you a copy of a dry argumentative note I have written on it – the conclusion seems rather odd, and surprised me, but I can do no alternative.212 Now at last, I am launched on my gross subject of the nude which I am due to give as lectures in Washington in 1953.213 Of course this involves learning a great deal more than I know at present about Greek art, and learning is always enjoyable. But whether I shall be able to digest all this new material and assimilate it with what I know already about post-renaissance art is still doubtful. As usual, all the bright ideas I had when I set out have become tarnished by the facts. It was a bitter blow not to be able to come to i Tatti orVallombrosa in September, but we couldn’t leave our dear Colin to have his short holidays from the raf with us away and the house shut up. However I am considerably cheered by the thought that I shall see you in October. Nicky tells me that you will probably come back to the Tatti about the 15th, and I have written asking her if I can come out on the 5th, and have my usual ten days retreat which I value so greatly. I am really longing for it – and even more for the pleasures of your conversation. Some of these pleasures I have been able to enjoy in reading Vedere & Sapere214 which I have done since I began this letter. The development of your theme that art is a compromise between seeing and knowing is most enlightening, and I agree with nearly all that you say about modern art. Only I think that the disease from which it suffers goes deeper, and cannot be cured without a complete catastrophe. I have also re-read the enchanting study of Sani,215 which

211 ‘Apologia of an Art Historian’, the Inaugural Lecture on the occasion of Clark’s election as President of the Associated Societies of the University, 15 November 1950, published in the University of Edinburgh Journal (Summer 1951). He had a number of distinguished predecessors, including Ruskin. 212 See n. 161; Kenneth Clark, ‘An Early Quattrocento Triptych from Santa Maria Maggiore, Rome’, Burlington Magazine, vol. 93, no. 584 (November 1951), pp. 339–47. Clark argued that Masaccio could have left the triptych unfinished at his death and that Masolino might then have completed those parts left unfinished and painted the entire back. Clark’s argument for a joint enterprise between Masaccio and Masolino is now accepted in principal. 213 See Introduction and n. 270. 214 Bernard Berenson, Vedere e sapere, Milan: Electa, 1951 (in English as Seeing and Knowing, London: Chapman and Hall, 1953). 215 See n. 127.

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is also a comment on modern art. It is astonishing how well his work survives reproduction in that sumptious form. When this arrives Mary will be staying with you. I do hope you have enjoyed her visit – as she will certainly enjoy hers. She is a wonderful person and after 12 years I have grown to love and admire her more. I am writing to dear Nicky about my plans. I do hope that when this reaches you, your fatigues of the summer will be forgotten and you will be bounding through the birch woods, as I love to think of your doing. Ever your affectionate Kenneth

Sept.1.1951 Casa Al Dono Vallombrosa (Prov. di Firenze)

Dear Kenneth. Thank you for delightful letter, and for the three articles. It is most generous to let me have two of them before they have appeared in print. In the first place let me tell you how sorry I am, and how disappointed that you are not to be here this month. Our walks and talks in this solitude have been among the best moments of my stay here. I fear we shall be away in Ischia216 and thereabouts most of Oct. and when we do get back to I Tatti it will be to receive the Hands217 and other American friends. Perhaps I shall get glimpses of you – nevertheless. You mention Mary Kessel [sic]. She has been with us a fortnight and I am sorry that she leaves tomorrow. She eagerly joined in all our talks with such a variety of folk as come here! She is so participating so intelligent, so human, so restful and soothing. A great acquisition. A couple of days ago we had the visit of that distilled quintessence of Zentral Europa, the Phaidon publisher.218 How he reminded me of Joe Duveen, with that noble peer’s power of persuading without convincing. Now to turn to your three papers. I can congratulate you with all my heart on all three of them. First and foremost on the Rembrandt paper, that fulfills all

216 See William Walton, who had a house on Ischia. 217 Judge Learned Hand 218 Bela Horovitz (1898–1955), born in Budapest, established the publishing house Phaidon Verlag in Vienna in 1923. In 1938 he transferred his publishing activities to London. In the 1950s Phaidon Press produced art books of the highest quality in both content and presentation.

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my expectations.219 You have attained full maturity in scholarship, in thought, in wording and in phrasing.You now can count on a quarter of a century of active and qualitative work on the lines started by yr. Gothic book. I liked the Edinburgh address almost as much. It is the best defence of our Schlemmer’s Geschaft that I have ever seen in English.220 And now for the article on the panels you discovered and helped yr. Nat. Gallery to acquire.You were good enough to send me photos of the Jerome and Baptist. Obviously masaccio. I read yours with admiration of yr. skill in handling the evidence. I have become doubtful of the possibility of such evidence to bring conviction. Millard Meiss221 has published in the June ‘Art Bulletin’ an article on a little ‘flagellation’ recently acquired by the Frick. He brings to bear all the big and little up-to-date artillery to prove that it is by duccio. It is obviously (so far as a reproduction can tell) by cimabue.222 Johnnie Walker is here and we have talked about Kress and his N.G. and how he looks forward to yr. lectures on the Nude. So much more to say – happily Ever Affectionately B.B.

[Undated letter] Upper Terrace House Hampstead, N.W.3 Hampstead 1357

My dear BB, One always forgets to enclose things – this one wasn’t really worth the postage. We aren’t going to the South of France after all – the doctor thinks it is too far for Jane. We are going to Paris – the Crillon – for a fortnight. More fun for her – and she needs fun as well as rest. But she really is a good deal better. Much love K

219 220 221 222

See n. 205. See n. 211. Millard Meiss Purchased by the Frick Collection in 1950, The Flagellation of Christ, c. 1280, is now catalogued as by Cimabue.

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‘As From’ Upper Terrace House Hampstead, N.W.3 Hampstead 1357 September 15th 1951

My Dear BB, Your generous letter gave me as much pleasure as any which I have ever received. I am really delighted that you found the Rembrandt lecture was on the right lines. The other paper is very sketchy and I should not have ventured to send it but that it contained so much which I have derived from you. Talking of which, I have just re-read your Sketch for a Self Portrait,223 and have enjoyed it even more than the first time. It is incredibly true and far richer than is apparent at the first glance. I believe it will be one of lives [sic] to survive from this epoch. Nicky will have had my card in which I say how gladly I avail myself of your kind offer to let me have the Villino in the first weeks of October. I hope to arrive on the 5th, and may catch a sight of you before you leave Vallombrosa: and in any case will see you when you return after the 15th. We are in the country with ample opportunity for work and reflection, which I am greatly enjoying. I am working on my nude lectures – interesting to me, if to no-one else. I am not sufficiently a pagan to do justice to the pure, sensuous nude – but hope to do better when it becomes hardened with thought and emotion. Incidentally your Vedere e Sapere put me on to Julius Lange,224 who is a real humanist. Strange how that kind of writing went out after the 19th century. I am greatly relieved that you agree about the Masaccio. Everyone I have shown the articles and photographs to is of the same mind – except the officials of the National Gallery, who are displeased. Yes: Horovitz is a sort of Duveen of publishing. But I must say that he produces the books with great care – assisted by a very gloomy, pessimistic unpersuasive Viennese named Graefe and he has been idealistic enough in some of his publications.

223 See Introduction and n. 90. 224 Julius Lange (1838–1896), was the first director of the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen, founded by the brewer Carl Jacobsen (1842–1914), who assembled one of the largest private art collections of his day. He named the museum after his brewery, Ny Carlsberg.Towards the end of the 19th century, Denmark witnessed an extraordinary increase of interest in ancient sculpture. Today, the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek contains ancient and modern art, sculptures and paintings.

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Thank you again, dear BB, for your most generous encouragement, which delights me now, and will comfort me when I no longer get favourable reviews and when readers in general are tired of hearing me called the just! Ever yours affectionately Kenneth

Upper Terrace House Hampstead, N.W.3 Hampstead 1357 [but probably written while in Italy] 6 Oct ’51

My dear BB, This is a note of gratitude for your great kindness in letting me stay at the Villino. As far as I am concerned it is quite perfect – I couldn’t wish for more – and I am happier than I have been since I was at i Tatti last year. I have been over to I Tatti each day, and am delighted at the re-arrangement of the library. It was hard to make up one’s mind that a private library should turn into an institutional one, but now that it is done, it is a great convenience. And after all, it is still extremely personal. Really Alda has done marvellously – one wonders where all the books were before the new library was built. I am looking forward very much to your return. There is a great deal which I wish to ask you and talk over with you, if you can spare me the time. Meanwhile I hope that Ischia has helped the hay fever, and that you will come back strong enough to face the inevitable pilgrims. All being well, Jane arrives at about the same time you do. She has not been well, and I am a good deal worried about her – she has grown into a sort of tragic figure without in fact being associated with any tragedy – a sort of Muse without a role. Still, I suppose it is sufficiently tragic to feel ill and nervous three quarters of the time. Much love to dear Nicky Ever your affectionate Kenneth

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Upper Terrace House Hampstead, N.W.3 Hampstead 1357 As From i Tatti Settignano 15 Oct ’51

My dear BB, Thank you for your kind words of sympathy about Jane. She hates anyone mentioning that she has been ill, for the very reasons you give in your letter225 – that she is naturally so full of zest and spirit; and usually I do not refer to it. But in fact it has cast quite a shadow over the last few years. She has just been to see a new doctor in whom she is disposed to have faith and I look forward to hearing the result when she arrives on Wednesday. But I am much afraid that she will never get right without a troublesome major operation, and this she naturally wishes to postpone as long as possible. Please don’t mention this to anyone but Nicky, and don’t talk to Jane about it. In fact I have never told anyone, but I take advantage of your quasi-parental relationship with me to get it off my chest! I am still reveling in the peace of the Villino and the library, and have been able to concentrate as I have not done for many years. I am sorry to hear that you have been laid up with a cold – but the cold (which in spite of what doctors say gives me a cold) has been hard for the youngest and strongest to bear. Your sisters226 have been very kind in inviting me to i Tatti for luncheon twice. Please tell Nicky that she must have thought me an intolerable fusser, telegraphing about my arrangements, but that the postcard in which she explained that all was in order only reached me here, a few days ago. We had just missed one in Aldeburgh, and it had then been mixed up with some invitation cards of Jane’s. Longing to see you both on the 20th. I hope that by then your chill will have vanished and Il tromantana227 have dropped Love to Nicky Ever your affectionate Kenneth

225 Letter missing. 226 Senda Berenson Abbott and Bessie (see under BB), who travelled from the usa to visit Berenson.The last time they had done so was in the 1930s. 227 Tramontana: the North Wind.

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Upper Terrace House Hampstead, N.W.3 Hampstead 1357 5 Nov ’51

My dear BB, It is less than a week since we got back, but it seems like the best part of a year, spent entirely in meetings and public works. Arts Councils, Commissions on the authorisation of artists’ materials, Conferences with the Ministry of Works, the Fine Arts Commission and Covent Garden – every day, morning and afternoon. You can imagine how regretfully I think of i Tatti, the library and the Villino. It is indeed my salvation that you are so kind as to allow me to stay there so often and for such long periods, and I can never be grateful enough. Apart from all this public grind, we have found things well enough at home – the children well and happy, and fewer major domestic disasters than usually attend a home coming. Those few weeks of talks with you, dear BB, have revived my spirit, and I am greatly delighted that you approve of my plan to do a Justi’s Winckelmann about B.B. and his circle.228 As I said, I must deal with the Nude, and Rembrandt first, but in the meantime can be collecting materials. I am only regretful that I didn’t think to extract more historical data from such figures of the past as Miss Paget.229 I was very glad that the few samples of my ‘nude’ ideas which I displayed to you, seemed to hold out promise. It will take a great effort to put them into order, and to do so I shall have to retire to the Country for long spells during the next year. I hope the pressure of pilgrims has not grown too intense. You may feel less active or resistant to fatigue, but you looked almost unchanged, and in your company I completely forgot the passage of time. Jane sends her love.You were so sweet and sympathetic to her, that I think it has helped her greatly. With much love and gratitude Ever your affectionate Kenneth

228 Carl Justi (1832–1912) was a German scholar and art historian with a particular interest in biography. While teaching at Marburg he read the works of Johann Joachim Winckelmann and during 1866–72 published a massive 3-volume account of Winckelmann’s writings. Winckelmann (1717–1768) was one of the founders of scientific archaeology and the first to propose categories of style as a basis for the study of the history of art. Many consider him to be the father of the discipline of art history. 229 Violet Paget

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I Tatti Settignano Florence Nov 13, 1951

Dear Kenneth. Thank you for a letter wh. warmed my heart. It would be wonderful if you wrote about my evoluement during the last 60 years and more. If, when you will be ready to give yr. full attention to the task, I still remain alive and I mean alive as distinct fr. senile surviving, hochst subjectif 230 no doubt, yet worth considering. A propos have you seen the N.G. catal. of Ital. Paintings just appeared?231 It is an Augean stable of antiquarian rubbish, and piled so high that it is not easy to read it and to find what one is looking for – even if it be a mere fact. Its whole tendency is to ignore and even to do more than ignore, to throw contempt on style-criticism and all that it has tried to do in the last 75 years. - Nicky read me Jane’s beautiful letter. I am glad Jane has decided to have the operation. – The Hands did not leave before the Francis Biddles232 arrived. Katherine Biddle is one of the most genuine as well as likeable human beings of my acquaintance.Yet half-sister of that arch comptress Marguerite Bassiano.233

230 German for ‘highly subjective’. 231 Martin Davies, National Gallery Catalogues: Early Italian Paintings, London, 1951 (see Ch. 6’s introduction). 232 Francis Biddle (1886–1968) was the us Attorney General during the Second World War and the principal American judge during the Nuremberg trials. He was married to the poet Katherine Garrison Chapin (1890–1977). His brother George was a painter who visited I Tatti in early 1952. 233 Marguerite Caetani Bassiano (1880–1963) was a patron of the arts and well-known in the literary world as the editor of Botteghe oscure, a biannual review publishing poetry and fiction in their original languages (e.g. André Malraux, Albert Camus, Paul Valéry, Ignazio Silone, Robert Graves, Archibald MacLeish, e.e. cummings). Born Marguerite van Auken, in 1911 she married Roffredo Caetani, 17th Duke of Sermoneta and Prince of Bassiano. His niece Topazia (1921–1990) married the composer Igor Markevitch (1912–1983) who had lived with his first wife at the Villino at I Tatti in 1941–7. Roffredo was the last male member of the line and a noted composer. The celebrated gardens at Ninfa, south of Rome, were the creation of his family.

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Yesterday a film on Michelangelo was shown in the sitting room downstairs. Fascinating reproduction of the sculptures, but the ‘talkie’ was ‘Savonarola-Brown’234 With love to you all Ever Yours B.B. PS Thanks for book on Venetian portrait photos – altogether admirable and remarkable

Nov. 23.1951 I Tatti Settignano Florence

Dearest Jane Thanks for the pretty double-faced scarf and still more for the p.c. with such an extraordinary good likeness of your dear self prise sur le vif. Which reminds me that I need photos of you and of Kenneth for my conostasis. I am glad you have decided to have the operation. It is a heroic decision but such a wise one! You have my whole-hearted sympathy. Is it true that K is going to America again this winter. With love to you both B.B.

Upper Terrace House Hampstead, N.W.3 Hampstead 1357 26 Nov. ’51

My dear BB, We delighted in your letter. The thought of I Tatti has a settling and inspiring effect on me. I am still in the midst of the Vita attiva which is producing a large

234 Possibly a reference to John Nicholas Brown or a cryptic comment on the style and content of the commentary. One of the chapters in Max Beerbohm’s Seven Men, London:William Heinemann, 1919, a book of stories based on six fictional characters, was about ‘Savonarola’ Brown, the author of a tragedy encompassing the entire Italian Renaissance.

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crop of weeds at the moment. For example, it looks as if our new Government is going to shut down Covent Garden, opera and ballet, which it has taken us six years and much heart’s blood to build up. That is the trouble about the life of action: it doesn’t require much intelligence, but continual attention. I have been relishing your characterisation of the N.G. Catalogue. It is an extraordinary production. The interesting thing is that it doesn’t really eschew stylistic criticism, but accepts it only if it is either over 80 years old, or the work of the editor himself. In other words, only if it is uninformed or second rate. My modest and, as I thought, inoffensive article on the Masaccio-Masolino altar piece has unfortunately become ‘news’, and I am attacked on the subject by waiters and cloak-room attendants. I have had a characteristic effusion from Longhi in almost exactly the same words as when I published the Lisbon Piero, i.e. that he had really known it all along (only had not had the good fortune to have seen the picture) and so that it was really his discovery, and I should have said so. By the time you get this Rosamund [Lehmann] will have arrived to stay with you, much in need of the rest and atmosphere of work which one only finds at i Tatti. How I envy her, and wish I was there too. However, I am escaping for ten days before Christmas, while Jane does some shopping. She has been a little better but now is fallen back, poor darling, into great distress of mind and body. However, she seems more or less decided to have the necessary operation. Your girl friends are all well. Vivien, after various colds and sinusitis, is extremely bright and able to face the horrors of a New York season. Mary is blissfully happy doing rather beautiful sculpture. You really changed her whole outlook by your sympathy. Thank you for sending me the off print of the Sacra Conversationi in the Louvre.235 I suppose you are right. But it is so much finer than the signed Mancini, which has always seemed to me rather a pastiche236 – whereas the Louvre picture is a rich new creation. Did you know the Degas copy of it.237 I have a photo which I can send you if you haven’t got it already. Much love to Nicky Ever your affectionate Kenneth

235 Bernard Berenson, ‘Une “Sacra Conversazione” de l’Ecole de Giorgione au Louvre’, Revue des arts (June 1951), pp. 67–76. 236 Domenico Mancini, Virgin and Child enthroned with Angel Lutenist, 1511, Duomo, Lendinara, nr Rovigo,Veneto. 237 Degas’s copy of 1868–72 is of what is now identified as Sebastiano del Piombo’s Holy Family with St Catherine and St Sebastian, Musée du Louvre.

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Just after I had folded this up your letter to Jane arrived – for which she is most grateful. She is having a final consultation with the surgeon on Thursday. Of course I am not going to America this winter, or next year, and never was. K

Upper Terrace House Hampstead, N.W.3 Hampstead 1357 22 Jan ’52

Dear BB, I have written you a longer letter, which I have posted separately, in which I give particulars of the original of the enclosed photographs. The owner is martin asscher, 4 joubert studios, jubilee place, london s.w.3238 Unfortunately, he has decided to ask such an exorbitant price that I doubt if there would be any chance of the Gallery buying it, even if it was thought desirable to do so. Yours ever Kenneth

[Typewritten letter] Upper Terrace House Hampstead, N.W.3 Hampstead 1357 23rd January, 1952

My dear BB, I put off writing to you every day in hopes that I may find time to write with my own hand but at this rate the letter will never get written, and in any case my hand grows daily more illegible. First of all I wanted to thank you for the beautiful Christmas present.239 The landscape details are most revealing, even more so than one might have expected. Perhaps there are rather too many of them, but then it is intended as a book

238 See next letter. 239 Probably Hanna Kiel and Dario Neri, Paesaggi inattesi: Nella pittura del rinascimento, intro. Bernard Berenson, Milan: Electa, 1952.

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to dip into and not to go right through. It was just the right picture book for Jane to look at through her convalescence, which, I am glad to say, is now going quite well, although she has had a number of setbacks, the last only a week ago. Of course, it is impossible for her to relax and she soon tires herself with letter writing and telephoning. She is in an ideal nursing home run by Augustinian nuns,240 with a view over London and a large window to admit any rays of sun which reach us in January. She will be there for another ten days, after which we go down to the country for three weeks. I am greatly looking forward to this as for the last two months I have hardly opened a book or written a word. Household business, arrangements for the children and visits to Jane twice daily, added to my ordinary Committees and other engagements, have made contemplation or study of works of art impossible. I did, however, go to see a picture which had been discovered by a rather obscure dealer called Martin Asscher.241 For some reason it sounded interesting and, in fact, turned out to be remarkably like a Simone Martini. (I am sending the photographs of it in a separate envelope.) He found it in an antique shop in Worcester. It has not been restored recently but the Madonna’s head must have suffered a little in the past.The Child is perfectly intact and looks very Simoneish to me but I have not yet had time to do any work on it. As we have nothing of the sort in the National Gallery, I told Hendy about it but have not heard, and probably will never hear, the result. I expect you have had more news of our friends than I have.Vivien has been ill almost all the time they have been in New York and has, in addition, had savage criticisms.242 I do not think I have ever had more miserable letters. I saw yesterday a very old friend, Gilbert Murray,243 who was as bright, curious and credulous as ever and wished to be remembered to you. By the way, I do not know if you are on good terms with Sir Robert Witt.244 He recently had an 80th birthday and I am afraid is in a very poor condition, so that if he is a friend a letter would be very welcome – but I can well understand it if he is not.

240 Probably the Bethanie Nursing Home, Highgate, London. 241 Martin B. Asscher was a fine art dealer at 36 Bywater St, Chelsea. There is correspondence between Clark and Asscher dated January–May 1952 in the Tate Archive. 242 Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh had taken Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra and George Bernard Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra to New York (having received good reviews for their performances in the plays in London). The New York reviews were mostly good but the young English theatre critic Kenneth Tynan, seeking to make his reputation, and with the slogan ‘Rouse tempers, goad, lacerate, raise whirlwinds’ pinned above his desk, wrote that Vivien Leigh had a mediocre talent which forced Olivier to compromise his own. 243 Gilbert Murray 244 Robert Witt

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I have not seen Rosamund since she came back from you, only talked to her on the telephone. She is distracted with house moving and the last chapter of her novel.245 [Continued in handwriting] I left this unfinished, and must send it off in this state, as I see no prospect of the chance to write in a more leisurely state. I am motoring Jane down to the country tomorrow. She is much better, though whether quite well enough to undertake the journey, I am not sure, and I am afraid that after the calm of the nursing home, the change of regime will be distressing for her. You will have seen that our chances of travel have been much curtailed, but even so I hope we may be able to come to i Tatti in May – or to the Villino if that were possible. I am longing to get back to work. With love to Nicky Ever your affectionate Kenneth

Upper Terrace House Hampstead, N.W.3 Hampstead 1357 Easter [1952]

My dear BB, I needn’t tell you with what sorrow and reluctance I left you. I didn’t seem to say half of what I meant to say to you, and there was so many things which I had wanted to ask you, which for some reason faded from my mind. i Tatti seemed more than ever my home, and I was miserable at the thought that I shouldn’t get back for a year or so. All this made me, after the first few evenings, distracted and apprehensive – although I loved our walks, and shall never forget the beauty of the spring landscape. I was also grieved to find your hay-fever tormenting you so continuously. It is particularly hard for you of all people to have an affliction which seems to grow worse when brought into contact with new life in nature. And then all those unknown people at tea-time! Surely, dear BB, you can get Nicky to tell them that you are not as young as you were, and can see them only once a week. There was a time when they seemed to exhilarate you, but not now. I was really worried for you when, on coming in from your walk, you had to brace yourself to meet all these unknowns.

245 Rosamond Lehmann, The Echoing Grove, London: Collins, 1953.

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I had a good journey back, and was met by the two boys, looking the embodiment of youth. The sight of them consoled me for the departure from i Tatti. You were so kind to Colette; I am sure that she will soon loose her nervousness and speak easily to you.You will find her very youthful and unlearned in speech – but she is actually very perceptive. It is as warm here as it was in Florence, and the garden, which is Jane’s delight, is full of flowers. Unfortunately she is still forbidden to do much digging or lifting. Thank you again, dear BB, for all your kindness to me, and the way in which you make me feel that the Tatti is my home. I value it more than I can say – more every year. Ever yours affectionately Kenneth Clark Will you please tell Nicky that I shall write to her in a day or two, when things have settled down a bit. Give her all my love and gratitude.

Wentworth Hotel Aldeburgh, Suffolk Telephone 312-313 5 June ’52

My dear BB, It seems a long time since I left i Tatti – very sorrowfully, for I have never felt more strongly that I ought to have stayed there. I wonder, and have wondered every day, how you have been since; and am grieved to hear from Derek that you have been rather low. I do hope that Ischia, followed by Vallombrosa, will revive you. I have been struggling with a multitude of things and people. Every day seems to bring a fresh complication. But as you see I am now in the country, near my old home,246 where I am able to give a little more time to writing. I can’t say that my nude book is going very well. I haven’t got the right balance between exposition and criticism, and keep on putting in bits of information, which I then have to cut out. Altogether, I am sorry I took it on – but I must grind away at it now; and of course I have learnt a great deal in the course of preparing it, which may come in useful later. Either I am growing prematurely old, or the

246 Sudbourne Hall, near Orford in Suffolk, was bought by Clark’s father for the excellent shooting that the estate offered. Many of Clark’s early childhood years were lived there.

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work of my colleagues has greatly declined. At any rate, I am being continually irritated by the dishonest or imbecile stuff written on the history of art – although it sometimes reaches the farcical, as in M. Iserlow’s [sic]247 article on Leonardo, which made two points – first that he was a ‘solid realist’ and second that the Mona Lisa was really a boy dressed up as a woman. I suppose those monsters in the Louvre will never have sent you those detailed photographs. They only sent them to me after three telegrams. The only treat I shall have to offer you is a set of details I am having taken of the frieze of the mausoleum,248 which really is a masterpiece, and greatly under rated because not properly photographed – oh, and some photos of the Mildenhall treasure249 which you may not have had. Jane is a good deal better, but easily grows tired and depressed. I was so glad to hear from Colette that she had some talk with you before she left Florence. She loved it, and now is able to recognise something of what her father owes to you. Of course she is longing to return to Florence at the first possible moment. Colin is still flying, and Alan pursues his strange independent life, half idle and half crazily energetic, and both halves equally pointless, as far as I can see. If Colin gets three weeks leave in July we are all going to Venice, so that the children can bathe. I like to potter about the churches in the early morning, but if it is very hot I can’t work, and I confess I would rather stay at home till this wretched book was in better shape: or, best of all, go back to i Tatti, where I can work, and where I feel completely in harmony with my surroundings. But, alas, I fear that will be impossible. We are supposed to be going to Greece in October.The present Ambassador250 is a war-time friend of mine, and has asked us to stay: and although I don’t like staying in Embassies, the present currency regulations make it a necessity. Do, if you can, send us a line to say how you are, dear BB. I am really anxious to know. With much love to Nicky Ever your affectionate Kenneth

247 Probably George Isarlov, a French art historian who wrote on a wide range of artists, ancient and modern, from 1929 onwards. 248 Possibly the Amazon frieze from the tomb of Mausollos at Halikarnassos (Bodrum), in the British Museum. 249 The Mildenhall Treasure is a hoard of highly decorated Roman silver tableware from the 4th century ad, which was unearthed by a ploughman near Mildenhall in Suffolk in 1942. Not realising what he had discovered, he did not bring his find to the notice of the authorities until 1946, when it was acquired by the British Museum. 250 Charles Peake

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Bari, June 10.52

My Dear Kenneth. Delighted to read yours of the 5th wh. found us here yesterday. News except for dear Jane, excellent. To her with my love the assurance that with rest and good thoughts she will recover L’operazione. Operations leave one depressed for months but not for years. The Nude is a task that demands much tunnelling and by-passing. To do it in the American-German-Jewish way would take several life-times and produce the usual boring rubbishy meta-fissical results.You would not embark with that theme nor have you the time to do it. So preach from on high. You speak of photos of the Mausoleum and of the Mildenhall treasure. I should be grateful for prints of them. We are having enchanting weather. La fond de l’ocean remains cool, and one enjoys the sea breeze nearly always. Since I used to haunt the regions more than 50 years ago they almost are unrecognisable. Squalid villages of 80 or 90,000 [sic] have given place to Pharaonomically grandiose cities. The roads wh. were more piste are now as good as any in Europa. Showy hotels everywhere. So, as far as material civilisation goes Apulia is as up-to-date and easy to get about it in [sic] as the most advanced regions of the North. But by way of art there is architecture only. The cathedrals are among the most fascinating anywhere and the chiselling that edges doors and windows is exquisite in its quality and entertaining as illustration. A whiff of Italy and a breeze from France enliven the Byzantine mass. As for painting, but for one fine Giov. Bellini, two or threeVeronese a Tintoretto or two there is only native rubbish – rubbish so rubbishy as to be disgusting.Yet Brandi251 has raffled some of them to give employment to his Istituto de Ristauro. I wish you were coming to Vallombrosa in the summer. At all events remember our tryst in Rome next Oct. It would be such fun to see things together the way we did more than 25 years ago. Sight-seeing is not only sheer delight but when it is to what one has seen again and again, a way of measuring one’s own growth. Durer on his 2nd visit to Venice discovered that. Write again soon Ever affectionately, B.B.

251 Cesare Brandi (1906–1988) was an art historian and critic who became the first Director of the Istituto Centrale per il Restauro in Rome in 1939, retiring in 1959. He was a specialist in the theory and practice of conservation and restoration of works of art.

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We expect to be zigzagging in these parts till the 26th.Then Naples and Hotel Excellium Excelsior till July 1.

Upper Terrace House Hampstead, N.W.3 Hampstead 1357 [August 1952]

My dear BB, I saw these photographs of the Lothair Crystal252 in the Warburg the other day, and managed to secure a set for you, as I was sure you would find them exciting. So little survives from that period which was clearly the work of the very best man available and not of some provincial artisan. Are they not beautiful! And do they not show how even the Utrecht Psalter253 is a sort of caricature of the style from which it is derived. I am so glad to hear that you were feeling better. How I wish I had been with you in Naples. I think we shall be in Rome from about the 17th to the 26th October. Is there any chance of your being there then? Our dates are more or less fixed, as I have a Louvre meeting on the 16th and we are going on to Greece on the 26th. Jane has been saying every day that she will write to thank you for your Rumour & Reflection, which she has read from cover to cover with great enjoyment. I have only had the chance of dipping into it, and have delighted in what I have read – far more than in the Italian edition. The feeling of a speaking voice is so important. I am still struggling with my Nude – sometimes I think it is good, sometimes hopeless. I really don’t know. We are staying here enjoying lovely hot weather – tropical suit every day for a fortnight. Our garden is still green and shady, and the assaults of claimants are beginning to slacken. Much love to Nicky, Ever your affectionate K

252 The Lothair Crystal, British Museum, is a large rock crystal (18.6 cm in diameter), from the 9th century, from Lotharingia (Lorraine), and is engraved with scenes of the story of Susannah as recorded in the Apocrypha. It has a long vertical crack supposedly caused when it was thrown into the Meuse during the sack of Waulsort by the French in 1793. 253 The Utrecht Psalter is a 9th-century illuminated psalter famous for its 166 lively pen illustrations for each psalm and its other texts. The extent of the dependence of these on earlier models has been

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Casa al Dono Vallombrosa (Prov. di Firenze) August 15th 1952

My Dear K. Thanks for yr. note, and the photos. What a treasure, and how explain such a classical and monumental work just then and there. No terms of comparison with the Utrecht Mss which was normally [illeg]. But why should Lothair have chosen the story of Susanna for the subject of the crystal? That is the kind of information the Warburgites should provide. Have they? It is golden, radiant, beautiful up here, but does not seem to suit what remains of my body. I could stand coughing, sneezing, etc. but my eyes prick and water! Nevertheless, I go on with my Lotto.254 But why for a generation that wants meta-fussion, superanalysis, iconosance, antiquarianism, [illeg], everything in short that I, belonging to the vintage of Consula Manlio255 the decried 1890s can not give them! We plan to be in Rome for a month or more from Oct. 15. and look forward with joy to seeing you and Jane. I am glad she is reading Rumour & Reflexion. Give her my love. Ever Affectionately B.B.

Sept. 17. 52 Casa al Dono Vallombrosa (Prov. di Firenze)

Dear Kenneth Let me hope that the rumours that reached of Jane’s having to undergo another operation are grossly exaggerated. Meanwhile we are very anxious, and hungry for authentic news. It would be sad if true.

a subject of art historical controversy. Housed in the University Library in Utrecht, it is the most important manuscript in the Netherlands. 254 See n. 278. 255 Tito Manlio was a Roman consul who, according to the plot in Vivaldi’s opera, punished those who

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Here our season is drawing to an end, and Oct. 1 we transcend to I Tatti. There we mean to stay till Oct. 15, and then, weather permitting, Roma for a few weeks. May you and Jane join us there. Johnnie Walker was here last month for ten days, and one afternoon he snatched from the embrace of the Continis, Rush Kress to have tea with us.256 Never had I met a sweeter or more impenetrably dear innocent sachem.257 Of him was it prophesised that anybody could bamboozle but nobody debamboozle him.258 It has been relatively quiet here and I have been able to go on with Lorenzo Lotto. Another month equally quiet and I could finish it. Distressingly little to change Please write at once Affectionately B.B.

[Telegram received/stamped North London 18 SEP. 52] from berenson at vallombrosa to kenneth clark upper terrace house london nw3 hope report of janes being threatened with another operation not true please wire news = b b nicky [Copy of telegram sent 18th Sept. 10.30 a.m.] to: berenson casa al dono vallombrosa (prov. di firenze) jane had emergency operation last week getting on very well indeed writing love from both

would not swear allegiance to Rome. Set in Rome some centuries before the birth of Christ, the story concerns the Romans and the Latins, who, once allies, were in conflict because the Roman Senate refused to allow a Latin to share in the city’s government. 256 In 1927, the dealer Count Alessandro Contini-Bonacossi (1878–1955) met Samuel Kress in Rome and began to sell him works of art. He continued to do so during Kress’s annual trips to Italy which lasted until 1941. After 1946, when Kress was incapacitated by illness, his younger brother Rush (1877–1963) took over the leadership of the Foundation. He expanded the collection from its mainly Italian focus to include masterpieces of Northern European and French art and more than 1000 Renaissance bronzes. 257 A sachem was an Indian chief from Massachusetts. The title ‘sachem’ was adopted for the leaders of Jewish communities in Colonial America. 258 It was reported that at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 Lloyd George remarked of President Wilson that ‘it was harder to de-bamboozle [him] than it had been to bamboozle him.’ Berenson often quoted the remark.

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Upper Terrace House Hampstead, N.W.3 Hampstead 1357 20 Sept 52

My dear BB, You will by now have heard from Jane herself about her disaster. It was a terrible blow, just as she seemed to be getting fit again, and was about to have a holiday, but she has accepted it with great patience – almost she had anticipated it. It seemed to confirm her tragic and fatalistic view of life, and since the operation she has been more serene than I have known her for years. Actually, the operation was well done, and she has made a remarkable recovery. All being well, I think she will get to Rome, though not of course to Greece. We propose arriving on Oct. 17th, and have written for rooms in the Hotel Eden, where the Hamiltons259 tell us that you and Nicky will be staying. It is a joy to think that we shall see something of you then. I shall have to be working hard and systematically, as this disaster has meant little time for work in the last month, and I am now terribly behind with my book. Besides which, new ideas come up in the writing, and need time to be examined. So I am in a bad way, but my grievance is small indeed compared to that of Jane. It really seems as if she had only to raise her head for fate to give it a fresh knock. I greatly enjoyed your description of Mr Rush Kress. Johnnie told me that he would introduce you, and hoped that you might be won by his transparent good will. But Lord, what patience it requires to talk to those old Sachems. In that respect I fear I have been spoilt and could never qualify as a museum director in the u.s. Forgive a short letter, but you may imagine how many I have to do. Much love to Nicky, Yours ever Kenneth

259 Jamie Hamilton

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[on Upper Terrace House paper] London Clinic, Devonshire Place, w.1. Thursday Sept 18 52

Dearest BB, I am so sorry not to have written since you sent me your enchanting and wonderful book. I took ages reading it as I enjoyed it so much, then I was rather busy for a few weeks and hadn’t time to write a proper letter then I suddenly had an operation. I now feel very well and very surprised and apologetic at having worried everyone all over again. I didn’t want K to worry you and he has been very distracted anyway poor man – as I meant to write as soon as I was convalescent which I am now! The operation was for acute intestinal obstruction due to adhesions after the last operation. A slight strain gardening brought it on but I would have had it soon anyway and the surgeon said better here than Delphi. He says there are 2 very good abdominal surgeons in Athens but I mightn’t have got down in time! It is disagreeable before the operation – before one is allowed morphine – but perfectly tolerable afterward (I was operated on at 3.30 am after a journey in a white ambulance like a French film) and now I am luxuriating in having time to read. I only wish I had another new book of yours dear BB. I can’t tell you how much I admire your reflexions all through the bombardment. It made me realise again as I have so often done in the past years what a waste it was for me to meet you first as a young and stupid bride! It was so long before I could understand and appreciate what you said and tho’ I mightn’t always understand now I would always appreciate it now we meet so seldom alas – however I couldn’t have enjoyed the book more and it was dear of you to send it to me. I hope to see you and Nicky in Rome – if the doctors allow me to go we shall stay in a hotel and not at the Embassy as one is freer if also convalescing. K will go to Naples and Greece from there and I will stay put. Family all well and we are sorry Angelica Rasponi260 couldn’t come. Colette is in Scotland staying at Cawdor with the Thane and dancing.261 Colin is flying jets

260 The family Rasponi dalle Teste owned the Villa Font’Allerta which was close by I Tatti. Angelica (b. 1930) and Anna (b. 1934) were of similar age to the Clark children and became friendly and swapped visits. Anna Rasponi was a friend of Colette. 261 Cawdor Castle, east of Inverness, was built round a 15th-century tower house. Originally belonging to the Clan Calder, it passed to the Campbells in the 16th century and became home to the Earls Cawdor. In Shakespeare’s tragedy, Macbeth is made ‘Thane of Cawdor’ but this is dramatic licence, since the castle was built after the life of Macbeth.The earl is always known as the Thane of Cawdor.

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and is a pilot officer. Alan reading for Bar Finals. He has a young lady in the ballet he is fond of, who must now be getting hopeful as each evening Alan collects enormous bunches of roses, etc from here and takes them to her! My room looks like a cross between a decayed flower shop and a new grave – Vivian [sic] came to see me yesterday and we talked of you with much love. Best love to you and darling Nicky and I trust this is the last time I will bother my friends with bulletins! Ever affect. Jane

Casa al Dono Vallombrosa (Prov. di Firenze) Sept. 23. 52

Dearest Jane. It did my heart good to read in your letter of the 18th that you were enjoying the relief and the leisure of a comfortable convalescence. Nicky and I are greatly relieved. Of course I am glad that you enjoy ‘Rumour & Reflecton’. I fear it is the last chance of pleasing you with a book. I doubt whether I shall bring out a readable book once more. I am busy preparing un-readable books, that is to say art books. Thanks for news of yr. offspring.With such blood in their veins, such bringing up, and such advantages, they must turn out satisfactory. And when do you mean to be in Rome, and where? It is time you made your ‘reservations’, for Rome now is a whole-year town. We expect to get there Oct. 15 and to stay four or five weeks. I shall not attempt to see people. What strength I retain I must dedicate to having I fear my last look around. It is crisp and radiant here again. Bad weather decided us to go down to I Tatti the 29th, and too complicated to change. Love to you all from Nick and Willy262 B.B.

262 William Mostyn-Owen

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Oct. 8. 52 Eden Hotel–Roma 49 Via Ludovisi

Dearest Jane Day before yesterday we were going out and whom should we see coming out of a cab but Kenneth and Colin. ‘Where is Jane’ was my exclamation and I learned you were not feeling well enough. I was distressed and even more disappointed. I had been looking forward to seeing you here more quietly, more intimately than even at I Tatti! Thank you for the delicious shawl, so soft, so caressing so warm. K and Colin dined with us yesterday in our sitting room. Colin with the impression of knowing how life already feels and what he means to get out of it. K and I will be sight-seeing together. Hoping for better and better news of your health Lovingly B.B.

Upper Terrace House Hampstead, N.W.3 Hampstead 1357 5 Nov ’52

My dear BB, I promised to send you the little catalogue of my Charles Keene exhibition263 – here it is. It may amaze you for seven minutes. On my return I found, as I had feared, that Jane had been in very poor shape during my absence. I think she was cheered up to have me back, and has been a little better for the last two days, but still far from well. I don’t know what to do to pull her up – it is such a bad time of the year for convalescence. It was such a treat to be in Rome with you, and visit some of the collections together. I should have liked a few more dinners, if British Schools and British Councils hadn’t interfered. But there it is – I remember Mary saying that after 40 one was either a failure or an invitation, and I am afraid I am an invitation.You

263 The exhibition was a part of the Aldeburgh Festival of 1952: The Drawings of Charles Keene (1823– 1891) at Sand Hill, arranged by Sir Kenneth Clark, K.C.B., for the Arts Council of Great Britain. Keene was a celebrated illustrator in black and white for publications such as Punch.

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have no idea how public life closes round me the moment I return. If I can free myself for two hours work I am lucky. Since beginning this letter, we have been lunching with Somerset Maugham who has offered to lend us his house in the South of France, so we shall probably go out there for a few weeks at the end of November, which will give Jane a good rest. It would be a load off my mind. After that we shall be better able to face the exertions of Christmas. I wonder if you in the end went on to Naples – how I wish I could be there with you, and hear your comments on those marvellous antique paintings. With much love from Jane, Ever your affectionate Kenneth

Dec. 22. 52 I Tatti Settignano Florence

Dearest Jane Thank you so much for the Browning book.264 I am glad to receive it, as I have been hearing its praises sung. Let me hope that you are your best self again, and ready to enjoy your manifold occupations and to cope with as many pre-occupations. Nicky is slowly recovering from a violent flu. I am not allowed to see her for fear of infection. I have only recovered from one. I suppose we spent too much of our physical capital in Rome, and are now paying for it. Morra is back from u.s.a. and very interesting.265 Say what you will against the present moment but boring it is not. With love to you all and every good wish for 1953. B.B.

264 Several books on Robert Browning were published in 1952. 265 Umberto Morra was in America for 2 months at the end of 1952 on behalf of Italian–United Nations Association. After the fall of Mussolini, Morra had hoped to establish an active role in Italian politics and government. In 1943–5 he worked with the Badoglio government but the constantly shifting loyalites and jealousies of post-war Italian politics were not to his taste. Instead he devoted his energies to working with international organisations, including the Italian Atlantic Committee and the Italian Society for International Organization, and made numerous trips abroad. From 1955 to 1959 he was the director of the Italian Cultural Institute in London. In recognition of his outstanding contribution to Anglo-Italian relations, he was awarded an honorary cbe in October 1960.

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Upper Terrace House Hampstead N.W.3 Sunday 28th [December 1952]

Dearest BB, It was a lovely surprise to get your angelic letter and I am so glad you had not already been sent the Browning book. Poor Nicky and poor you but I am very relieved she is now getting better and that you haven’t caught it. K has written his own sympathy so I am sending her only a note. It is so depressing for so long after one is up. I am now entirely well again which is the most wonderful feeling. Last Christmas I was in the nursing home the one before I felt very ill and this time it was such a surprise and relief to feel well whatever happened and things always do happen! Christmas Eve morning I was waked by the telephone at 4.30 am – it was Colin bewildered who had been with 2 other pilot officers in a police station since 11 pm, being accused of stealing a woman’s bag! He didn’t get back till 6 am and then had to go back for an identification parade at 9.30 am. To cut a long story short it was collusion between the police and 2 prostitutes but mercifully I had met the head of Scotland Yard when we were both staying at W.S. Maughams. When I got on to him on the telephone, he was v. efficient, sent down his Chief Inspector and the boys were released at once and a good deal of cleaning up is now going to take place in that station! But it was a shock and v. bad luck on poor Colin who left today for Yorkshire to learn to fly heavy bombers and later pilot troops to Singapore. He gets out on May 28th which will be a red letter day. Otherwise we had a good Christmas and all is well. Poor Maurice Bowra266 couldn’t join in as usual but is now back from Greece today but still very shaky after the bad accident. Alan has gone to Cape Wrath. Colette is here very well and pretty and young men drift in and out. K working away on the book and a peaceful time is – I hope – ahead. Best love darling BB and a Happy New Year Jane

266 Maurice Bowra. He had had a serious road accident in Greece.

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Upper Terrace House Hampstead, N.W.3 Hampstead 1357 20–1–53

My dear BB, The Arch of Constantine267 arrived a few weeks ago, but I have only yesterday found time to read it. I have enjoyed it immensely. At every page I felt like uttering prolonged cheers – in fact as I was alone in a railway carriage I did shout out loudly ‘Bravo’ every few minutes. It is really splendid that you should have come out with so many necessary truths, backed by such an overwhelming weight of knowledge and experience. It is a distillation of wisdom of very great value to us all, and an incomparable encouragement to those of us who are trying to do the same sort of thing. Of course the Arch does remain extremely mysterious. The idea that they wanted to do such miserable travesties is obviously disposed of – but it is very strange that there was no one left in Rome who could do better. After all, even an ordinary Italian mason could make a better shot at copying the Diocletion reliefs than those poor wretches did. And those splendid heads! It is an unanswerable riddle – but at least the answer should not involve us in a complete set of false values. Dear BB, please write some more on this theme. It is what we need most from you; and when I say ‘we’, I don’t speak only for middle aged people like myself, but for young people like my children, who often speak of you as a prophet and source of wisdom. I am in the last stages of my lectures for Washington. The final book will require another six months work. I have no idea what it is like. If it turns out to be any good I should dearly love to dedicate it to you, for nothing else I am likely to write will contain more that I have learnt from you. But I musn’t land you with a failure – so let me see how it goes in Washington, and if it is well received (by me!) I will ask your permission to dedicate it. I think some parts are new and illuminating, but there is, inevitably, rather a lot about Michaelangelo, and those damned Germans have made it absolutely impossible to write about him except in the style of a Seventh day Adventist. We are all well: Jane a good deal stronger, although frantically occupied – Washington will be a rest for her – and perhaps for me. I wonder if you have seen

267 Bernard Berenson, L’Arco di Constantino o della decadenza della forma, trans. Luisa Vertova, Florence: Electa, 1952; The Arch of Constantine, London: Chapman and Hall, 1954.

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the reviews of Irene’s Portia.268 She is really splendid. Strange how such a goosey character can become an extraordinary human being when given a good script. You must have had a wretched winter with dear Nicky so ill: but Derek, who is most kind in writing, says she is now better. Love from us both Ever your affectionate Kenneth

Jan. 25. 53 I Tatti Settignano Florence

Dear Kenneth. Thank you for yrs. of the 20. A few days before I had a good letter fr. Irene enclosing cuttings about her Portia. I answered urging her to come for a visit to I Tatti. Do encourage her to do so. I should feel honoured to have yr. book on the Nude dedicated to me. No subject is nearer to my thoughts. More & more, and ever deeper is my conviction that it is to the visual arts what blood is to our bodies. I am confident that you will pull it off – altho’ of course it will take years before you have forgotten what you wanted to say and can judge the book for what it says. I am very happy that you liked the essay on the Arch of Constantine. As you may have read in the introduction, it was to be the first chapter of a big book on Decline & Recovery. I was going to be as free from meta-fissics and icononsences as in this first chapter, and meant to carry it down to and comprising Giotto, and the Florentines till Mich. [illeg] and the disabilite viscine intervened. Since then I have been unable to continue. However I have another chapter or two ready and may publish them. I am so glad that Jane is herself again. Give her my love and loving admonition to walk in the fear of the Lord of good Health. Nicky is nearly well again, and alarmingly eager to be up and doing. Freya has been with us for a wk and leaving tomorrow. The previous weekend we had Lady Mallett mother and son!269 Affectionately B.B.

268 Irene Worth. Her Portia received a rave review in The Times, 7 January 1953. 269 See Victor Mallet.

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Wardman Park Hotel Washington 8, D.C. 3 April 53

My dear BB, If you can face a page or two of my miserable script it may amuse you to have some impressions of Washington.270 We have enjoyed the us. much more than in the last few visits – perhaps because we have been here, among friends, entertained, but not rushed, no cocktail parties and few big parties of any kind. No doubt one can live very pleasantly in Washington, now that everyone has a small house in Georgetown: at least one can in March and April. The town has begun to grow to its plan and status, and is profiting by all its green spaces. At present all the people of the town can think of is the cherry blossom. Everyone – taxi men, waiters, porters – begin by asking if one has seen the cherry blossom, and the streets are blocked by miles of cars filled with people on the way to enjoy this aesthetic experience. Aparently this mania antedates the conquest of Japan – one would like to have put it forward as one more example of the conquered culturally victorious. I must say it is very spectacular, stretching all round a sort of lagoon of the Potomac. The Gallery is unchanged – somehow not quite satisfactory; the spaced out hanging does for the Casa Alba Madonna and the Hermitage Botticelli,271 but it makes lesser works look ridiculous. And then the pictures are so evenly glossy – they look in worse condition than they are. Pichetto was a complete fraud and swindler, and all his retouches will have to be taken off and done again. Poor Johnnie is overworked and has no competent help – only old Mrs Shapley.272 There are dozens of typists in every room gossiping or filing index-cards, and dozens of accountants, but no scientific staff at all.Yet there is a good Library, and it should be possible to produce a decent catalogue. One of the great pleasures of Washington is the Duncan Phillips’ – sweet people and real lovers of painting. But they have to be seen among their pictures – they would be deadly shy at i Tatti. He would start lecturing and she would dither like a Virginia Woolf heroine.Their collection is one of the most enjoyable I know, every picture chosen with love. We also see a lot of the Lipmanns [sic] and the old Blisses – I say old, as I am thinking of dear Robert, who falls asleep in

270 Clark had been invited to give the six, newly established, Mellon Lectures, at the National Gallery in Washington, in March–April 1953. He chose as his subject ‘The Nude’; see Introduction. 271 Raphael, The Alba Madonna, c. 1510, and Sandro Botticelli, The Adoration of the Magi, c. 1478/82, National Gallery of Art, Washington, d.c., Andrew W. Mellon Collection. Both were acquired in 1937 and are among the major works in the Gallery. 272 Fern Shapley

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the middle of a sentence, but Mildred is as active as ever – just a shade goosier.273 David Finley is cumbered about with much saving. He has the hunted look of the high bureaucrat, and seems to move from one committee to another – rather as I do at home. It seems that amongst his other worries was the subject of my lectures, and he had been anxious to persuade me to change the title from the Nude to the Human Figure: but hadn’t quite screwed himself up to do so. Instead he had announced the series without a title – it isn’t even printed on the tickets. However he now seems reconciled and reassured by the approval of his mother-in-law, Mrs Eustace [sic], who is his model of the proprieties. The lectures are going quite well so far, and although I groan over the amount that has to be cut out of each chapter to fit into the hour, I think I have learnt quite a lot which will be useful in the final stage of the book. One really only sees a subject in perspective by dragging it into the open in this way. We have taken only one expedition, to Toledo274 and Cleveland. The first is a shapeless provincial town – a real Babbitt Warren and I had the fascinating experience of lunching with a group of prominent Babbitts in their club.275 Sinclair-Lewis did not – could not – really do justice to the banality, complacency and false heartiness displayed: but it was only a social convention. Each in his business was no doubt as agile as a panther and as tenacious as a boa-constrictor, and small signs of their attributes was perceptible through the banter. Cleveland is very large and rich, and the gallery is really remarkable276 – not the pictures, which are not much above the average, but the amazing early medieval Kunstgewerbe.277 Milliken has a genuine feeling for Imperial Art of any epoch, and I have never seen such Ottonian things outside Germany.The Chinese section is also very fine, and altogether we felt that the pains we suffered in a disagreeable journey were not wasted.

273 Robert and Mildred Bliss 274 During this stay, Clark was invited to lecture at the Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio (26 March 1953), and for the New Republic in Washington (16 March 1953). The Toledo Museum of Art was founded by the glassmaker Edward Drummond Libbey in 1901 and is best known for its major collections of glass from the 19th and 20th centuries. In 1912 it moved to a Greek Revival building, which was developed further in the 1920s and 30s. 275 George F. Babbitt is the central character in Sinclair Lewis’s eponymous novel of the early 1920s. He is a middle-aged, middle-income male from Middle America, the proprietor of a middle-size real estate business, with a moderately happy marriage and three average children. The driving forces in his life are success in business, money, gadgets and status; ‘his motor car was poetry and tragedy, love and heroism. The office was his pirate ship but the car was his perilous excursion ashore.’ Professor C. E. M. Joad, who was a panellist with Clark on the radio and later television programme The Brains Trust, in 1927 published Babbitt Warren, which criticised the usa. 276 The Cleveland Museum of Art was founded in 1913. Its international reputation was established under William Milliken, its second director, 1933–58. In the 1940s and 50s a series of large bequests enabled numerous and exceptional purchases to be made. 277 German for ‘decorative arts’.

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Our spirits are much damped by the news of Vivien. I expect you will have heard as much, or more, than we have, but a letter from Larry this morning makes it clear that she is really very ill. She had suffered from melancholia last summer, but of course nobody could conceive that it would end in positive derangement. But that, I fear, is what has happened; however please do not repeat this, (unless of course it is generally known). Of course I don’t know what the chances of recovery are: I suppose Larry expects that she will become normal again, but even so the future will be full of complications. We hear from Colette that she had a lovely visit to i Tatti and that you were kind and inspiring. I am so glad you saw her again and were so good as to talk with her. It will always be a joy to me to think that you got to know her. She was enraptured with Florence – how I wish I could have been there to go sightseeing with her. Jane is far stronger and sends her love to you and Nicky – as I do. Ever your affectionate Kenneth

Hotel Excelsior Napoli May 18. 53

Dearest Jane. Vague rumours reach us that you are back, and let me hope in the best of health. From Washington, Cleveland and waystations glowingly enthusiastic accounts of K’s lectures. Begin reading the Browning you sent without my realizing it was yr. gift. Best thanks! We take train in an hour or so for Messina, and expect to remain in Sicily til June 20th or so. ‘Letters will be forwarded’ from Settignano. ‘Lotto’ is finished and ‘going to Press’.278 When we return I mean to tackle two problems. Giotto and Giorgione, each separately of course. I mean to but shall I? Love to you both B.B.

278 Bernard Berenson, Lotto, trans. Luisa Vertova, 3rd rev. edn, Milan: Electa, 1955, and in English as Lorenzo Lotto, London: Phaidon 1956.

378

Nine Television, Journalism, Altamura, Conoscing 1953–1958

In 1954 Clark accepted an appointment which immersed him in a business world which held real fascination and which would eventually involve him in a creative activity for which he developed a flair: television. The Conservative government, which came into office in the uk in 1951, had determined to create a commercial television channel as an alternative to the British Broadcasting Corporation (bbc). Until then, broadcasting in Britain had been a monopoly operated by the bbc and financed by an annual television licence fee. Commercial television was a controversial subject, since the only other example, in the United States, was widely considered to be unsatisfactory, with too many of its programmes pandering to vulgar tastes and of poor quality. The Television Act of 1954 created a new Independent Television Authority (ita), which would be responsible for constructing and operating the transmission stations to be used by the network and awarding franchises for the making of programmes to commercial broadcasters. The intention of the act was to set up a system which was deliberately different from the American model so that, for example, commercial advertising had to be clearly distinguishable from programmes and be limited to not more than six minutes per hour. National news was to be provided by a separate body to be called Independent Television News (itn). Having set out the broad principles, the Act left the details of the operation to be worked out by the ita. The Television Act received Royal Assent on 30 July 1954 and, four days later, on 4 August 1954 the members of the ita were announced. The appointment of Clark as Chairman was a surprise to many but the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, was an old friend, as was Lord de la Warr, the Postmaster General, who was the cabinet minister with responsibility for telecommunications, and thus empowered to appoint the Authority. (It was Lord de la Warr who had brought Clark onto the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts [cema], the forerunner of the Arts Council, in 1939.) Clark was also a member of the General Advisory Council of the bbc (he resigned from it on 2 September 1955).

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Thus, in venturing into what was then unknown and vexed territory with many opponents, the government was deciding to put their trust in someone who was, to them, a known quantity and whose views on public responsibility for the arts were avowedly in favour of quality and high art rather than popularity. There were seven other members of the Authority, three of them being charged with representing the regional interests of Scotland,Wales and Northern Ireland. The initial deputy chairman was Sir Charles Colston, formerly the chairman and managing director of the appliance manufacturer Hoover; there was a trades unionist: the former General Secretary of the Transport Salaried Staffs’ Association; two women: Dilys Powell, the film critic and a former member, like Clark, of the bbc radio programme The Brains Trust, and Margaret Popham, the recently retired principal of Cheltenham Ladies College, the headmistress when Clark’s daughter Colette had been a pupil there. The Authority initially had no premises, no broadcasting equipment, no staff and no chief executive, but it was expected to broadcast the first programmes in just over a year. The responsibility falling on the chairman was considerable. Salaries for the members of the Authority were generous and commensurate with those of the Director-General and governors of the bbc. Clark’s salary was publicly announced as £3000 per annum; other members were paid between £1000 and £500 per annum. At a press conference on 5 August, Clark said that he envisaged a staff of about forty or fifty and that they would invite applications from those willing to produce high-quality programmes and that they would probably favour a system of allotting time on each regional broadcasting station to several contractors. He also added that all but two of the members of the Authority did have a television set. In September he announced that the Director-General would be Sir Robert Fraser, who was at the time the Director-General of the Central Office of Information. Fraser was Clark’s personal choice. They had worked together at the Ministry of Information in the war and had become friends. Fraser, who was Australian-born, had been a leader writer for the Daily Herald and had stood as a Labour Party candidate for Parliament in 1935. Operating at first from Post Office headquarters, they moved into temporary accommodation in Park Lane in October 1954 and in June 1955 acquired freehold premises at Princes Gate next to Hyde Park. The first programmes were broadcast on 23 September 1955, the centrepiece being a live broadcast from the Guildhall in London where five hundred guests had assembled at a dinner with speeches from the Lord Mayor, the Postmaster General (by then Dr Charles Hill) and Clark. In his speech, Clark commented that ita was an experiment in the art of government – an attempt to solve one of the chief problems of democracy: of how to combine a maximum of freedom with an ultimate direction. ‘There are many who have felt that competitive

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commercial television would open the floodgates to a rapid decline in the standards of national entertainment, but as the main duties of the Authority will be the preservation of good taste and impartiality in news and political matters, I think you will agree in due course that there is no truth in this assertion’ (The Times, 23 September 1955). Clark’s appointment was for three years and in the judgement of his peers and of historians it seems that he did an excellent job. Nonetheless, his term was not without its problems. In January 1956, the experienced and charismatic Aidan Crawley, who had been appointed as editor-in-chief of itn, resigned because he considered that the programme makers would not provide itn with the support and finance that a serious news service required. At the end of his term of office, Clark was not reappointed. However, by 1957 the political climate had changed considerably. Churchill was no longer Prime Minister. He had been succeeded in April 1955 by Anthony Eden, who resigned less than two years later in the wake of the 1956 Suez Crisis, Harold Macmillan becoming Prime Minister in January 1957. Eden replaced Lord de la Warr with Dr Charles Hill. Hill was a different animal, a man from a relatively humble background who had won a scholarship to Cambridge, become a medical practitioner and had made a name for himself during the war as the ‘Radio Doctor’. He then entered politics in 1945 as an independent member of the House of Commons for the University of Cambridge. Hill was an unashamed populist and neither afraid of expressing his own opinions nor of challenging the establishment. Clark clashed with him in October 1956 when he publicly criticised Hill’s department for its lack of financial support: the 1954 Act had allowed the government to provide funds for ‘balancing’ material in itv programmes, that is, to provide money for the making of quality or minority programmes which the television companies themselves would not support. Clark thought that ‘solemn and precise assurances’ had been given by members of the government to enable this to be done and he publicly professed his shock when Hill declined to make the grants available. In his Annual Report, Clark wrote: ‘This meant that we could not discharge one of our most important responsibilities and we feared that there had been a radical change in Government policy’ (quoted in The Times, 2 October 1956). The official announcement of Clark’s departure from the ita said that he had not sought a further term because of his other responsibilities and commitments. In a speech in Glasgow, to mark the opening of a Scottish broadcasting station, on his last day as the chairman, Clark again referred to the democratic question: namely to what extent should those in authority should give people what they wanted. He said: ‘The escape clause used to be that one did not really know what they wanted, but this is no longer viable because the audience research figures for television are terribly convincing. These accurate figures are really a very dangerous weapon and, used irresponsibly, and with an eye to quick returns,

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research of this kind could deliver a serious blow to civilised values’ (The Times, 2 September 1957). His final plea was that television should not be allowed to drift on the tide of popular preference: instead it should look for what was best in popular preference and build on that. Clark’s departure from the ita in 1957 brought to an end his active career as a public servant. Although he was the chairman of the Arts Council from 1953 to 1960, he was essentially a figurehead. The publication of The Nude in 1956 was his last major publication as a writer and critic on the arts who aspired to serious scholarly recognition. However, new opportunities were beckoning and it was to be as a presenter of television programmes that he would come to make a unique and lasting mark. An interest in reaching out to the public and in promoting publications and exhibitions about art which would gain popular attraction had always been one of Clark’s priorities. His directorship of the National Gallery had first given him a platform for this, as had his work in wartime. His skills as writer and lecturer, able to reach out to new audiences, did not go unnoticed. The Sunday Times, for example, commissioned two prominent series of articles about individual paintings and he undertook several lecture tours in the usa and was asked by the British Council to lecture in India. The medium of television intrigued Clark. He made his first television programme in 1937 and went on to make in excess of a hundred. He had an innate understanding of the intimacy of the medium, as well as of its impressionistic character. His discernment did not go unnoticed by those in the industry. Less than three months after he left the ita, it was announced that Val Parnell, who was the managing director of Associated TeleVision (atv), the company to which the ita had allocated the London weekend franchise, had asked Clark to create, prepare and participate in a special series of programmes on the arts and to act as adviser in the public service and cultural fields for atv. The first programmes were not a great success – unscripted and unstructured, and broadcast late in the evening just before closing time, they explored such general topics as ‘Is art necessary?’ and ‘What is beauty?’. However, Clark was quick to learn and in 1959 he created a tightly scripted and well received series for atv, Five Revolutionary Painters (Goya, Breughel, Caravaggio, van Gogh and Rembrandt). This experience paved the way for Civilisation in 1969. There were changes on the domestic front.The Clarks had never had a house in which they felt they truly belonged or settled, other than Old Palace Place in Richmond, which they had intended to be a permanent home but where they had lived for little more than a year in 1930–31. Clark found Upper Terrace House too small and inconvenient. The library had space for only a small proportion of his books. However, in the early 1950s, by serendipity, they discovered Saltwood Castle in Kent, close to where they had rented a weekend house from Philip

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Sassoon in the pre-war years. In his autobiography, Clark called the house a ‘dream’ with which he became ‘besotted’, a ‘love affair’. Indeed, it became the place where both he and Jane ended their days. Saltwood is everything that the imagination supposes a castle should be: high stone walls, a keep, a gatehouse, an inner bailey, a great hall, a moat, a ghost. Private and secluded, it has fine gardens and a splendid view down the valley to Hythe. Dating from before the Norman Conquest, the structure is essentially of the twelfth century, and it is said to have been at Saltwood that, in December 1170, the four knights planned the murder of Thomas à Becket in Canterbury Cathedral less than twenty miles away. The Castle was rendered uninhabitable by an earthquake in 1580 but some of it was restored as a habitable residence in the nineteenth century. Rumour had it that the Nazi Reichmarschall Hermann Goering, having once holidayed on the Kent coast, identified Saltwood as a suitable residence after a successful invasion of Britain, and ordered the Luftwaffe not to bomb Hythe as a consequence. In June 1950, the elderly and reclusive Lady Conway of Allington advertised the property for sale with three hundred acres and all ‘mod cons’. However, in spite of re-advertising the next year at a ‘greatly reduced price’, the property failed to sell. The Clarks saw the advertisement and speculated that it could be their dream home but they did not go to see it. Then, by chance, in August 1953, when returning from holiday in Venice and being delayed in France by a rail strike, they learned from a friend that Lady Conway had died. Without a moment’s postponements they called at Saltwood and asked to buy the Castle and the estate. There were postponements and complications but eventually, by October 1953, it had become theirs and they moved in the next year. Lady Conway had been born in America and had first married into the Lawson family who were the proprietors of the Daily Telegraph newspaper. She liked castles and had bought Saltwood among others, carrying out restorations, including the re-roofing of the Great Hall. She then filled Saltwood with bricà-brac, especially tapestries and textiles, though often of a high quality. Her husband committed suicide and she became a virtual recluse. However, on a visit to another castle, Allington, near Maidstone, she met Lord Conway, recently widowed and in his late seventies, and they married. A few years later he died and she remained at Saltwood Castle with a female companion. She died on 14 March 1953. As well as purchasing the Castle and the estate, the Clarks also purchased the entire contents. Clark thrived on the move to Saltwood. He enjoyed sorting out Lady Conway’s ‘junk’; he had a beautiful and interesting medieval environment in which to display his own works of art; he turned the Great Hall into a library for all his books with a cosy room in which to work next door, and both were separate from the main house. He had a busy and interesting professional and creative life

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which kept him in London during weekdays so that Saltwood was the perfect retreat for weekends. It was everything that he wanted. For Jane the move was less easy. It meant giving up her London life and reverting to the dislocated lifestyle with frequent absences by Clark which had put their marriage under stress in the early years of the war. Although she busied herself with the gardens, she was not fulfilled and suffered frequent bouts of depression and ill-health. They still enjoyed travelling together but there were many times when Jane was not able to go and trips were either cancelled or Clark went on his own. Alan was now in his late twenties and leading a rackety unsettled existence, aspiring with some difficulty to become a popular novelist and a military historian. Then he sprang a surprise. In mid-August 1956 he met Jane Beuttler, a schoolgirl aged fourteen, half his age. He courted her persistently over the next two years, proposed more than once, and was finally accepted. The engagement was announced on 3 July 1958 and the wedding ceremony and reception in London were held less than a month later. The twins, Colin and Colette, in their early twenties, were beginning to find their own feet and lead their own lives. Behind Clark’s purchase of Saltwood and Berenson’s creation of I Tatti lurked the dream of Altamura. Altamura was a fantasy aesthetic haven which first made its appearance in a short-lived literary magazine, The Golden Urn, which had been initiated by Logan Pearsall Smith in late 1896. Privately printed in Fiesole, it ran for three issues between May 1897 and 1898. Exquisite and pretentious, the magazine consisted of short literary and aesthetic articles. One of the articles, on which Berenson collaborated, was called ‘Altamura’ and was a fantasy which gently parodied the refined aesthetic life and lofty conversations of the social and intellectual circles which the Berensons inhabited and of which they were leaders. The fantasy setting was a monastery, dedicated to a fictitious St Dion of Altamura, somewhere in a remote mountainous region of Italy. The narrative describes the liturgy of their religion of culture and includes among the saints who are worshipped month by month Keats, Mozart, Giorgione and Marlowe. The inhabitants spend their days in the worship of poetry, music and philosophy and they celebrate the great writers of antiquity in their festivals. They also identified certain ‘sacred’ pictures which they treated as objects of faith because of their beauty, quality and certainty of authorship. Freed from that narrow, feverish grind of passions and activities which is called ‘Life’, the Dionites derived a richer more wonderful sense of self conscious existence from the contemplation of Nature . . . the study of their sacred books, and the devout worship of those great forces and persons and works of art in which the spirit of Being has been most splendidly manifested . . .What chiefly connects the followers of St Dion with the life about them is the belief that, by real and devout enjoyment, the burden of the world’s joylessness can be, in some mystical way, abated. (Samuels MC p. 273).

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On 24 June 1953, Berenson celebrated his eighty-eighth birthday. There were to be only five more such anniversaries. Never blessed with a robust constitution, his last years were marked by increasing infirmity, physical aches and pains, tiredness and the fear of losing his sight. Yet, even to his last remaining months, his mind remained alert and his hunger for life and interest in people and works of art continued undiminished. He was stubbornly determined to cling on as long as he could. The writer Eric Linklater had recorded a conversation with Berenson during a brief visit that he made to I Tatti in the summer of 1944. Linklater, in his midforties, was well established as a novelist and was serving with the British Army in Italy. After showing him his collection, Berenson took him into the garden where, under the olive trees, he said: I have so little time! . . . There are mornings when I wake up and think that I must go into Florence, and stand at the corner of a street like a beggar, and take off my hat . . . and say to the people who pass me by, ‘Will you give me five minutes please? You are quite young, you have so many minutes, and really you do nothing with them. Give me five! – for that is what a man of my age truly wants: a few more minutes . . . (Samuels ML p. 497) I Tatti continued to be filled with visitors and was a constant hive of activity. Some visitors, such as the Clarks, were old friends whom he welcomed warmly but many were people whom he hardly knew – callers, rather than true visitors (including Linklater), who made their way up the hill to I Tatti more out of curiosity and in order to be able to say that they had met so great a celebrity. If it was a day when he was alert and full of good humour, he would engage with these callers, but there were days when, with increasing infirmity and deafness, he might sit uncharacteristically silent and let the conversation flow around and over him. One regular visitor was Sylvia Sprigge. She and her husband Cecil were correspondents for English newspapers in Rome. She conceived the idea of writing a book about Berenson and, having found a publisher, was determined to see her project through, even though Berenson much regretted his halfhearted acquiescence in the proposal. He mistakenly thought that her intention was to write nothing more than a personal memoir, but it soon became apparent that she wanted to write a full biography: he was alarmed when she started to dig around for information and to ask family members for interviews. Her book, which two publishers backed out of, was eventually published in 1960, a year after Berenson died. Clark had also had it in mind to do a book on Berenson, which would have been much more to Berenson’s taste: it might never have got off the ground and, once he was aware of Sylvia Sprigge’s proposed book, Clark abandoned his idea altogether.

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Berenson continued to read voraciously and to write incessantly. His mornings were devoted to correspondence: sitting in bed he wrote copious letters in increasingly illegible long-hand, hungry to maintain contact with the people who had been part of the tapestry of his life. Starting in 1952, he contributed regular articles to the Corriere della Sera. He was also persuaded to undertake new editions of his books, including the Lists, although the work involved in the revisions and bringing them up to date was burdensome. Nicky Mariano worried that he took on too much, but the habit of such work was not one that he could relinquish. Such a busy and active life would not have been possible without a dedicated group of supporters. His principal support was, of course, the ever faithful Nicky, who was herself now in her late sixties. Berenson was utterly dependent on her and could not bear that she not be with him for even half a day. Nevertheless, her strength, health and energy – although formidable – were not infinite, and when they faltered Berenson was left bereft. On such occasions Luisa Vertova would step into the breach as hostess. With Nicky, Berenson continued to travel, but in these final years it was mostly to places that he knew, such as Venice and Rome. He continued to make the effort to see important exhibitions of art and artists whom he admired and understood, such as Tiepolo, and those with whom he struggled, such as Caravaggio and Picasso. His last trip abroad was to Libya in 1955 to see such sights as the extensive and impressive Roman ruins at Leptis Magna.They stayed with Anna Maria Cicogna, who owned an eighteenth-century Turkish villa on an oasis on the outskirts of Tripoli. His last trip in Italy further than Florence was to Naples, Rome and Assisi in June 1957. The work and travel took their toll, but Berenson’s love of ‘conoscing’ (his catchword for connoisseurship) was too deep-rooted to permit any compromise. Berenson discovered ‘conoscing’on his first visit to Italy in 1887 at the age of twenty-two. The word was his own (and Mary’s) and it describes the multifaceted activity of seeing, identifying, puzzling over, tracking down, discussing, making judgements on and above all enjoying works of art. For him it was best enjoyed not as a solitary pleasure but as an activity with others: with Mary in the early years of their marriage and partnership, with like-minded individuals such as Clark and John Walker, and with collectors and dealers who demonstrated the requisite commitment and adventurousness. Nothing pleased him more than the possibility of a new discovery, or of a new light shed on an old unsolved problem, and in conversation and correspondence he would constantly probe, query and suggest. His passion for ‘conoscing’ was one of the reasons for the establishment of I Tatti, its collections and the library, and one of the principal driving forces behind the travels, the publications, the friendships and the involvement with the commercial art world.

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The uncertainty over the future of I Tatti, which had long caused him much anxiety, was finally resolved in February 1953, when the Harvard Corporation formally agreed to accept the bequest which he intended for them on his death. Although his intentions had been publicly announced in the New York Times as early as 1931, he was well aware that Harvard had never been enthusiastic about the idea of a remote outpost in a country of uncertain politics and economics, and was concerned that his proposed endowment would barely cover the running costs, let alone fund any scholarships. Consequently, he deliberately did not place any specific obligations on Harvard. Nonetheless, he constantly worried about what would become of I Tatti and how Harvard would run it. Eventually, in 1956, he committed his wishes to a paper, ‘On the Future of I Tatti’, in which he spelled out a vision in which Clark was to have a role as a member of an advisory committee, although both knew that in reality such a vision would never come to pass (see Appendix 2). Berenson’s last five years were overshadowed by declining physical powers, although his mind remained alert until the last few months. For example, even when he became physically unable to write, he continued to contribute articles to the Corriere della Sera by dictating them to Nicky. The catalyst for the decline was an accident which he suffered in December 1954. Berenson and Nicky had driven by jeep to take a morning walk above I Tatti. Having got out of the car to walk, he asked Parry, the chauffeur, to drive on, and as he did so a door of the jeep swung open, knocking Berenson into a ravine with a drop of some twenty feet. From then on he suffered constant and severe pains in his spine and ribs. On Christmas Eve 1955, he nearly died from food poisoning. In the spring of 1957, shortly after returning from the trip to Naples, Rome and Assisi, he collapsed in agony while out walking. The diagnosis was osteoporosis of the spine. From then on he was virtually bedridden, still reading, but writing less and less. By mid-January 1958 he had given up replying to letters by hand, and in the summer he gave up writing his diary. He was also plagued by bronchitis and bladder ailments. For the last eighteen months of his life he was an invalid, attended night and day by Nicky and by the long-serving Emma Melani, who had joined the household in the 1940s. Gradually, all the things which he had pursued and enjoyed with energy and passion became fewer, until, finally, even conversation became no longer sustainable.

Chronology 1953 Spring

Clark’s Lectures on The Nude at National Gallery of Art, Washington Royal Fashion Show at Upper Terrace House, Hampstead

May/June

Berenson in Sicily and Naples

June

Berenson in Rome

August

Clarks in Venice

Sept/Oct

Berenson in Venice and Milan Clarks buy Saltwood Castle, Kent

November

Berenson in Rome Clarks in Rome

December

Clarks in Paris

1954 April

Clark at I Tatti with Colette

May/June

Berenson in Venice Clark in Venice

June

Clark in Holland

August

Clark appointed Chairman of the Independent Television Authority

October

Berenson in Bologna

Oct/Nov

Clarks in the usa

December

Berenson suffers severe accident Clarks stay with Somerset Maugham

1955 March

Clarks in usa

April

Clarks at I Tatti

May

Berenson in Syracuse, Tripoli, Naples, Malta 388

June

Berenson in Calabria and Rome

September

Berenson in Ravenna and Ferrara Clarks in Venice

1956 March

Clarks in usa

8 May

Berenson awarded Laurea Honoris Causa by the University of Florence

22 May

President Gronchi makes Berenson a Cavalier of the Great Cross of the Order of Merit

November

Clark in India

1957 February

Clarks at I Tatti

March

Berenson collapses and is diagnosed with osteoporosis of the spine

June

Clarks in Paris

August

Clark’s chairmanship of the ita finishes

June

Berenson in Naples, Rome, Assisi

September

Clarks at Abano Terme, near Padua Clark at I Tatti

November

King of Sweden visits I Tatti Clarks in Copenhagen

1958 April

Berenson suffers further ill health and requires constant care

July

Alan Clark marries Jane Beuttler

Sept/Oct

Clarks in Canada and Boston, Mass. 389

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Upper Terrace House Hampstead, N.W.3 Hampstead 1357 [Various dates in June 1953]

My dear BB, We are very sorry to hear from Louisa [sic]1 that owing to a number of circumstances you haven’t been so well – the chief circumstance being the delay in leaving i Tatti. I hope by now that you have escaped from pilgrims and hay seeds, and have re-established the rhythm of your daily life.We have had a disagreeable six weeks, made up of Traffic blocks and functions, and innumerable guests.2 What time I didn’t spend in dressing up and hanging about, was spent in my car, stationary behind a row of ’buses. No work, no sight of friends, no talk, no reading. However, things promise a bit better now, and I am at last back at work on a supplementary chapter in the nude book – a sort of appendix really, on the Gothic nude. I am sorry that I couldn’t work it in to the structure of the book, but it can’t be done. The interesting moment is when the nude of shame and humility suddenly turns into the Gothic nude of Cranach and the mannerists. I find that my new job (if it can be called that) by giving me a nice quiet room, is going to help me greatly in my work.3 Before that I was like a landless man in the middle ages, any body’s chattel. I am sending you in a separate envelope a drawing I discovered years ago (but have only just had photo’ed) in the Royal Academy at Edinburgh.4 It interested me that a drawing of the St. John in the S.ta Croce fresco5 shd’ be so like Pollaiuolo. Is it simply a Pollaiuolesque copy of the fresco – or is it a copy of a drawing for the fresco, which is so like Pollaiuolo in a number of ways? I am also sending some beautiful new photos of details of the Torrigiano tomb in Westminster (I mean Henry vii) which shows that he was a disciple of the della Robbias.6

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4 5 6

Luisa Vertova Nicolson The Coronation of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth ii took place on 2 June 1953, 15 months after her Accession on 6 February 1952. Preparations were extensive and an estimated 3 million people lined the streets of London. The event was televised by the bbc for an audience, unprecedented in television, of more than 20 million viewers. Clark became the chairman of the Arts Council in early summer 1953. ‘I sat at an empty desk in a large, dignified room . . . and once or twice a week had a short interview with the Director-General’; Clark OH p. 135. See Keith Andrews, National Gallery of Scotland: Catalogue of Italian Drawings, Cambridge University Press 1968, vol. i, p. 128, RSA 124, and vol. ii, fig. 851. Veneziano, St John and St Francis, 1440–60, fresco, Santa Croce, Florence. Pietro Torrigiano (1472–1528) was a Florentine sculptor who benefited from the patronage of Lorenzo de’ Medici in Florence. After employment as a mercenary soldier, he was invited to England to execute the magnificent monument for Henry vii and his Queen, with two effigies which are

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As usual, I began this letter weeks ago, and had to lay it aside during a week of official business. Some of it was interesting, including a dinner at no. 10 Downing St. to meet de Gasperi – like a more charming Devalera.7 In a way de Gasperi made the evening by asking Lord Alexander if he had ever been in Italy – an occasion where the safe opening was not a success.8 Our old warrior is much worn out. Eden’s illness has been a great blow and burden to him. After dinner he clung on to Jane saying ‘I’m tired. I just want to see an old friend’.9 Talking of friends, you will have heard that Vivien is marvellously better.10 When we first got back we wondered if she could ever recover, but she now seems quite calm. Whether she can stand the strain of theatrical life again is another question. You may have heard that Irene is in Canada, rather enjoying herself.11 I am told (by Rosamund) that you liked her novel – or at least admire it.12 So do I. It is relentless, and true. Apparently it is a novel for men who like women, as the other kind dislike it. I must get this off before it is put aside again, love to Nicky

Ever your affectionate Kenneth

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well modelled and lifelike. Still existing in the Lady Chapel of Westminster Abbey, the tomb appears to have been begun before Henry’s death in 1509 but was not finished until 1517. Éamon de Valera (1882–1975) was a leader of Ireland’s struggle for independence from Britain in the War of Independence and of the anti-Treaty opposition in the ensuing Irish Civil War (1922–3). In 1926 he founded the Fianna Fáil party and was head of government at various times from 1932 to 1959. His political creed evolved from militant republicanism to social and cultural conservatism. Sir Winston and Lady Churchill (Churchill had been knighted in the Coronation Honours List) hosted a dinner for the Italian Prime Minister, Alcide de Gasperi (the founder of the Christian Democratic Party), and Signora de Gasperi, who were on an official visit to London, in June 1953. Some 40 guests attended, including the Clarks and Lord Alexander of Tunis who had been Commander of the Allied 15th Army Group, which was responsible for the invasion of Sicily, the bombing of Monte Cassino and the entry into Rome in June 1944. Clark retells this story in his autobiography (Clark OH p. 128) where he attributes the question asked to Signora de Gasperi who was seated next to General Alexander (although he also says that she spoke no English). At the dinner, Churchill made a sparkling speech about Italy but immediately afterwards slumped in his chair with what was later diagnosed as a stroke. Anthony Eden, then the Foreign Secretary, was not present. He had undergone a routine operation in London in April 1953 which had gone wrong. To save his life, he had been taken to the us for emergency surgery and had remained to convalesce. Eden regained his health; Churchill’s declined but he stubbornly refused to relinquish the premiership. Eden succeeded Churchill as Prime Minister in April 1955. Vivien Leigh Irene Worth. In 1953 she joined the fledgling Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Ontario, for its inaugural season, performing in an enormous tent as principal leading lady with Alec Guinness in All’s Well That Ends Well and Richard III. Rosamond Lehmann, The Echoing Grove, London: Collins, 1953.

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I Tatti Settignano Florence July 4, 53

Dear Kenneth. Delighted with yrs. posted June 25th. Yr. observations about the Gothic nude are most interesting and I look forward to reading what you have to say about it. Thanks for the photo you so kindly sent of the drawing in the Edinburgh Royal Academy. It looks as if a Pollaiuolo-schule was copying the DomVeneziano of S. Croce. I too have heard fr. Irene in Ontario, very happy there. Got back seven days ago to piles & piles & piles of books, periodicals, photos that it will take me weeks to work thro. Weather is queer showery bain-marie atmosphere, and not too good for me as you may infer fr. my unsteady writing. In Rome I did my duty by Picasso, went three times to his show.13 Barberini palace now houses all Corsini and earlier Pal.Venezia pictures. Only one unknown among them. A curious Ercole Roberti ish St. Sebast. and St. Catherine.14 La Terme, now Villa Livia fresco of garden wall transported & entire rearrangement most satisfactory,15 tho’ not yet complete. Enjoyed this last short visit to Rome. Saw nobody but Schwarzenberg,16 and Lady Mallet.17 I wonder who will succeed them, for they go soon. Love to all of you, and would you were coming soon! Yours B.B.

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A major exhibition of paintings by Picasso, from his blue period to the 1950s, was held at the Galeria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome, May–July 1953. Probably Francesco Pagano (c. 1450–1500), St Sebastian and St Catherine of Alexandria. Frescoes from the Summer Dining Room of the Villa Livia are displayed in the National Roman Museum – Palazzo Massimo alle Terme. Prince Johannes Schwarzenberg was the Austrian ambassador in Rome in 1952–5 and subsequently in London in 1955–66. See Victor Mallet. Their successors at the Rome embassy were the Ashley Clarkes.

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Upper Terrace House Hampstead, N.W.3 Sunday July 12 53

Dearest BB, Thank you so much for both your charming letters. I am very sorry not to have written for so long but since we have been back from America I haven’t had a free moment. Or rather I haven’t written any letters – I can’t resist the garden and in between dressing up for engagements, household chores and seeing the children. Whenever it is fine I put on old trousers and dig in the garden with a sigh of relief – till the telephone rings again! I wish the latter had never been invented. But I envied Johnnie18 very much when he lunched here a few days ago on his way to see you – instead of going to Manchester tomorrow with K! Is there any hope that you will be in Venice for the Lotto exhibition? K and I will be at the Monaco19 with the twins from Saturday 8th August till Thursday 27th.Then we have to come back for the Edinburgh Festival and a visit to David Crawford.20 He and Mary stayed with us for the Coronation also Tom Lindsay who was David’s page in the procession and Georges Salles21 – faintly bewildered by the Gilbert and Sullivan atmosphere, enough [illeg] of peers in robes and stays whose names he couldn’t quite catch like Osbert Lancaster or Baron von Hirsch or the Piper family or Colette’s young men. It was tiring but fun as was the ball at Buckingham Palace a few days later to which Colette was also invited and looked ravishing. Colin is now out of the r.a.f. till he goes to Oxford in October – his last flight was thro’ the Bay of Bengal to Singapore with 45 women and children on board and his Wing Commander with a high temperature out of action. Life at home is boring and he can’t yet bring himself to read for Oxford so he has taken a job at the Zoo looking after little birds. I am now very well and have long ago forgotten the operations and long to see you and Nicky feeling normal again. We go to Holland next week to see the Venetian exhibition22 and wish we were going to meet you there.

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John Walker Hotel Monaco,Venice, on the Grand Canal, one of the best hotels in Venice. The exhibition, Mostra di Lorenzo Lotto, Palazzo Ducale,Venice, June–October 1953, was curated by Pietro Zampetti. David Balniel Georges Salles Venetiaatise Meesters tekeningen 1480–1880, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, 1953.

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Poor Vivian is still far from well tho she thinks she is better. Larry looks 10 years older and as he might have a nervous breakdown at any moment – the Fates are cruel.23 America was great fun and a rest cure – anyone can do only one thing at a time. Best love to you and Nicky dearest BB, Jane

I Tatti Settignano Florence July 17, 53

Dearest Jane. How good of you to write at such length and with such good news of all of you and that you are your marvellous entire self again. You write of being in Venice from Aug. 8 till 27th. We shall not be able to get away, but would be delighted to have a visit from you after Aug. 21. If you could spare 3 or 4 days with us! Incline yr. hearts thither! So cool that we still are here, but expect to transcend to Vallombrosa in a few days and to stay there till end of Sept. Johnnie Walker is with us, and more charming and stimulating and vivifying than ever. We talk shop a good deal of course, and about the Mellon lectures. Yours, I mean K’s, were wildly adored.24 J. leaves Sunday the 19th and the same day arrive the John Coolidges of the Fogg Museum25 to stay four days, and to talk of the future of I Tatti. A tedious subject, for I fear the worst when I am gone and Harvard takes over. I mean to devote the summer to a reconsideration of the Giorgione problem. Love to you both B.B.

23 24 25

Laurence Olivier See Introduction to Ch. 8 and n. 270. John Coolidge (1913–1995) was an architectural historian and the Director of Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum, 1948–72. Coolidge’s family was closely associated with Harvard University and Boston. As a result of this visit he wrote a report which was influential in persuading Harvard to accept I Tatti.

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Upper Terrace House Hampstead, N.W.3 Hampstead 1357 28 July 53

My dear BB, For many years you have been encouraging me to see a fountain by Rustici in the gardens of Wool Beding [sic] Hall.26 At last I have managed to do so, and it may amuse you to hear the result. The house belongs to some elderly people called Lascelles – very poor and sensitive, nothing changed or renewed for at least 60 years. They had the reputation of not allowing visitors, who often rang the bell attracted by the beauty of the façade, but I found a friend who had stabled some polo ponies with them, and got in through his introduction. They were dimly aware that the fountain was of interest: it was naturally known as the Cellini. There is no doubt at all that it is by Rustici, but the interesting part is (as I expect you will remember) that it derives from a drawing or model by Leonardo of the Neptune made for Antonio Segni.27 In fact it is exceedingly like the standing Neptune drawing at Windsor 12591 which is so strangely like Michaelangelo’s David, especially the lower slighter sketch on that sheet. The reaction of the figure to the sea horses is identical.The head is ‘Leonardo Classical’, especially in profile, which is almost [illeg]. The modeling is Verrocchiesque – the base of the fountain typical Verrocchio workshop, so it must be an early Rustici. Of course it is thickly coated with verdigris, so that one can’t be dogmatic about the actual facture. Apparently it comes from the 16th C. manor house of Cowdray, which was burnt down in 1800, and the fountain, which stood in a courtyard, was given to the agent. I must try to find out when it reached Cowdray.28 Jane was delighted to get your letter. We may have to come home early from Venice for the Edinburgh festival, so do not like to propose a visit then.What we

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Woolbeding Manor, with origins in the 16th century, is near Chichester, West Sussex. In 1893, the Manor was bequeathed to Colonel H. A. Lascelles, who was succeeded in 1913 by his son Edward (1884–1956). The fountain was once in the centre of the court at Cowdray House, West Sussex, and was removed to Woolbeding Manor after a fire of September 1793 which left Cowdray House, dating from the 16th century, as a permanent ruin. The fountain remained at Woolbeding until the National Trust, who took over the house in 1956, loaned it to the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. It is dated c. 1536 and now attributed to Benedetto da Rovezzano, a Florentine sculptor who worked in England in 1524–43. Leonardo da Vinci executed a large finished drawing of the sea-god Neptune for his friend Antonio Segni, the Master of the Papal Mint. That drawing was celebrated during the 16th century but is now lost. However, there is a sketch for the composition, in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle, inscribed with a note by Leonardo to ‘lower the horses’ (RCIN 12591). A drawing, dated 1783, of the Great Court at Cowdray by Samuel Hieronymus Grimm, in the British Museum, appears to show that the dragon-head taps were originally used for filling buckets.

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should really love is to come out to i Tatti in December. Would it be possible? We could come on the 11th and stay till as near Christmas as you could have us – only unlike Beryl29 we really would go on the appointed day, as we must be home by Christmas Eve. If it can be managed I can’t imagine anything which would give us both more happiness. What splendid news that you are returning to the Giorgione problem. May I offer a small piece. There is a Durer drawing, Winkler 85,30 dated 1495! It seems to imply the kind of nude used by Giorgione in the Fondaco di Tedeschi.31 But is it really possible for that date? On the whole I think the date and monogram must be fake, but if true it would be an interesting light on Venetian art.You see that my mind is still running on the nude. But, alas, no writing for weeks. Love from Jane Ever your affectionate Kenneth

Casa Al Dono Vallombrosa (Prov. di Firenze) July 28, 53

Dear Kenneth. That is good news that you both can come Dec and stay for a fortnight. I am thrilled to read that you have seen the fountain at Woolbeding. I have not seen it in 50 years, and I doubt whether I ever had the chance to study it in detail. How I wish you could get it photo’d and publish it in all its details in the sense in which you write to me. I have been suspecting for very many years that Rustici deliberately imitated Pollaiuolo, Verrocchio, and of course Leonardo. So what you say does not surprise me. Indeed I never could accept the so-called Verrocchio ‘Resurrection’ wh. some decades ago was brought down from Castello to the Bargello.32 I

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See Arthur Waley Friedrich Winkler, Dürer, des Meisters Gemälde Kupferstiche und Holzschnitte, Stuttgart, 1928. The Fondaco dei Tedeschi inVenice, on the Grand Canal near the Rialto Bridge, was the headquarters and living quarters of the city’s German merchants. In about 1508 the façade on the Grand Canal was frescoed by Giorgione and Titian. Their work soon deteriorated because of the humid climate but a few fragments survived and are now housed in the Cà’ d’Oro. Ascribed to Verrocchio, Resurrection of Christ, c. 1463, Museo Nazionale del Bargello, Florence.

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kept suspecting that it is by Rustici who worked so much at Castello. Did the Woolbeding fountain come from there? Heavenly weather up here! Affectionately B.B.

Hotel de Crillon Paris, le 4th decembre [1953]

My dearest BB, I do hope you are now feeling better and back at I Tatti and did not find the journey home too tiring. I can’t tell you how much we enjoyed seeing you again and our whole visit to Rome and especially seeing the manuscripts with you. It was so long since I had seen you and Nicky it was all a great treat. We lunched with Georges Salles who sent you his love – he took us all round the new rooms at the Louvre – the Beistegui collection33 is also on view now. Some of the re-arranged pictures look very well but on the whole I like pictures to stay in the same places so that one knows where to find old favourites! We went to tea with Huyghe34 – we had not yet met his wife who is very nice. They have a lovely apartment in a ramshackle house in the Rue Jacob but too many books everywhere. No room for anything else. The Harveys35 are away and Georges S. goes to u.s.a. end of the month so he won’t be given his k.b.e. till Feb on his return but he is very pleased and I am sure he would like you to congratulate him! We are sad to be going home tomorrow but were much sadder when we left you and Rome Thank you again from our hearts for all your goodness and our love

Jane

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Carlos de Beistegui (1863–1953), of Basque origin, whose family made a fortune out of silver mines in Mexico where he was born, lived in France and was much influenced by the painter Léon Bonnat, from whom he caught the urge to collect. In 1942 he gave the Louvre a group of paintings, mostly portraits, by such as Rubens, van Dyck, Largillière, Nattier, Drouais, Fragonard, Goya, David, Lawrence, Gérard, Ingres, Meissonnier and Zuloaga, bought with the advice of the Louvre’s curators. His collection entered the Louvre when he died in 1953. René Huyghe Oliver Harvey was the ambassador in Paris, 1948–54.

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I Tatti Settignano Florence

Dec 11. 53 Dearest Jane Thank you for the loving words about our hours together in Rome.You added greatly both of you to our pleasure in being there. We got back three days ago. I still have a bit of a temperature & stay in bed most of the day. Freya Stark was already here to welcome us & just left. She read me some chapters of her book on Ionia.36 What a gift she has for calling up places she describes. When do you transcend? Every good wish for 1954. May it bring you back soon Love B.B.

Upper Terrace House Hampstead, N.W.3 Hampstead 1357 21 Dec 53

My dear BB, We were glad to know that you were back at i Tatti. I do hope that the infection has quite cleared up by now. I am sending you in the envelope a few photographs I have got together for you. Most of them come from the Scottish Museum of Antiquities37 – you probably know the Traprain Law pieces already – Viking loot, hastily buried, with coins from Constantinople.38 The piece of horse armour is

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Freya Stark, Ionia: A Quest, London: John Murray, 1954. Stark travelled along the west coast of Turkey in 1952, meeting only one other tourist. The Society of Antiquaries of Scotland was founded in 1780 to collect the archaeology of Scotland. Its collections passed into public ownership in 1858 as the National Museum of Antiquities of Scotland. In 1985 the museum was amalgamated with the Royal Scottish Museum. Traprain Law is a hill east of Haddington in East Lothian, Scotland. The first archaeological excavations were begun in 1914 and continued until 1923. In 1919, a hoard of sliced-up Roman-era silver was discovered. Four coins were also discovered with the hoard, which dated the find to the 5th century ad.The quality of some of the items suggests that they may have come from as far afield as Constantinople. The Museum also owned the Skaill Horde, discovered on Orkney in March 1858

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really superb and shows the technical skill of the Celts in the pre-Christian era.39 I know nothing about the dragon’s head – it is loan [sic] from a local museum.40 The bracelet is the finest – and most tete nigre41 – of about a hundred in the museum. The beautiful head from the Torrigiano tomb is by a really marvelous young photographer whom we (the Arts Council) are commissioning to do a series of photos of English tombs and monuments. As for the Belliniesque picture – it is of course dreadfully repainted head entirely new, but it has some interest, as it appears to be signed Opera di Antonio S, which must I suppose be Saliba.42 It was brought in to me to look at by a modest young woman. It will add a grain to your material. Colette and I are hoping to come to Italy in the second half of March in order that she may work on her ‘special subject’ in her history schools – which is Italy 1492–1521, or so. We hope to spend about 3 weeks there. Is there any chance (I ask without ceremony as you said I could) of our having the Villino? It would be absolutely perfect for us as we shall both have to lead hermit-like lives, she in the last throes of her final schools, I writing notes to the Nude, and composing the Romanes lecture for May.43 Of course Derek44 may be back, and will have made his own arrangements. But it would be lovely for us if it could be managed – approximately 18th March to 9th April. We are now in the throes of Christmas, looking wildly for presents for forgotten friends, and usually ending in the desperate course of seizing a first edition of Shelly [sic] or Goethe from the shelves. We are much encouraged

39

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when a boy named David Linklater, digging at Muckle Brae, came across a few pieces of silver. More than 100 items were eventually unearthed, the largest Viking treasure trove found in Scotland. Probably the Torrs Horns and Torrs Pony-cap, Iron Age bronze pieces of c. 200 bc, forming part of a small surviving group of elaborate and finely wrought metal objects that were commissioned by the elite of British and Irish society before the arrival of the Romans. A sandstone dragonesque head was found, in c. 1917, in the burial ground of St Ninian’s Church, the old aisle church of Kirkintilloch, in East Dunbartonshire. Clark probably meant that it is dark brown in colour. Antonio de Saliba (c. 1466–c.1535) was a nephew of the more famous Antonello da Messina. Also from Sicily, where he worked primarily, it is likely that he followed in his uncle’s footsteps to paint in Venice and the Veneto, coming under the influence of Bellini and his circle. Clark delivered the annual Romanes Lecture at Oxford University on 11 May 1954. George John Romanes (1848–1894) was a Canadian-born biologist and physiologist and the youngest of Charles Darwin’s academic friends. He was interested in the similarity of cognitive processes and mechanisms between humans and other animals. Cambridge-educated and resident in England, he founded a series of free public lectures, including the Oxford Romanes lecture. It can be on any subject in science, art or literature, approved by the vice-chancellor of the University. Clark’s invitation came from his old friend Maurice Bowra, who was then the Vice-Chancellor. Clark’s lecture, ‘Moments of Vision’ (the title borrowed from Thomas Hardy), was written in the solitude of the Villino at I Tatti, and explores experiences of heightened perception. Derek Hill

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by Saltwood,45 which looked more beautiful empty than full. How I wish you could see it. With all good wishes for 1954, dear BB, and much love from us both Ever your affectionate Kenneth

Saltwood Castle Nr. Hythe, Kent Tel. 67190 Apr. 20. 54

My dear BB, I should have written a week ago to tell you how grateful Colette and I were for unforgettable time [sic] we had at i Tatti and at the Villino. I don’t think I have ever been happier or felt more completely in my true centre. I wish we could have stayed a few days longer – and we made a great mistake in going to Milan, which really is a nightmare. Hammering everywhere – outside our window in

45

See Introduction above. On 26 October 1953, Clark had written to Nicky: ‘Our life in London has grown so complicated, expensive and exacting that at the end of last summer we decided to leave and at the same time it chanced that the place in England we most wanted to buy was for sale, so we have bought it and, if all goes well, will be moving there next spring. It is a ruined castle about a mile and a half from the sea near Hythe. From the battlements one can see across the channel to France, back on to the downs. It is entirely enclosed by high walls of the late 12th century. We shall live in tolerable comfort in the 14th century gatehouse and in a little 18th century building which was attached to the gatehouse when the whole castle was used as a farm. It was given by Canute to the Archbishops of Canterbury and was a continual source of dispute between the Church and the Crown throughout the middle ages. It must have been an enormous place and living there is rather like living in the middle of Hadrian’s Villa. But it is quite easy to keep up – or rather everything that could fall down fell down in the 16th century. For the time being this purchase has still further complicated our lives and made it very difficult for me to concentrate on my book. But we have no regrets, as it was time for us both to get out of London and we could not have gone anywhere more beautiful. Incidentally, we had to buy the castle fully furnished, and amongst a great quantity of roba di antiquario were one or two quite respectable-looking trecento pictures in deplorably mouldy condition, of which I shall send you photographs when they are cleaned. They belonged to old Martin Conway who used to give us so much trouble over his “Giorgiones”.’

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the Manin from 6.30 am to 7.0 pm., in the Castello, in Saint Ambrogio. The only peaceful spot was the Poldi, which is most intelligently done.46 Otherwise I hated it all. At least it made me less sad to leave Italy. Here it is now relatively peaceful. It will take us another three months to get the house straight, and a year to sort out the library; but already we are able to enjoy some of the pleasures of being here, and can see that it is going to suit us as well as we hoped. It’s strange to change one’s whole way of life at our age, and in a way I haven’t yet realised it; I feel unconsciously that I am only staying with someone, and will soon be going back home. It is odd to wake up in a 14th C. town, white washed, with sky and tree tops all round, absolutely quiet and isolated, after living so long within sound of London. The confusion in the library is apalling. Thousands of books I have never seen before, each posing the problem – is it worth keeping. The trouble is that there is no half way house between a book shelf full of Everyman, Phaidon, Penguin etc. – all that one needs for reading – and a huge library, all that one needs for reference. However, I haven’t been able to give my attention to the problems, because I have been scribbling hysterically at my Romanes lecture, which is, I fear, doomed to failure. I have taken too abstract a topic for my creaking, concrete mind, and the result so far is a series of platitudes. I did enjoy our walks, especially going once more to the Tree.47 What a great part walking has played in your whole being. It seems to liberate your mind more than any form of intellectual exercise. Thank you again, dear BB, for your kindness to us both. I hope Venice is a pleasant change – I wish I was there with you Ever yours affectionately Kenneth I am writing a separate letter to Nicky, but send her my love in this one too.

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The Hotel Manin is an old established hotel in the historic heart of Milan, near the Castello Sforzesco, the former seat of the Duchy of Milan and one of the biggest citadels in Europe, housing several of the city’s museums and art collections. The Biblioteca Ambrosiana is the historic library of Milan and also houses the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana. The Museo Poldi Pezzoli houses the 19thcentury collection of Gian Giacomo Poldi Pezzoli and is noted for its holdings of Northern Italian and Netherlandish paintings. In the second volume of his autobiography, Clark OH p. 106, says: ‘There was one old tree which he visited as a kind of pilgrimage almost once a month. He said that its roots were a better illustration of his theory of tactile values than anything in art. There should be a photograph of this tree in any book on Mr Berenson, but it is very hard to find; indeed I have never been able to find it since his death, and cannot even say what kind of tree it was. I remember only that it was some miles north of Fiesole, and that the valley behind it led to the Convent of the Camaldoli’.

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Saltwood Castle Nr. Hythe, Kent Tel. 67190 7 Jun ’54

My dear BB, Amongst the many things I promised to send you, two have now become available – the off-print of a lecture I gave on photography48 and the photos of a picture which I bought with Saltwood. The former is an example of the kind of thing which I find myself having to do from time to time – and which I try to do as well as possible. I fancy that it might be worth expanding and illustrating one day. The photos show details of my polyptych after cleaning, and before any restoration. It looks to me rather like Alegretto Nuzi – but it isn’t a field with which I am at all familiar. It is a nice work, and not badly preserved in the essential parts.49 After a lot of work we have made this place look quite presentable, and I wish you could see it.We love being here, and go to London with reluctance – although we have a pleasant pied a terre in Albany.50 I am finishing the proofs of my nude book – also giving parts of it as lectures to London University. You will have the page proofs soon, and much hope that you will find something in them to interest you, as I am not likely to do much better than some of the chapters – alas! I do hope Venice has been a success, and that the sun has lit up the dark corners of the churches. If ever I go back there it will be in May and early June, before the Piazza has become impenetrable owing to my compatriots. But at present I feel I can never leave England again, except to see you. Colette is in the middle of her finals. She will feel very strange when they are over and she has no more definite goal to work for. It must be an uncomfortable

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The text of a lecture, ‘Art & Photography’, given by Clark at the centenary meeting of the Royal Photographic Society was reprinted in The Penrose Annual: A Review of the Graphic Arts, vol. 49, London: Lund Humphries, 1955. Allegretto Nuzi (1315–1373) was trained in Fabriano and worked in a style influenced by Giotto and the Sienese Masters. The Albany (or simply ‘Albany’), in Piccadilly, London, was built 1770–74 by William Chambers for Viscount Melbourne and was first known as Melbourne House. A three-storey mansion with a pair of service wings and a courtyard, it was occupied in 1791 by Prince Frederick, Duke of York and Albany. He relinquished the house in 1802 when it was added to and converted by Henry Holland into 69 bachelor apartments (known as ‘sets’). In the early days there was a requirement that residents be bachelors. The Albany is governed by a board of trustees. Rents are well below commercial levels and the sets are said to be allocated through social connection. Among Clark’s contemporaries and acquaintances who also lived in the Albany were Arthur Lee, Isaiah Berlin, Harold Nicolson and Aldous Huxley.

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feeling – I have never had it – I have always been terribly behind hand with at least three books or articles. I went to see Mrs Sprigge51 and she outlined the scheme of her biography, which sounds v. ambitious. Her point of view is certainly v. different from mine, and although we may overlap in certain passages of pure fact narration, I am sure that our books will in no way resemble each other. She wrote afterwards that in ‘a saner age we should collaborate’ – a comical concept. With love from us both, dear BB. – in which I know that the twins would join if they were here Ever your affectionate Kenneth Have you seen the enclosed drawing, which reached me in a dealers catalogue and twas possible, tho’ only a scrap. (dealer named Franklyn, Primrose Hill, unknown to me).

Hotel Europa E Britannia Venezia June 22 [1954]

Dear Kenneth. Thanks for a dear letter. The very interesting and entertaining paper on ‘Photography & Painting’52 as well as for the photos of a polyptych, you believe may be by Allegretto Nuzi. You may be right about this, altho’ the saints look more sculptural and rougher than usual with him. I shall examine them in connection with more certain works. I should be helped by a photo of the entire panel of the polyptych. We are here for another week. Then I Tatti for a fortnight or so before we move up to Vallombrosa. Perhaps a gentle zephyr will waft you to us in the course of the summer. The Biennale is rather an unpleasantness and an elaborate search for infancy. The Chinese exhib. has wonderful bronze [illeg] and as yet no paintings except four grand ones sent by Jap. G’v.t. and no sculptures.53 Basil and Nicolette Gray54 are here, and others I avoid. G. B. Constable55 [sic] with whom we gossip and

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Sylvia Sprigge See n. 48. A seminal exhibition, Mostra d’arte cinese, was held in the Palazzo Ducale,Venice in 1954. Basil Gray W. G. Constable

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talk shop. The stately Stewart [sic] Preston,56 the Laurance Roberts57 of course. Sir Ashley Clark above all. Hartley58 in this hotel. We meet often and discuss prose and poetry. Love to all of you from Nicky and B.B.

B5 Albany Piccadilly W.1 Regent 0458 10 Sept 54

My dear BB, You may care to see the enclosed,59 which was in great part written at the Villino this spring. It doesn’t amount to much but seemed to do well enough at the time. I wonder how you have passed the summer. We have had little sun and much rain, but that hasn’t destroyed our love for Saltwood, and or altered our conviction that we were right to go there. Unfortunately Jane has had a series of minor mishaps – a sort of ’flu, a broken arm etc. which have put her back. I have to go to New York in October to see through the press my book on the Nude – also give a jaw at Columbia. You may have seen the first chapter in the Cornhill60 – the mss is now substantial and less sprightly. If you didn’t like it, let me know – for otherwise your name will appear on the dedication page. With much love to Nicky from us both Ever your affectionate Kenneth

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Stuart Preston Laurance Roberts L. P. Hartley (1895–1972), the novelist and short-story writer, had little commercial success until the publication in 1953 of The Go-Between. A lifelong bachelor he had, in 1922, suffered a nervous breakdown and shortly thereafter started to spend much of his time in Venice. Clark had met Hartley through Ethel Sands in Venice in May 1933. Kenneth Clark, Moments of Vision, Romanes Lecture, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954. The Cornhill Magazine, a literary review, had been founded in 1860 with William Makepeace Thackeray as it first editor. In summer 1954,with John Murray as the editor, it published its 1000th number. There were articles by Freya Stark, Osbert Lancaster and Compton Mackenzie, and by Clark on ‘The Naked and the Nude’.

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Casa Al Dono Vallombrosa (Prov di Firenze) Sept 14 1954

Dear Kenneth. I cannot imagine yr. writing anything I should not be proud or happy to have dedicated to me. Thanks for the enchanting causerie on ‘Moments of Vision’. It is a favourite theme of mine, and the exponent who best has understood it was Wordsworth. Goethe comes close, and Petrarch so often. I would call these moments Moments of ecstatic re-cognition. If ever you and I can enjoy an hour or two of real leisure – not pre-occupied by the pigheds [sic] – we could antiphone61 delightfully on the subject. But I am immersed in my pig trade. Just at present it is the new catal. of Ven. pictures. Will you be an angel and let me know what Ven. paintings are in your possession? Have you still the over-coiffed lady who so resembles the one in the Lichtenstein miniature ascr. to ‘Giaconalto’.62 And what of a panel or canvas with the busts of an elderly and a much younger man that I do not hesitate to ascribe to Giov. Bellini?63 We are having divine weather and hope it will outlast our stay. Oct. 1 we go to Bologna for three days, and then settle down at I Tatti, where you will be ever so welcome – when? I regret to read that Jane is far from well. My best wishes for her recovery. Ever affectionately B.B.

Saltwood Castle Kent Hythe 67190 10 Nov. 54

My dear BB, Having just returned from a fortnight in the usa, or rather in NewYork, I thought you might like to hear something about that strange land from an unprejudiced observer.

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Antiphon = the response one side of the choir makes to the other in a chant. See Ch. 8 nn. 19 and 39. See Ch. 7 n. 73.

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I must say that I find it life enhancing for a short visit. I spent most of my time talking to the heads of various broadcasting companies who on the whole are more intelligent than most of our colleagues – have to be. The weapon they hold is terrifyingly powerful, and they are just beginning to wake up to their responsibility. I also spent a little time in the new Metropolitan. It is certainly much improved – in fact the part containing objets d’art and tapestries is really beautiful, partly because they lend themselves to the art of display, partly because the old style millionaires, the Birbo Morgos64 etc seem to have had more feeling for the substance of tapestry and enamel than for the more intellectual qualities of painting. The Italian pictures are really the least satisfying part – the Havermeyer [sic] collection remains the best because it shows evidence of an individual taste.65 How on earth did Mr Frick manage to get such good pictures!66 However, their latest purchase, the Rothschild Van Eyck is a dull work, ruined by transference to canvas.67 I returned home to a great political row over our television.68 It was exhausting, but rather fascinating, and helped to make more vivid one’s reading of 19th C. history – for example the recent excellent biography of Gladstone which you will certainly have read.69 I am taking the opportunity of sending out with our dear Irene. It is good of you to have her to stay, and I am sure you will find as we all do that the more you know her the more you love her. She is extremely shy, and sometimes talks nonsense from embarrassment; but in the end she has such understanding, especially of music and English poetry. See if you can persuade her to read aloud to you one evening – something unfamiliar or out of fashion like Pope’s Eloise & Abelard70 or Thompson’s Seasons.71 How I wish I was going to be there too! I am overworked, and think longingly of the heavenly time Colette and I had in the Villino.

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Jack Morgan. Berenson’s nickname for J. P. Morgan Sr. was Birbo Morgo, birbo being colloquial Italian for scoundrel. Havemeyer Family Henry Clay Frick Jan van Eyck and workshop, Virgin and Child, with Saints and Donor, early 1440s, purchased by the Frick Collection in 1954 from the French Rothschilds, through Knoedler. It is catalogued as being on panel. The ita awarded the first franchises in early November 1954, causing an outburst of criticisms and protests that it had shown political bias by favouring newspaper and other commercial interests who were supporters of the Conservative Party. The Labour Party was especially vociferous, and there were angry questions and a stormy debate in the House of Commons. Philip Magnus, Gladstone: A Biography, London: John Murray, 1954. Alexander Pope (1688–1744) published his poem Eloisa to Abelard in 1717. James Thomson (1700–1748) was a Scottish poet and playwright best known for his masterpiece, The Seasons (1726–30), and the lyrics of Rule, Britannia! (1740).

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Jane sends heaps of love (as well as a small gift). I hope I can induce her to leave Saltwood and come out to see you in the spring. She is completely happy in the country. Ever your affectionate Kenneth

Nov. 25 54 I Tatti Settignano Florence

My Dear Kenneth. Thanks for the good letter that Irene brought and the pretty presents from you and dear Jane – to whom my love. Your observations on Americ. collections are interesting. I suspect the Freer collection was made by continuous elimination. ‘Do you advise me to keep it or part with it’? As for the Havemeyer it was made by Mary Cassatt. Irene is still here, the most domesticated of guests, receptive, stimulating, discreet, resourceful, no bother whatever, and a very good mixer. How she is devoted to you both, and especially to Jane. If only you could hear how she talks about Jane and yourself! You will want to know what I am up to. Getting older and feebler. I have lost faith in my body, and await nothing good. Yet I still enjoy people, reading, and above all work. That consists now of cataloguing the Venetians,72 and altho I seldom can do more than one hour and a half a day I am making progress and the thing may go to the printer early in the spring. As you were leaving for N.Y. I wrote to ask what Venetian picture of yr. own you would like me to catalogue. The Bellini lady with the starched coiff? And what about a painting by G.B. with the portraits of one elderly and a younger man of which I have a photo sent by you? Etc. etc. The gates of I Tatti are always ready to be lifted high for Jane and yourself. Ever affectionately B.B.

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In summer 1953, Bela Horowitz proposed that Phaidon Press publish a series of lavishly illustrated catalogues based on the Lists of 1932. The first volume was to be the Venetian School. The project was financially supported by the Kress Foundation.

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Saltwood Castle Kent Sunday 26th December 54

My dearest BB, Irene who is staying here told us about your dreadful accident and how you took it with your usual philosophy and are now getting better and able to go on dictating – but it must have been a great shock and I hope you will be persuaded to stay in bed for some time so that you can recover properly. I meant to write to you for Christmas but was very busy beforehand so you must forgive me. Georges Salles was here till today and Maurice Bowra is still here with Irene and last night we were all talking about you and Nicky with such affection that we signed the enclosed card to remind you of a few of your devoted admirers. Irene adored her visit to the Tatti and you did her great good. She is a dear and it was lovely for her to be with you. I hope K and I may be able to pay you a visit in the spring. His work should be less of a tie by then. Now he is here for a peaceful week and hopes to finish the Nude. Best love to you all dearest B.B. as ever Jane

Saltwood Castle Kent Hythe 67190 Dec. ’54

My dear BB, We have just heard from Willie MO73 via Irene, about your accident. What a horrifying affair – no younger man could have survived. Willie gave a cheering account of your recovery, but all the same you must be feeling very shaken – and we are all feeling thankful but alarmed. It is particularly bad luck that the accident should have happened when according to Raymond74 and Irene, you were exceedingly bright and well. What angels you all were to our friend Irene – she has never been happier – Raymond was also full of gratitude. How I wish I could have been there too – but my new job requires hourly vigilance not only difficult problems, but

73 74

William Mostyn-Owen Raymond Mortimer

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determined and dishonest men to deal with, who naturally started by assuming that I was to be no more than a figure head, and are hurt to find that I take the work seriously. The last sheet having been left in another briefcase, I take a new one and a different pen, to say how glad I am that the last reports from i Tatti are still reassuring.We are in the middle of a happy family Christmas, the pleasantest one we have had for years, because in the country. In fact we have just come back from Service in Canterbury Cathedral, which was beautiful and authentically Anglican. Maurice Bowra always spends Christmas with us, and this year we also have Georges Salles and Irene. Georges can’t make out more than a tenth of what is said, but he is glad to find that an English family can make such a noise: [illeg] said the only time in England he had heard as much noise as in Italy. I am eagerly looking forward to your Lotto,75 and am delighted to think of you revising the Venetian Painters. You ask what I have to include – the Bellini Madonna,76 the little portrait77 and the Tintoretto of a man dressed as David: this last the same personage as in a portrait by Paul Veronese. The double portrait I have never owned. You are thinking of the Degas copy of the double portrait in the Louvre.78 I sent you a photograph of the ? [sic] Bellini double portrait which was in Legers – I will see what has happened to it, as it looked convincingly G.B.79 I tried to persuade many people to buy it, but you know how fruitless that is. We have just bought a fascinating quattrocento work of art, an ivory plaque depicting Petrarch’s Triumph of death, Florentine about 1460. It was offered for sale at Christies80 where fortunately the dealers thought it a fake. But it is

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Bernard Berenson, Lotto, 3rd rev. edn, Milan: Electa, 1955; in English, Lorenzo Lotto, London: Phaidon, 1956. Circle of Bellini, Virgin and Child, late 1460s or early 1470s, now in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. Accepted by the government in lieu of inheritance tax from Clark’s estate and allocated to the Ashmolean Museum, 1987. Bust of a Man with a Letter in his Hand, sold by Clark at Sotheby’s, London, 27 March 1968, Lot 16, as a Giovanni Cariani. Clark owned Degas, Portrait of Two Male Figures (1859–60), copied from a double portrait in the Louvre which was then attributed to Gentile Bellini but now to Giovanni Cariani, and argued by some to be portraits of Giovanni and Gentile Bellini. See Ch. 7 n. 73. Lot 144, Christie’s Sale of Objects of Art and Vertu, Tuesday December 14, 1954. Once belonging to the collector Alfred Trapnell, it was sold by the executors of Mrs Mary Jane Trapnell. Measuring 23 cm x 24 cm x 2 cm, Christie’s catalogued it as ‘Florentine, second half of 15th century’ and gave as its provenance ‘From the Meyrick Collection’ and ‘From the Collection of J. Malcolm., Esq 1913’. With a reserve of 100 guineas (£105), it failed to sell and was ‘bought in’ for 72 guineas. The auctioneer’s book shows that it was sold to Clark shortly after the close of the sale (it was the final lot) for £105. It had previously come up for sale at Christie’s on May 1st 1913 (Lot 23), when they sold works of art from the ‘Famous Collection of that well-known Connoisseur the late J. Malcom Esq. of Poltalloch’. In both sales the plaque was similarly catalogued. In the 1913 sale the reserve was 300 guineas ‘with wide discretion’, and it sold to Mallett for 150 guineas (£157.50).

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remarkably unfaky, and in fact was in the Douce Collection,81 then Malcolm82 and Meyrick.83 I will send you photos of it, as it relates to Pesellino – also early Agostino di Duccio.84 I wonder what your plans are for the spring. We should be able to get away for a week or so in March, which is cold in Florence, but none too agreeable in Kent. Alas, it is almost impossible for me to make plans until my television affairs are a bit more stable. Jane has written and sends her love, as do Colin and Colette. All my wishes for you Ever your affectionate Kenneth

Dec 31, 54 I Tatti Settignano Florence

Dearest Jane Many thanks for the Xmas card with the good wishes of so many friends, and ever so much more to yourself for all the sympathetic and affectionate words about my fall and miraculous escape.

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Francis Douce (1757–1834) was a leading member of the Society of Antiquaries and Keeper of Manuscripts at the British Museum. He bequeathed his books and manuscripts to the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and his letters to the British Museum. John Malcolm of Poltalloch (1805–1893), succeeded as 14th laird of Poltalloch in 1857. He inherited a mansion and estate in Scotland, a London house off Park Lane, profitable sugar and rum plantations in the West Indies and a successful cattle station in South Australia which was sold in 1873, for £175,000. Widowed young, childless and with enormous wealth, he became one of the leading collectors of his day, notably of old master drawings. Malcolm’s excellent connoisseurship was shaped by his membership of the Burlington Fine Arts Club of which he was a founder member. He also collected objets d’art with equal discrimination. The majority of his drawings were either given or sold to the British Musuem and constitute one of its most signifcant acquisitions. Sir Samuel Rush Meyrick (1783–1848) acquired a pioneering collection of arms and armour on which he was the leading authority. His expertise was widely admired and he helped e.g. Sir Walter Scott to decorate his new house at Abbotsford and advised him how to collect arms and armour. In 1824 he published a pioneering 3-volume work on arms and armour, and at the request of George iv arranged the collection at Windsor Castle. In the 1820s, the dramatist, actor, producer and historian of costume, James Robinson Planché (1796–1880) introduced him to Francis Douce. In 1834 Douce bequeathed to him a part of his collection of antiquities. The sculptor Agostino di Duccio (1418–1481) was born in Florence and influenced by Donatello. He assisted Michelozzo with the sculptural decoration for the SS. Annunziata in Florence and later worked on church facades in Rimini and Perugia.

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I am improving, although ache of back and ribs can be very tiresome still. I already go down to meals and take short walks in the garden. I am delighted with the promise of yr. coming in the spring – not later than April, when we ourselves decamp. I shall look forward to it during the intervening months. Every good wish for 1955 Love to you and yours B.B.

Saltwood Castle Kent Hythe 67190 12 March 55

My dear BB, It is a reviving thought that we shall be with you in a month. So much has happened since Colette and I were with you last year. It is marvelous that you have kept on writing (and walking) after your mishap – and I must thank you for sending me the off print on the Oxford Madonna.85 Your suggestion of Cariani is perfectly convincing – I don’t know if you have seen the original, but the colour has just that touch of vulgarity which Cariani could never avoid – including a garish saffron. In spite of all the obvious resemblances to the Castlefranco Madonna86 I never could begin to swallow the Oxford picture. The Hermitage Madonna looks far better, but it is so dirty and repainted that one can’t really tell.87 I hope you haven’t had too many icy blasts. It has been unusually cold here, and some days Saltwood has been cut off by 3ft. of snow – marvelously beautiful, but alas, it has broken the boughs of the old yew planted in our courtyard by Richard i.88

85 86 87 88

See Ch. 8 n. 112. Giorgione, The Madonna and Child between St Francis and St Liberale (the Castelfranco Madonna), c. 1505, Cathedral of Castelfranco,Veneto. Giorgione, The Virgin and the Child in a Landscape, c. 1503, State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg. From early January 1955 until early March there was severe and freezing weather across all regions of the uk.

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I promised to let you know where the Bellini double portrait had gone to. It still belongs to the dealer named Leger, who is rightly waiting to see what will turn up. With love to dear Nick Ever your affectionate Kenneth

B5 Albany Sunday [April 1955]

B.B. dear Thank you from my heart for our blissful time with you – I have never been so happy with you at I Tatti and you were an angel of sweetness and sympathy and wisdom. It was very sad to leave you and that our visit was so short but while it lasted it was pure happiness and I shall never forget some of the moments of vision! I couldn’t write till now on our return from Stratford and Birmingham. We had only one night at home and I had to pay everyone apart from talking to my brother and sister in law who were there – and Colin who has since gone back to Oxford and sends you and Nicky his love and respects. Birmingham was a bore and very ugly and we had to go to a boring banquet of business men where K made a speech about Commercial Television. We also visited his poor aunt in hospital and went back there again today after Stratford. The latter was great fun and Larrie and Vivien send you much love and long to see you. They both were marvellous – Larry as a very original but convincing Malvolio and Vivien as Viola was exquisite and spoke the poetry so beautifully and looked a dream in boys clothes.89 Before that K made a brilliant speech on Shakespeare – it won’t read as well as it sounded but as you asked for it I am having a copy typed for you and will send it to I Tatti where it can await your return with the photographs I shall also send you as soon as possible. I have arranged for a photographer to come to Saltwood on Tuesday. After lunch where I sat beside the Lord Mayor of London who also shed a tear with me, K spoke so well! We all processed with the Corps Diplomatique (including the Schwarzenbergs90) to the church and on the way K unfurled the flag of St George so for once in our lives we were placed top – even ahead of the Dozen of the Corps Diplomatique! – it

89 90

Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night opened at the Stratford Memorial Theatre in 1955 with Olivier as Malvolio and Vivien Leigh as Viola. See n. 16.

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was a lovely sunny day and the flag on the main sheet looked lovely and it was great fun marching behind the band of the Royal Marines all carrying flowers – us, not the band! – to Shakespeare’s tomb. I do hope this arrives before you leave and that you have a good time in Tripoli and that the sea and the change to the dryness of North Africa will cure your poor eyes. My love and gratitude and looking forward so much to seeing you again and thank you darling B.B. for everything Jane

B5 Albany Piccadilly W1 Regent 0458 24 April.

My dear BB, The worst of my trials being over for the moment, I can write with a freer mind to thank you for our wonderfully happy week end at i Tatti. I really don’t think I have ever enjoyed it more: it was such a delight and relief to find that in spite of your accident and the other inflictions you were as little changed as anyone I know. Coming to i Tatti from my troublesome active life, it seems like an earthly paradise, and when I left I felt a perfect donkey to have taken on so many talks when I could have spent most of my time enjoying the pleasures of your conversation and of the library. It was lovely to have Jane with me, and so much better that she could enjoy i Tatti as much as I do. Indeed, dear BB, I owe you a debt beyond all expression or repayment, and although you say that expressions of gratitude embarrass you, you must allow me to say so. Since leaving you I seem to have spent most of my time in trains. If only they wobbled just a fraction less, so that I could count on writing in them I shouldn’t complain. We shall be thinking of you on the 30th and praying that all goes well on your journey. I will write again nearer your birthday. With much love, Yours ever Kenneth

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[Written on unheaded paper, undated but must be May 1955] Saniet Volpi, Tripoly, Libia91

Dear Kenneth. Thanks for yr. delightful article lecture, on the acting of Shakespeare.92 You present brilliantly and accurately every facet of the subject. I admire your acumen and your dialectic. I remain more than ever of my life-long opinion, conviction even, that to act tragedy, to recite great literature is to degrade it. ‘A voce’. I am ready to defend this view. Writing would require a book. Alan, whom I saw for a few minutes at I Tatti was a surprise. He was so responsive, so alert, that I felt drawn to him and urged him to return and stay. Stopped over at Malta to see the Caravaggio. After the Calling of Matthew the Decapitation of the Baptist is by far his greatest work.93 We expect to stay here till 25, and what follows will depend on my strength. Love to you both B.B.

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Berenson was staying with Anna Maria Cicogna (1913–2004) the younger sister of Marina Volpi, the owner of the Villa Maser (see n. 197). She had married Count Cesare Cicogna Mozzoni and owned an 18th-century Turkish villa in an oasis on the outskirts of Tripoli. She arranged, on this last trip abroad by Berenson, for him to spend two days in the superintendent’s house at Leptis Magna. On Sunday 24 April 1955, Clark spoke at a luncheon in Stratford-upon-Avon to celebrate the 391st anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth. He reflected on the difficult but not impossible task of performing Shakespeare’s plays on television, and on the qualities needed by directors and actors to accomplish this task in a medium whose essence was intimacy and a small screen, and whose audience was necessarily distant and possibly restless. In the circumstances, he thought that the way that actors spoke was all-important. His speech was summarised in a long article in The Times, 25 April 1955. An entry in Berenson’s diary for 3 May 1955 uses exactly these words. Caravaggio fled to Malta after murdering a young man in Rome, believing that membership of the Knights of Malta would lead to a pardon. He was inducted into the Order and, in exchange, was commissioned to paint an altarpiece for St John’s Co-Cathedral in Valletta: this was the Beheading of St John the Baptist (The Decollation of the Baptist), 1608, which still hangs in the Cathedral. Caravaggio’s connection with the Knights of Malta was severed several months later, following another brawl.

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Saltwood Castle Kent Hythe 67190 21 June ’55

My Dear BB, Of the many friends who will write to you on your birthday, very few can draw on so large a store of gratitude and affection as I can. I have thought a lot, in the last years, of all that I owe you, and find that the first and greatest debt is emancipation from the various intellectual fashions of the time. If I had never gone to i Tatti I should certainly have been bound apprentice to Bloomsbury – or perhaps never moved beyond Oxford. But thanks to your Petrarchian characteristic of metropolitan isolation (I see Metropolitan as the opposite of provincial) I came to look with sceptism at all dogmas and tabernacles. In fact, dear BB, you made me a Catholic in the Arts, which although it involves a temporary isolation in Salvationist Society, gives one a humbler place [in the] apostolic succession. From the chief benefit flowed countless others. It delights me how often the children, after meeting you, tell me that they have discovered the origin of this or that turn of thought or behaviour which I had supposed to be my own. In all these ways I am truly your son. I will say nothing of all the happiness you have given me when I am at i Tatti, for many others could say the same. And a letter is not the place to write about the influence of your critical ideas. I should like to have written an article about that to offset all the accounts of your train de vie and conversation which will be appearing. But it would mean carefully re-reading those essays which contain the basis of your thought – and I can’t do that for a month or two. There is another thing I should have liked to send you as a birthday present – a scheme by which your English friends and admirers could pay for a studentship at i Tatti. But that, too, takes a lot of work and organization. However, you will live to see both these tributes of my gratitude and perhaps have more peace of mind to consider them when the present celebrations are over. One of the many things I share with you is embarrassment in the face of expressions of gratitude or collective admiration. But I know that you don’t mind the expression of affection, and so I send you my love as a son and a dear friend. Kenneth

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Saltwood Castle Kent Thursday June 26 55

My Dearest BB, Many many happy returns for your birthday. You will have hundreds and thousands of letters and telegrams but when you have time to read this one I would like it to be a tribute from the poor little plain ignorant girl to whom you were so angelic when unaccountably your pupil married her – against your unspoken advice. You could not have been kinder to me in the most civilised sense of the word kind. K owes you more than you will ever know but so do I in a quite different way – for you gave me my first knowledge of the international world of the mind and taught me how to inhabit it or at least be on the outskirts, understanding what was going on even though I could never have taken part. And from your benevolence and affection I have learnt the great importance and value of tolerance – because you were uniformly understanding, where you had every reason not to bother. So darling B.B. love and gratitude always and again very many happy returns. Jane

July 3, 55 I Tatti Settignano Florence

Dearest Jane. Ever since yr. last visit, we have been looking forward to yr. return July 4. We were expecting you when Luisa brought us the news that you could not come. Your dear note helps me over my disappointment. It is sweet of you to recall our past together in words transfigured by memory. Both of you have counted in my own life, helping me to enrich its texture, and to shape it. – Home-coming after two months is a mixed delight. Such piles and piles of arrears to attend to. The very sight of them drives me to the point of complete exhaustion. Dearest love to each and all of you. B.B.

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Saltwood Castle Kent Hythe 67190 3 Sept, ’55

My dear BB, Although I hope to be seeing you in a few days I must write now to thank you for two additions to my library of Berensoniana – the Bibliography94 and the Sicilian diary.95 The former is most impressive and fascinating.What an immense amount you have initiated and discovered. No wonder you sometimes grow impatient at the claims of your juniors, for you have been ahead of them at almost every point – both in connoisseurship and taste. It was a delightful idea to let us all visit Sicily in your company, and listen to your reminiscences and reflections.These little Electa books are an excellent way of perpetuating your talk. My last weeks have been spent in preparing for the opening of the independent television service. It went off well, but has left me feeling rather gloomy – I am like an architect who has built a fine town, and now sees it inhabited by Yahoos.96 Of course I knew all along that they were the only possible inhabitants, simply because anything beginning with the word ‘mass’ is inherently low – and this involves mass entertainment, mass appeal, mass persuasion, etc. However, the structure into which the Yahoos are fitted is a good one, and may have some influence on their filthy habits. We had a week in Edinburgh and saw some good drama and opera. Irene’s Thornton Wilder play was not a complete success – too much dubious philosophy.97 And to be perfectly truthful Irene was not at her best: she looked wrong – so fundamentally un-Greek – concave, like Aegean sculpture, instead of convex. Alcestis must radiate from a solid core of health, if only to bring Admetus back to life, and Irene looked ill and rather uneasy – a child of our time. Visually, there was a good Gauguin show, of which I will bring you a catalogue, as it contains some new material;98 but the great experience was to see Poussin’s

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William Mostyn-Owen compiled a Bibliografia di Bernard Berenson, Milan: Electa, 1955, listing all his published books and articles. Bernard Berenson, Viaggio in Sicilia, Milan: Electa, 1955, 70 pp., 120 pls. Yahoos are legendary beings, invented by Jonathan Swift for his novel Gulliver’s Travels, 1726. He describes them as filthy, with unpleasant habits, resembling human beings, but primitive creatures obsessed with ‘pretty stones’ they find by digging in mud: thus Swift created them to represent what he saw as the base materialism and ignorant elitism that he observed in early 18th-century England. Thornton Wilder’s The Alcestiad performed at the 1955 Edinburgh Festival with Irene Worth. The exhibition, Paul Gauguin: Paintings, Sculpture and Engravings, was shown at the 1955 Edinburgh Festival, catalogue by Ian Hunter and Douglas Cooper.

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Seven Sacraments (the Ellesmere series) cleaned and hung together alone in a room.99 I wish you could have seen them. His conception of antique Christianity – of Christian peace100 as an extension of pax Romana – was most impressive, and although I had often seen the pictures at Bridgewater House, I had never felt their full impact before. Alda101 is coming to see us today. Alas, it is raining – the first wet day for weeks – so she will not be able to enjoy the place; and owing to frequent changes of plan her visit has been cut down to two days. Apparently she had thought of going to see Derek in Ireland, believing that it could be done in a day or two – whereas we feel it takes two days each way. Also, I think she is finding the see busyness [sic] of London rather bewildering, as Jacob Burckhardt did.102 I must go now and meet her train. It is really a great joy and refreshment of spirit to me to think that I shall be seeing you soon. Ever your affectionate Kenneth We arrive at lunch time on Saturday – at the Monaco.

Saltwood Castle Kent Hythe 67190 21 Oct. ’55

My dear BB, I promised to send you the title of a book on the antiques in the Villa Medici – here it is on a separate card, so that you can give it to Alda.103 I expect you have it in the Library already. Actually the Raphael-Marcantonio Judgement of Paris

99

100 101 102

103

Poussin painted two series of the Seven Sacraments.The first was commissioned by Cassiano dal Pozzo in the second half of the 1630s and sold to the Duke of Rutland in 1784. The second series was painted later for Paul Fréart de Chantelou and was acquired by the Duke of Bridgewater in 1798, passing by descent to the Earls of Ellesmere and placed on loan in the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh, in 1946. Clark added as his own footnote “or Christian piety as an extension of pietas.” Alda von Anrep Jacob Burckhardt (1818–1897), Swiss-born, was one of the first significant historians of art and culture. His Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien, 1860 (translated as The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, 1878) became a model for the treatment of cultural history. Burckhardt visited England for the first time in early autumn 1860. Of his visit to London, he wrote to a friend advising him not to go there unless he could afford to take taxis everywhere as the buses were not helpful, and he remarked that he would not pay a return visit. Michelangelo Cagiano de Azevedo, Le antichità di Villa Medici, Rome: Libreria dello Stato, 1951.

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is only loosely related to the Villa Medici relief, and the beautiful pose of the woman in the Raphael is quite different – I hope he may be allowed to have made it up for himself.104 We so much enjoyed seeing you in Venice. It was our only holiday this year and the nicest possible. We had two rather drear days in Paris on the way back. The poor French are depressing company. Their misfortunes have exaggerated all their least pleasant characteristics. In fact the only thing I enjoyed was the Titians in the Louvre, which, after Venice, looked more beautiful than ever. Since then I have been plunged in my work, which I enjoy. If it is true that the test of civilization be how much one talks and reads it is not a civilized life, for I do neither. But action is an irresistible stimulant to me and I approach my office with the rapture of a drunk approaching the sideboard. Much love from Jane Ever your affectionate Kenneth C

Villa Mauresque St Jean Cap Ferrat c/o W.S.M105 28th December [1955]

My dearest BB, A very happy new year from us both and I do hope poor Nicky’s leg will soon be out of plaster and quite strong. It must have been a most dreadful shock for you both. We had a series of illnesses amongst the servants the month before Christmas then I got a sort of ’flu and K got very overworked and tired and at Christmas had a temperature and Maurice Bowra fell downstairs so we had rather a depressing and exhausting Christmas and were glad to escape here on the Tuesday i.e. yesterday. Poor Irene could only take 36 hours off and arrived at 1 am Christmas morning – however the play is very good and her acting is really marvellous.106 I wish you could see her in it. We went to Larry’s film Richard iii with the Waltons (he did the music) and

104 See Phyllis Pray Bober and Ruth Rubinstein, Renaissance Artists and Antique Sculpture: A Handbook of Sources, London: Harvey Miller, 1986, pp. 149–50, no. 119. 105 Somerset Maugham 106 The play was The Queen and the Rebels by Ugo Betti (1892–1953), an Italian playwright and judge, at the Haymarket, December 1955, and also starred John Gielgud.

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Vivien looked simply beautiful107 – they are all on [illeg] for Christmas so I expect you will see Willie and Sue soon. His opera Troilus opens at Milan – Scala – on Jan 12th108 – I wish we could be there but poor K has too much work to do – he is giving the annual lecture at the Historical Society on Wed. Jan 4th.109 It is on Art History in the last 200 years – not Art Criticism but all the same it might amuse you to glance at it and I’ll send you a copy end of next week. It is not open to the public but I shall bring Colette and Luisa and the latter will doubtless report as well. She spent Christmas Eve with us – glad to leave her parents in law and Ben was still in hospital which was bad luck as they have hardly met so far! We go to America early in March as you know for Johnnie’s celebrations – K is not lecturing except twice in the small Duncan Philips110 gallery (and we are staying with them) – once on Millet and once on Rodin. But these aren’t written yet! At any moment the page proofs of the Nude should arrive and as soon as possible we shall send you a corrected set for your approval. Our host is busy both resting and writing before he goes to Egypt to stay with the Aga Khan – we are very happy doing the same and go home Monday. Meantime the sea is blue and mimosa and carnations everywhere. Best love Jane

Jan. 5. 56 I Tatti Settignano Florence

Dearest Jane Yr. good letter fr. Cap Ferrat took some days to reach me. I am delighted to hear from you, and of all yr. and K’s activities. They are beyond me. I cannot understand how he manages to do so much in each field, enough each one for one average persons entire career. Do send me all his lectures, or whatever output including what he wrote say on Millet and Rodin.111

107 Olivier’s Richard III was released in the uk on 16 April 1955. The première was attended by the Queen. It received many awards and an Oscar nomination for Best Actor.Vivien Leigh did not star in the film. 108 William Walton’s opera Troilus and Cressida was first performed at Covent Garden in 1954. 109 Kenneth Clark, ‘The Study of Art History’, Universities Quarterly, May 1956, pp. 223–38. 110 Duncan and Marjorie Phillips 111 See next letter.

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Nicky is at last out of plaster and hobbling about, stays in what used to be Mary’s room and was (when not more than five) having our meals with her. A quiet Xmas with those [illeg] friends staying, and few from the outskirts. I am already at work on the Florentine volumes of my catalogue of Italian paintings from 1300 to 1600. I enjoy the work, but I can do little at a time, an hour a day at most. And I vividly recall working ten hours a day.112 Our best to you all for 1956 and ever so many future years. Affectionately B.B.

Saltwood Castle Kent Hythe 67190 24 Feb. [‘56’ added, probably in another hand]

My dear BB, We have thought of you often during this cold weather.113 I am afraid it will have made you feel very miserable, for however warm the house the cold seems to creep in. It has been a nuisance here, and with villages cut off & so forth, but I can’t say we have suffered much, & I have suffered less than most because I have spent the last week in bed with a bad attack of influenza – the worst I remember since we lived in S. Martino. Of course for a man of action sickness is always a luxury, & even when I felt too feverish to read or write it was a pleasure to have time to notice & remember feelings which usually have to be pushed on one side. Since I became normal I have amused myself by writing a lecture on Rodin to follow the one on Millet in the Duncan Philips Gallery next month. It’s a good subject because the great works are really great, & the unedifying last years of his life are marvellously dramatic – not unlike the last years of Rossetti, altho’ poor Rossetti never became as odious. I have often wondered how well you knew Rodin – also if you knew the Duchesse de Choiseul.114 What a subject – if only Balzac by Rodin could have been followed by Rodin by Balzac (someone

112 Berenson continued to work on revisions to his ‘Florentine Painters’ almost to his dying day. During the last summer at Casa al Dono in 1959, he poured over the photographic material he had with him, making small corrections to the Lists. 113 February 1956 was exceptionally cold with mean average temperatures below freezing.The sea froze along the south coast of England. 114 Rodin made several busts of the Duchesse de Choiseul. She was an American of French descent who married the Duc de Choiseul in 1891. She enjoyed an intimate friendship with Rodin from about 1904 until he ended their relationship in 1912.

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must have made that joke before). In the Millet lecture I thought of quoting your words of admiration which occur (of all unlikely places) in the famous defence of Mattisse [sic]. I hope you still feel the same.115 I fished the Glaneuses out of the deposito when we were last in Paris: it really is a great picture. But many of the others are disappointing compared to the drawings, & the Angelus116 is really rather disgusting – as if painted in blackcurrant syrup. The drawings in the Cabinet des Dessins are superb. (The said Cabinet as you know, is now beautifully installed in the old Salles Camondo – its administration is as ignorant as ever). We go to the usa on March 10th, and will spend most of the time in Washington with the Duncan Philips. I shall be interested to know what has been happening at the National Gallery. It will be interesting also to see their new acquisitions, altho’ for some mysterious reason I never feel I can get acquainted with the picture when it is hanging on those too, too [illeg] walls. It is like meeting people, including some quite horrible people at an extremely formal dinner party. We hope to get to Boston for a day or two – we haven’t been there since 1935. Otherwise no more travelling, & home before Easter. In my moments of enforced reflection I thought a great deal of i Tatti, & all it had meant to me. It is extraordinary how consistently you pursued your ideal of civilization from the days of Altamura117 onwards. If Altamura seemed necessary in the 90s, good Heavens, how much more is it necessary today. Your disciples will have a hard task to maintain it. Much love from us both, dear BB. Ever your affectionate Kenneth.

March 1st 1956 [no address]

My Dear Kenneth Thanks for a dear and most interesting letter. I wish you buon viaggio, buon permanenza and buon ritornare. How glad you will be to get back, far from [illeg] and forced conviviality.

115 In 1908 Berenson had written a letter to The Nation, the usa’s oldest continuously published weekly magazine, in defence of Matisse’s art. In his concluding paragraph he wrote: ‘50 years ago, Mr Quincy Shaw and other countrymen of ours were the first to appreciate and patronise Corot, Rousseau, and the stupendous Millet. Quantum mutatus ab illo! It is now the Russians and to a lesser extent, the Germans, who are buying the work of the worthiest successor of those mighty ones.’ [‘How changed things are from what they were!’Virgil, Aeneid ii, 274]. 116 J.-F. Millet, Des Glaneuses (The Gleaners), 1857, and L’Angélus, 1857/9, both Musée d’Orsay, Paris. 117 See Introduction above.

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No, I have not changed my mind about Millet as a draughtsman. I admire his drawings more and more, and believe that they have had a real effect on the art that surrounded him. Of Van Gogh for instance, and in particular. I envy your seeing so many of them. I could do now without his paintings.You can’t imagine how they were admired 70 years ago when I first saw any of them. I partook of course but, even then, in moderation. Rodin was when I knew him far too surrounded by 2nd and 3rd rate men of letters for me to approach him. They made him believe that he really was a Michaelangelo [illeg] & not only to pose as one, but to inject tragic sentiment hypodermically into his work. Even Rilke118 was poison to him. But I admire his marbles as a whole. Nobody, not even what remains of Greek sculpture has given a young woman’s back as he has, and not even Bernini. I get all sort of rumours about the Washington N.G. but confusing. Johnnie refuses to write about it, and Davis119 does not hide his disappointment, etc. putting up a good show of having plenty of Ersatz. Dear K, yr. and Jane’s love means a great deal to me, and I need it. I feel like a stranded whale on top of Ararat. Do write if you can fr. Washington. Dearest love to you both B.B.

123 East 79th Street New York City Rhinelander 4-3386 24 March [1956]

My dear BB,

As Jane will have told you, I put off writing until my lectures were over, as I had my hands full trying to amplify & polish them over here. However, the last has been delivered, & my mind is at rest.

118 Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926), the great German lyric poet, married Klara Westhoff, one of Auguste Rodin’s pupils, in 1901. They had a daughter, Ruth, who was born seven months after the marriage which lasted only one year. In the summer of 1902, Rilke left his new family and travelled to Paris to write a monograph on Rodin. After an initial, difficult period, Rilke became deeply involved with Rodin’s work and then with Cézanne’s. For a time he acted as Rodin’s amanuensis, eventually writing a long essay abut him. In spring 1906 Rilke suddenly abandoned Rodin. 119 Robert Tyler Davis (1904–1978) was a museum administrator and an educator in art and art history. A Harvard graduate, he held a variety of museum directorships and professorships in the usa and Canada. In 1968 he became the Assistant Director of the National Collection of Fine Arts and Acting Director in 1969–70.

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Before I try to give you some account of Washington, I must say how happy your last letter made me – not only because of all that it contained, but also because it seemed to show that you were feeling stronger. Even more was I rejoiced & inspired by your expression of wishes for i Tatti, which Nicky sent.120 It is really a most moving declaration of faith, & expresses exactly what all your friends believe & would want to see put into effect. We shall all do what we can to see if we can prevent i Tatti becoming an institution – although I do not underrate the difficulties. Of course a great deal depends on the director, & if you could be sure of Johnnie all would be well, for he not only knows how it should be run, but has the diplomatic skill to achieve it. This leads to the burning question of the directorship of the National Gallery. On the whole people were sick of the subject and wouldn’t talk about it. But I think Johnnie will get the job, simply because he has David Findly121 [sic] behind him – whatever else can be said about David, he is the most dictatorial and ruthless fighter, and he will stick at nothing to get Johnnie in. He is perfectly right, because to put in a man who knows nothing about art & cares less would be to place the Gallery at the mercy of those millionaires who want to use it for self-expression. They are already in trouble of this sort, as Chester Dale has insisted on their exhibiting a Last Supper by Dali122 of a vulgarity compared to which Madame de Behagues’ Cene Inferieur123 was a Leonardo. This old system of blackmailing museums by dangling Collections over their heads is peculiar to this country, as no Englishman ever gave away a picture he could sell – or Italian citizen, I suppose*. [Written down the left-hand margin: *In the end I suppose this millionaire blackmail doesn’t matter so much as things settle down to their own levels – like Birbo Morgo124 in the Metropolitan.] Which leads me to the new Kress pictures.125 They are really very good – much the highest level of any of his gifts.The exceptions were almost all Contini pictures, like the Eleonora of Toledo.126 What a mercy he is out of the way! The

120 See Appendix 2. 121 David Finley 122 Salvador Dalí’s (1904–1989) The Sacrament of the Last Supper, 1955, was purchased by Chester Dale in 1956 and loaned to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, dc. Dale (1883–1962), from lowly origins, made a fortune as a financier. He was the President of the National Gallery in 1955– 62, bequeathing to it the bulk of his collection. Uneven in quality, his highly personal collection contains works by earlier painters, Impressionists, Post-Impressionists and leading American artists. 123 Martine-Marie-Pol de Béhague owned several supposed Leonardo da Vincis, including a Salvator Mundi. 124 See n. 64 above. 125 Samuel H. Kress 126 Eleonora di Toledo, c. 1560, by Agnolo Bronzino (1503–1572). Once belonging to William Beckford, it was sold in 1926 to Count Alessandro Contini-Bonacossi who sold it in 1954 to the Samuel H. Kress Foundation.

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Botticelli of Giuliano is a wonderful discovery127 – if all the fuss made over the exportation of the Met-Castagno head has made over that, there would have been some justification.128 The festivities passed off without disaster, as far as I could see. But we led a sheltered life with the sweet Philipses – the nicest host & hostess imaginable, who ‘came out’ in the course of the week we were there. At first they are sunk in shyness, & anxieties for the poodles, but after a time they become perceptive humorous & highly individual. I mustn’t start another page, or it won’t go air mail. I shall write another letter with news of New York. Ever yours affectionately. Kenneth.

[Undated letter] c/o Duncan Phillips 2101 Foxhall Road Washington

My dearest BB, We are having great fun in Washington and everyone asks for news of you and Nicky. It is just like a village where the same people gather in one or other pub each night, tho’ perhaps houses like Marie Beale’s aren’t awful like pubs. One of the few new friends we have made has been Jayne Wrightsman129 very beautifully dressed in dresses I would have loved for Colette – especially a short white Dior – one of the most beautiful dresses I have ever seen. The Nat. Gallery celebrations went off very well and David should be feeling proud – everyone made deservedly nice speeches about him and everyone gave parties for him and Margery. Feeling runs very high over the N.G. appointment. Duncan our host and David are determined to have Johnnie and as David is a man of steel I feel inclined to back him to win.

127 Sandro Botticelli (1446–1510), Giuliano de’ Medici, c. 1478/80. Purchased by Wildenstein’s in 1948, who sold it in 1949 to the Samuel H. Kress Foundation. 128 The Metropolitan Museum’s Saint Sebastian (accession no. 48.78), now attributed to Botticini, was purchased in 1948 as a work by Andrea del Castagno and exhibited as such in New York at Art Treasures of the Metropolitan, 1952. The picture had suffered considerable damage and over-cleaning. 129 Jayne Wrightsman (b. 1919) married Charles B. Wrightsman (1895–1986) who was the president of Standard oil and who made a fortune when its assets were liquidated in 1953. The Wrightsmans acquired notable old master paintings and a fine collection of the decorative arts of the French ancien regime. They donated much of their collection and funded the Wrightsman Galleries for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

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The other subject of discussion is the negroes.130 Senator Fulbright explained to me at length that the Supreme Court decision was 50 years too early – next evening I sat beside the Chief Justice Governor Warren131 who described very movingly how important it was for the United States to take this stand in the state of the world today and the troubles in Africa and the East generally – so there you are. It is almost Johnnie versus K.C.! K’s lecture on Millet was a wow – Rodin is on Thursday, then back to N.Y. Will write again from there. May we come to I Tatti second half of Sept. and visit you at Consuma. K wants to work in the library. Don’t bother to answer as will write from N.Y. Best love to you both Jane

Saltwood Castle, Kent. Hythe 67190 22 April [1956]

My dear BB., In my last letter I promised to let you have more comments on the usa. Now we have been back for three weeks, so my news is stale. I gather that even the great Director question is practically settled, as the appropriate committee has recommended Johnnie. Everyone will be pleased – but I confess I should have liked him to be free in order to fulfill your wish & look after i Tatti – perhaps he will do so yet. I should hate to be director of the Washington N. G. myself – too much politics and toadying to the rich. We much enjoyed New York. I wish you could see the Metropolitan in its new shape – metropolitan no longer – in fact more human and alive than the National Gallery.The level of intelligence in New York is high, I suppose because it is a judenstadt; & the crowds in the museum on a Sunday afternoon seem to me to be the best informed & most responsive I have ever listened to in a Gallery. We saw one really admirable collection which was new to me, that of Harold Baker.132 As you know, it consists chiefly of great bronzes & terracottas, very well

130 In early March 1956 the United States Supreme Court upheld a ban on racial segregation in state schools, colleges and universities. 131 James Fulbright was the Democrat Senator representing Arkansas between 1945–75, and was a segregationist. Earl Warren served as 14th Chief Justice of the United States (1953–69) and is remembered for the decisions which ended school segregation, upheld the rights of an accused, and ended sponsored prayer in state schools. 132 This is probably a reference to Walter C. Baker, who had begun to collect old master and 19th-

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chosen (almost all from Brummer133) & a few fine drawings – the whole done with real intelligence & what looks like taste, & a nice change after the usual apartments full of Matisse, Renoir and van Gogh Irises. Actually n. yk. would be paradise for a collector. It is full of forgotten works of art which if they don’t qualify as ‘important’ & are out of the prescribed scheme of interior decoration, are sold for nothing. I bought a very nice 4thc. stele for $150! One might find anything – sometimes only just unpacked from the case in which it was shipped to Mr Hearst134 or Senator Clark.135 I had long talks with my publisher, & to my astonishment the book is nearly finished & will come out in October.136 I ought to be able to send you the page proofs in May. The us edition is fatter and more pretentious than the English one, & will be too heavy to take on a train or read in bed – so as far as I am concerned cannot be read. It seems that Jane promised to send you a lecture I gave on art historians:137 so I am sending it, though it was intended for an audience who had never heard of them (except Ruskin), &, as discovered, couldn’t read a word of German. As you will see I had to make a rule not to mention any living writer: also I had to bring in Aby Warburg, as the Warburg is part of London University, where the lecture was given. Now I am about to amuse myself compiling an anthology of drawings for Phaidon, with a general introduction on the art – a pleasant holiday task. Saltwood looks enchanting. We lost a few shrubs in the cold weather, but nothing to your losses in Italy. It must look very sad where the olives have died. Much love from Jane Ever your affectionate Kenneth.

133 134 135 136 137

century drawings in 1950, having previously acquired a notable collection of antiquities. His collection was bequeathed to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in 1972. Joseph Brummer William Randolph Hearst William Clark Kenneth Clark, The Nude: A Study of Ideal Art, London: John Murray, and New York: Pantheon Books, 1956. See n. 109.

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1956, June 19 Telegram stamped ‘Reading, Berks’

= elt = kenneth clark wardens londings [sic] wadham college oxford =138 heartfelt congratulations from three old friends and best love = bb alda nicky

Saltwood Castle Kent Hythe 67190 2 Nov, ’56

My dear BB, I am supposed to be leaving for India tomorrow, and must write to you before I go – if I go, which seems doubtful. The purpose of my journey is to persuade the Indians that we are a peaceful & civilised country, & this seems a foolish moment at which to attempt it.139 I can’t imagine that anyone will listen. I am very disappointed, as it is probably my last chance of visiting the East, & I had been preparing my mind for it. I wonder how you have survived the summer & the royal visit.140 It is sad for us not to have seen you. Alan enjoyed his visits enormously & came home full of enthusiasm. I am so glad that you have got to know him, as he is usually the under-rated member of the family. Before I see you again you will have received a copy of my book on the Nude which you kindly allowed me to dedicate to you. You will see how much it owes to you on almost every page. It was conceived on walks in the hills behind

138 On 21 June 1956, Clark received an Honorary Degree of Doctor of Literature from the University of Oxford in a ceremony at the Sheldonian Theatre. The University Public Orator, in presenting Clark, spoke (as was the tradition) in Latin and, referring to his office as Chairman of the ita, quoted from Ovid’s Metamorphoses Book xii, ‘the House of Rumour’: ‘There is a place at the centre of the World, between three zones of earth, sea and sky, at the boundary of the three worlds. From here, whatever exists is seen, however far away, and every voice reaches listening ears.’ The former President Truman received an Honorary Degree of Doctor of Civil Law on the same occasion. The Clarks stayed at Wadham College where his old friend Maurice Bowra was the Warden. 139 November 1956 saw the introduction of the States Reorganisation Act, a major reform of the boundaries of India’s states and territories, which organised them along linguistic lines. The Act came into effect at the same time as the restructuring of the constitutional framework for India’s existing states.The Commission, appointed in 1953 to make recommendations for change, was faced with demonstrations, agitations and hunger strikes, and, in a riot in Bombay in January 1956, 80 people were killed by the police and a further 200 were killed or injured in June. The events of the Suez Crisis in 1956 had also not played well in India. 140 King Gustaf of Sweden, formerly Prince Gustaf of Sweden, was a regular visitor to I Tatti in the 1950s.

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i Tatti, during one of those blissful periods when you let me stay there. I have had it about the place for so long that I have no idea what it is like. Some of my friends who have seen it seemed to be pleased, but I fear it will fall between two, or three, stools. However I have got so used to attacks in the last few years that I am quite resigned to disobliging reviews. We had rather a disagreeable summer, partly owing to the rain, & partly to the troubles with my television job, which however I got under control in the end.141 The last part was a trip in the car down to Albi & Toulouse. You know how reviving such escapades are – & how horrible it is to get back. I was sorry not to see the ivories at Ravenna.142 As for the Caracci – I have seen the catalogue & am confirmed in my dislike of Anibale, though I admit that Agostino was a minor poet.143 I find it hard to believe that the exhibition would have made me change my mind. I wonder if you got there, & what you thought. Jane sends her love. She has been very well (except for lumbago) & we both love Saltwood more than ever – tho’ heaven knows how long the Welfare State will allow us to live here. Love to Nicky. Ever your affectionate Kenneth

[Airmail letter posted on 13 November 1956 from Ajanta, Decca] Airungobad

How I wish you could be here, dear BB. It is really one of the most enchanting places I have ever visited, a perfect climate, an excellent hotel (the only one, I must confess, that I have discovered in India) and within easy reach of Ellora, & a possible drive to Ajanta.144 I have been at Ellora all day, & there are some works of great beauty, but much of it is second hand – from pattern books – about the level of a second rate Romanesque tympanum like Cahors.145 Very little equal to

141 The ita had had a troublesome few months. In January 1956 Aiden Crawley resigned as the editorin-chief of itn (see Introduction). An announcement was made in March that the New Zealander Geoffrey Cox would be appointed as his successor, but Cox did not take up his post until July. 142 An exhibition, Early Christian, Byzantine and Medieval Ivories was held in Ravenna in January– December 1956. 143 There was a major and ground-breaking exhibition of the Carracci in Bologna in 1956 which was a turning point in the rehabilitation of their reputation: Mostra dei Carracci: Disegni, Palazzo dell’Archiginnasio, catalogue by Denis Mahon. 144 See Ch. 5 n. 58. 145 The Cathedral of St-Étienne at Cahors in south-west France is late Romanesque. On the cathedral’s north facade is a carved tympanum depicting Christ surrounded by saints and angels.The Clarks had recently returned from a visit to this area of France.

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Moissac!146 Elephanta was far fairer before the Portuguese destroyed it.147 Much of this you can tell from photos, but what you can’t tell, & I hadn’t anticipated, is the ravishing beauty of the Country. It is not at all arid & burnt up, but like a combination of Provence with English park scenery. Green fields & magnificent trees. All the caves are in perfect sites. Sanchi148 is also beautifully set on a hill overlooking a plain with gentle round hills on one side & a mountain the other – an Umbrian landscape which seems to confirm the likeness of St. Francis to the Buddha. Incidentally, tho’ some of the figures at Sanchi are really fine, much of it anticipates all that is most disastrous in 19th century Indian Art. I have only two more days here, & long to come back to visit the other great monuments Bhubaneswar, Konarka etc. There is not much to be said for Delhi after one’s first shock at its extent size [sic] & close resemblance to Washington dc. Bombay is really rather revolting, tho’, fascinating too – like a very large and squalid edition of Nice. Indians have no taste, & the vulgarity of their Riviera-style houses is ‘beyond good & evil’.149 I have now been to Ajanta, which is as much beyond expectations as Ellora falls short of them.150 The paintings are unequal and terribly damaged – in most cases just a jigsaw puzzle of small pieces. But the best are really admirable – comparable to Simone and declining to Bartoldo di Fredi – never any lower than Andrea Vanni. And there are so many! 30 caves of which quite half a dozen have first-rate paintings. The site is also most impressive – a gigantic horseshoe of rock, like Cheddar Gorge, with a river at the bottom. Dear me, I wish you could see it. I am afraid it will soon become a tourist centre – they have made all preparations for this, but so far the tourists are chiefly Indian schoolchildren – who look enchanting, & Tibetans, who are the least shampooed indigenes [sic] I

146 The Abbey of St Pierre at Moissac, near Cahors, is an outstanding example of Romanesque art and architecture with an especially fine tympanum and cloisters. 147 The Elephanta Caves are a network of sculpted architectural caves located on Elephanta Island in Mumbai Harbour and date to between the 5th and 8th centuries. The caves are hewn from solid basalt rock and were originally painted, although only traces now remain. During the period of Portuguese rule in the 16th and 17th centuries, soldiers used the reliefs of the main cave as target practice and removed an inscription relating to the creation of the caves. 148 Sanchi is a small village in Madhya Pradesh. It is one of the important places of Buddhist pilgrimage with several monuments dating from the 3rd to the 12th centuries. The Great Stupa at Sanchi is the oldest stone edifice in India, a simple hemispherical brick structure built over the relics of the Buddha, crowned by a parasol-like monument symbolising high rank and encircled by four carved ornamental gateways and a balustrade. 149 A reference to Friedrich Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (Jenseits von Gut und Böse:Vorspiel einer Philosophie der Zukunft), 1886, in which Nietzsche accuses past philosophers of uncritically accepting dogmatic premises in their consideration of morality. 150 The 34 Ellora Caves, north-west of Aurangabad, are the finest examples of Indian rock-cut architecture. Excavated out of the vertical face of the Charanandri hills, it is an entire mountain, cut by hand into palaces of worship, supported by elaborately carved columns and decorated with colossal statues from India’s three major religions. They were built between the 5th and 10th centuries.

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have ever seen – or smelt. I suppose they are here for the gigantic Jayanti151 – I’m sorry to have missed the Dalai Lama in Delhi.152 By & large, Buddhist imagery is less rewarding than Hindu, and has some doleful eccentricities, like the thousand appearances – whereas the adventures of Shiva are full of romantic poetry – & humanity. By now you will have received the Nude. I wish I could have added an Indian section – but it is incomplete in so many ways. However I hope that parts of it will please you, as it certainly owes its existence to you. Heaps of love to Nicky. Ever your affectionate Kenneth [On the back is written in what appears to be BB’s handwriting: ‘Indian art much better understanding of Nude than late Gothic or Chinese’]

Saltwood Castle Kent Sunday 18th November [1956]

Dearest B.B. Your very sweet letter to K153 arrived after he had left for India. I hope by the time this reaches you, you will have had the Nude. Sent it to Umberto154 as he said he would arrange it to reach you quickly thro’ the bag. It isn’t available to the public till Nov 30th and we are arranging for a specially bound copy to reach you later.When the latter does arrive will you give your immediate copy to dear Nicky with our love. The Nude is dedicated to you because as you know this is the first time K has written something which he feels shows in some small way all he has owed to you and your inspiration and teaching for so long. I hope you will feel this too? I don’t suppose it will be popular or have a success with the art critics because they are mostly such dreary specialists and won’t know enough to understand the point of the book – each one I fear will pick holes in his field of so called scholarship and distrust the rest. Anyway the book is your fault!

151 Jayantis are religious holidays and festivals. 152 In 1956 the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Lama visited India at the invitation of the Mahabodhi Society to attend the 2500th Birth Anniversary Celebrations of the Buddha, arriving in Delhi on 27 November. 153 Letter missing. 154 Umberto Morra

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K will see your letter and the press cuttings you enclosed on his return – I hope early in December. Willie Mostyn Owen is here for the weekend and I am enjoying his company. Colette and Alan are here and send their best love to you and Nicky – so does Willy. All three have gone to see Graham Sutherland.

Love again Jane

Nov. 30 56 I Tatti Settignano Florence

Dearest Jane The book155 reached me yesterday evening. All I can say as yet is that it is beautifully and attractively got up. Needless to say that I shall read it as soon as I can.You shall hear from me about it. Meanwhile need I say how gratified I am by the dedication! The dedication will infuriate the reviewers, for they flatter my conceit by treating me as Enemy No. 1, of their way of – boozing, shall we say? When does K return? I wish he had the leisure to give us his impressions of India.156 Do urge him to it. I should be ever so grateful. We are having weather so draughty, so damp, so snowy that I am not allowed to leave the house, which then becomes for me a sort of palazzo tomb like those of the early Pharonic priests.

Love to you, dearest Jane and to all your offspring. Devotedly, B.B.

Settignano Dec. 5, 56

Dear Kenneth This morning came your letter from India. Delighted to read of all you have been seeing and visiting there. Would I could have been with you. I know

155 Clark’s The Nude. 156 Clark’s letter from India cannot yet have arrived.

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all the sights you have enjoyed – that is to say I know them in reproduction. How often I have longed to see them! I never found the time, but we look forward to seeing you soon and getting your so-vivid impressions while they still are so vivid. I like your comparison of the Ajanta frescoes with Sienese painters from Simone to Andrea Vanni. I hope to begin to read your book on the Nude in a day or two. I like its material aspect, and am deeply touched by the dedication. Nicky is helping H. Kiel157 over snags in translation. She already has read the introduction and finds its clarity and completeness beyond praise. I cannot imagine being less enthusiastic over it. I shall be honest with you. I am distressed by the world situation and very unhappy over (u.s.a.) the humiliating, bullying, hectoring way ‘Ike’ is dealing with it.158 Every affectionately B.B.

Settignano Florence Dec. 9. 56

Dear Kenneth Let me congratulate you on surpassing even yourself in ‘the Nude’. Much as I always have expected from you this achievement goes beyond expectation. You unfurl the subject to its vastest horizons and fill it with details so perfectly communicated, such precise epithets, such illuminating evocative phrases, such rhythmic sentences that it is a delight to read and read and read. I admire your scholarship and the way you have assimilated it. Wonderful your analysis of the Apollonian nude.You end by constructing a scheme of such authenticity regarding the figure work. No province or representation that you fail to illumine. If you were here now that I am full of your book we could discuss details and convey matters further even than have yet been done by either of us. If only I was not reduced as I am by the burden of my piled up years I could be tempted to write of Pisgah sights that open or shut down when I doze.

157 Hannah Kiel was an art historian who worked with Berenson and, inter alia, translated his writings into German. 158 President Eisenhower (‘Ike’) and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had their hands full in 1956 with the Suez Crisis and the Soviet invasion of Hungary.

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All the reviews of the book that have reached me are generous, if not always intelligent. None by those cheres collegues have reached me yet. I wonder whether the British Academy would admit it (the book) to be ‘the right kind of learning’.159

x As you may see from my handwriting I still am feeble and shaky. I scarcely ever enjoy a moment of relief from some kind of ache, pain, nausea or vague discomfort. Only the half hour at noon when we drive high up and I walk do I feel as if still alive. The thought of all the publications we have undertaken weights [sic]on me like an Alp. I have no satisfactory aids. Luisa gone and Willy coming and going at his pleasure. If only Nicky did not do the work of ten others in running this establishment and could devote herself to searching for me much could still be done. Much love to you all and good hunting for many years. Yours B.B.

Saltwood Castle Kent Hythe 67190 15 Dec ’56

My dear BB. Thank you for your letter. I am glad that both the book & the letter from India reached you safely. Before saying anything else I must enter into a very boring explanation. As a rule the Phaidon send me their new publications, so that I was rather surprised to find that, months after it had appeared, they had not sent to

159 The concept of culture was a hot topic for debate among members of the British Academy in the 1950s and climaxed in C. P. Snow’s Rede Lecture of 1959 in which he argued that Western society was split into two different cultures, science and the humanities, from which many of its problems derived, a view which was shortly afterwards vigorously attacked by F. R. Leavis (1895–1978), the acerbic literary critic, who was a don at Downing College, Cambridge.The Rede Lecture is a public lecture at the University of Cambridge, named after Sir Robert Rede, who was the Chief Justice of the Common Pleas in the 16th century.

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me your Lorenzo Lotto.160 Just before leaving to India I wrote to them asking if I could buy a copy, & received an ajitated [sic] reply that they had duly sent one at your request. It certainly never arrived.When we first moved here some things went astray, but we are more orderly now & it is quite impossible that a book of that size, & one which I was waiting so eagerly, should have come without my knowledge. However, they have sent it now & I hasten to thank you for it, & to say how greatly I am enjoying it. I had no idea you had spent so much labour in transforming it – & you have added some fascinating pages of criticism. Altogether the book is very nostalgic for me, as our expeditions to see the Lottos, with you & Nicky, are amongst my most vivid and valued memories.161 I think Asolo &Trescore stand out the clearest. What did we look for in those tours in the Veronese [sic] Valleys, I wonder – Zogno and Scrimalta. I remember the chase, but have completely forgotten the quarry – except for a Cariani – which is about the equivalent of one of Isaac Walton’s day fishing162 – a dace or a chub. (both of which are uneatable). I feel thoroughly vexed at being back in the active life, and shocked by the ugliness of my countrymen. Eastern faces are stylised, but cabbagey English faces all look like English cooking – meat & two veg. – or as Virginia Woolf described Oxford Street shoppers – ‘like soup plates washed up by dirty scallions.’ (By the way don’t – but you never would – buy Clive’s book on his old friends.163 It is as flat as the Duke of Portland memoirs,164 but not as good natured.) However, even at this season there are beautiful moments at Saltwood.

Love & Christmas wishes to Nicky Ever your affectionate Kenneth.

160 See n. 75. 161 See Ch. 1 above. Clark went to the Veneto and Bergamo with Berenson and Nicky soon after they met, in autumn 1926. See also Ch. 8 n. 94. 162 Izaak Walton (1594–1683) was a writer and biographer who is best remembered for his book The Compleat Angler which is a celebration of the art of fishing in prose and verse. 163 Clive Bell, Old Friends, Personal Recollections, London: Chatto and Windus, 1956. 164 William Cavendish-Bentinck, 6th Duke of Portland, Men,Women and Things, London: Faber & Faber, 1937.

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I Tatti Settignano Florence Dec. 23 56

Dear Kenneth Thank you for your kind words about my ‘Lotto’. The Ven. exhib. of all his work finished him – for me.165 I was sipping voluptuously rapturously & with no-end of wonder fr. ‘Nude’. From one second to another I was struck down with a bronchitial fever of a most virulent kind. I am over it but has left me exhausted as never before. When I recover I shall turn again to ‘the Nude’ and after many days shall write to you about it and already congratulate you on the way it has been produced. No book of mine was like it. To each and all of you mine and Nicky’s fervent wishes that yr. 195 [sic] may be satisfactory.

Affectionately B.B.

Saltwood Castle Kent

Jan 17th [1957] Darling BB, Your angelic and most generous letter to K about the Nude has given him more pleasure than you can ever know. We shall keep it for ever. He has written to you but I want to thank you from my heart. He owes everything to you and it is so sweet of you to write about his book as you did. Willie M-Owen who is here on his way to you will give you enclosed Christmas card from me with my love. Colette is only just convalescent after pneumonia – when we know where she goes for a holiday, we hope to come to see you – middle February if you are at I Tatti. But we will write to propose a date when we know how she is. If I Tatti is full or you are tired we can stay at a hotel but we want to see you as soon as possible. Best love Jane

165 See n. 19.

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Saltwood Castle Kent Hythe 67190 19 Jan 57

My dear BB, I needn’t tell you what your letter means to me. I literally wept with joy when I read it. That it should please you was the first & chief hope I had in mind all the time I was writing my book.You can see this, for the influence of your ideas is evident on every page – almost in every sentence. But in spite of this there is much to criticise in the book, & it is most gracious of you to pass over these faults, & dwell on its merits. What more could your pupil ask for. The only merit that I would claim for the book is that it sticks to the point & is made up of solid blocks. I have just been reading Malraux on Goya – a succession of brilliant sentences, but they could have been rearranged ad lib. & been equally effective.166 Yes, I would dearly love to hear what you have to say on many points in the book, & would like to come out while it is still in your mind.We would propose ourselves for a few days next month – but I expect you are full up, and it is difficult for us to give an exact date until we know what Colette can do. She has had a long illness – a kind of pneumonia – & it is not yet quite certain when she will be able to travel. She will want to have a change from her family but unfortunately her friend Anna Rasponi167 is going to Chile, & the Waltons are supposed to be coming to England. I have a Louvre meeting on Feb. 14th, but could be in Italy for a few days either side of that date. I confess I would love a change, for India, although exciting, was hard work. I must tell you how much I have enjoyed your musings on revisiting Florence.168 It was good of you to send them – indeed it was good of you to write them, so that your friends might enjoy the pleasure of your company at such an interesting moment. I realised how many things in Florence I myself had not seen for 30 years, if not for 50! Willie Mostyn-Owen is spending the week end with us – a very comfortable companion; & last week I had dinner with Ben169 & Louisa [sic], who are well installed in a pleasant house – not at all Bloomsbury. So I have heard a lot about the progress of your illustrated lists, which will be a real blessing to us all. But I wish you could find a way of starting on the writing more of the thoughts which

166 167 168 169

André Malraux, Saturne: Essai sur Goya, Paris: Pléiade, 1950; English trans. London: Phaidon, 1957. Contessa Anna Rasponi dalle Teste. See Ch. 8 n. 260. Bernard Berenson, ‘Paesaggi e musei’, Corriere della Sera, 22 December 1956. Benedict Nicolson

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pass through your mind. Alas but Boswell & Eckermanns are so rare – as rare as Johnson & Goethe. I have met a number of the great and the talkative, & I can’t remember two words that they said. Yes, the reviews of my book have been astonishingly friendly. It seems to have whizzed past the cheres collegues before they were aware of it. The review in the Times Lit. Sup. is by old Clive Bell170 – he has lost his facilities as a writer. I expected more attacks from the old adherents of the ‘pure aesthetic sensation’ but perhaps they are dying out. The Catholics have written to say that the Greeks were not really homosexual, & the homosexuals to say that I am not sufficiently conscious of the beauty of the male body – which I think is true. My undisguised admiration of the girls has given some mild offence. But on the whole, considering the explosive material I deal with, I have got off lightly. However, nothing that was said, one way or the other, could matter to me, dear BB, compared with your opinion.

With love from us both, and my deepest gratitude. Yours ever Kenneth.

Hotel De Crillon R.C Seine 27.162 Place De La Concorde Ad. Teleg ‘Crilonotel’ Tel: Anjou 24-10 Paris le 15 Feb. 1957

My dear BB, A peaceful evening away from responsibility gives me the chance of writing to say how happy I was to spend a day or two at i Tatti. It is my spiritual home, & every minute there is precious to me. It was sad that you had a reverse just as we arrived, but although you yourself feel everything to be a pain & an effort, it doesn’t show to your friends, who find your company as enchanting as ever. I wonder if you will still be at i Tatti in June. We have it in mind to visit Ashley Clarke at Whitsun, as our friends the Moncktons171 will be there then, & risk removed of striking a diplomatic bore. Perhaps we could come to the Tatti on the way out.

170 Clive Bell’s review, TLS, Friday, 11 January 1957. 171 Walter Monckton

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Well, I have seen the Sassetta Madonna & Angels.172 It is chiefly shop work, some of the angels very silly, & the Virgin’s drapery quite mechanical. It is in a fairly good state, & the gold admirable. The two Saints seem to be of about the same quality as your Beato Raineri, but less good than the Baptist. I wasn’t present at the Conseil when it was bought – I should have felt doubtful about paying such a price, but on the whole in favour as it is such a famous object. Anyway, the price is not high compared to a very feeble sketch by Matisse for which we were asked, yesterday, to pay 20 million francs! I am no longer competent to serve on the Councils of Museums & Galleries, as all modern prices seem to me wicked, & then there is far too much in all of them (I mean the Galleries) already. What a farce buying more pictures for the Louvre & National Gallery, when a third of them aren’t exhibited – & people don’t stop to look at the ones that are. However we did buy one interesting object – a marble head of a man of the late IVc. a.d. vaguely like a Constantine head, but far more Hellenising, and really very subtle (I remember one like it in Istanbul).173 I have asked for a photograph to send you. Our Conseil of the Louvre is in poor shape. Everyone of authority has died, the Conservateurs are therefore free to talk for hours about every proposition, with the result that the members grow bored & set up private conversations, & it ends as bedlam. Fortunately the works of art are unaffected, & I don’t think I have ever enjoyed them more. It reminded me of my visits from school to the National Gallery. You will have heard from Jane that we found Colette in poor shape. The doctors said cheerfully that she may remain like this for months. I am not quite happy about a disease for which there is no evidence at all, & scarcely any precedent. Please give my love to Nicky, and my best thanks for our happy hours at i Tatti.

Ever your affectionate. Kenneth.

172 Sassetta, Madonna and Child surrounded by Six Angels with St Anthony of Padua and St John the Evangelist, 1444, acquired by the Louvre in 1956. 173 In 1957 the Louvre acquired a marble bust of the Emperor Caracalla (No. d’entrée MND 2118, no. usuel Ma 3551).

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[Undated but after the death of Loria in February 1957] Saltwood Castle Kent Hythe 67190

My dear BB. We were so glad to get your letter to Jane in which you sounded as full of life & affection as ever. We had heard that one of your eyes had given new trouble, & were distressed that this should be added to all the other misfortunes which the body afflicts on those who inhabit it so long. What a lot of other miseries have befallen you this year, including the death of Loria.174 We do sympathise most deeply. We have been working away as usual. My television job comes to an end in August & much to everyone’s annoyance I am not offering to be re-appointed. I am very sorry in some ways, as I enjoy active work. But I had taken on too much, & a good deal was being neglected. This place requires more attention than I have been able to give, & it has become too much for Jane to do alone. Our poor Colette was feeling far from well when she came to see you: the germ seems to have made a fresh assault on her. I am sorry, for when she is well she is enchanting gay & responsive. Please forgive my mouldy little letter, dear BB., but I don’t seem to do anything which could interest you – & yet I want to write & tell you that we are thinking of you with sympathy & love.

Yours ever Kenneth.

Hotel de Crillon Place de la Concorde Paris, le 13 March 1957

Darling BB, I do hope you continue to get stronger daily and are able to get outside to the flowers in this lovely weather. I enclose some photos to amuse you also a blue tie like Goethe’s – I couldn’t find the right colour in London. We are here for the Louvre meeting tomorrow and a few days holiday.We went to Versailles with

174 Arturo Loria (1902–1957), who was the same age as Clark, died on 15 February 1957.

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Georges Salles today to see the newly restored theatre at Versailles which is lovely and which the Queen will open in April.175 Georges has decided to leave the Louvre and is to go in May. He seemed rather depressed and we are not sure that though he wanted to retire he wanted to go so soon. Rene Massigli176 came in for tea but is very depressed about the state of the world. Gladwyn Jebb177 also came – jollier than we had seen him in America. They were both going to an Anglo-French dinner in a club called appropriately ‘Les Miserables’! Paris is lovely – warm as June and the chestnut leaves are out. We go to the Besancon exhibition178 tomorrow but you will have the catalogue. Much love and sympathy to you and our daily thoughts and wishes and much love to Nicky.

Ever affect Jane Colette is now well again and I hope will go away in April. We saw the Waltons several times before leaving London – both on crutches but still very uncomplaining. Colin is again working for Laurence Olivier and very happy.179 Alan just back from Switzerland – pretty brown and as eccentric as ever

March 18 57 I Tatti Settignano Florence

Darling Jane Thanks for yours of 13th and enclosures just arrived. Thanks for family news, on the whole satisfactory. Thanks for tie and photos of Saltwood, portrait of K,

175 Queen Elizabeth made a state visit to France in April 1957 at the invitation of President Coty. With the Duke of Edinburgh, she visited Versailles on 9 April 1957. 176 See Ch. 8 n. 49. 177 Gladwyn Jebb (1900–1996) was Acting Secretary-General of the un, 1945–6, until the appointment of the first Secretary-General. He was the uk ambassador to the un in 1950–54 and ambassador in Paris in 1954–60. 178 There was an exhibition of works by Fragonard in 1956 at the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Besançon. 179 Colin Clark became a ‘gofer’ on the film The Prince and the Showgirl (1957), directed by Laurence Olivier and starring Olivier and Marilyn Monroe. In 1995 Colin published The Prince, the Showgirl, and Me:The Colin Clark Diaries, an account that included no story of a romance. In 2000 he published My Week With Marilyn, an account which included a dalliance with Monroe.

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and photo of the Bellini grisaille.180 I want more of the pictures of all kinds and other works of art. It is unexpected news and bad that Salles is leaving.181 Are they foolish enough to want him to go, and whom, I wonder, have they in mind to replace him. I do not envy his successor. I do not wonder Paris looks upon the world-political horizon gloomily. I feel in my bones that these very nearest weeks may determine events for many a day – and not to our liking.182 I am better, pourvue que cela dure,183 but feeble, jumpy, nervous. Yet we can not exclude people altogether. I crawl down to see them, but after half an hour collapse. I long to see real friends, and them only – you or K. and the so few your like.

Ever so much love B.B.

Saltwood Castle Kent Thursday 18th April 57

Darling BB, I do hope you are now feeling less tired and are having better nights and able to go outside and enjoy the sun and the flowers and the hills. We sent you our love by the Lippmanns184 and I have been meaning to write ever since to send you enclosed catalogue of the Stubbs exhibition185 which K thought would interest you. He is so good and such an underrated artist?

180 Giovanni Bellini, Pagan Rite, then owned by the Clarks. It had been in the J. C. Robinson sale at Christie’s, London, in 1902, catalogued as Antonio Pollajuolo (Lot 14). The attribution to Bellini is now questioned and current wisdom ascribes it to Jacopo de’ Barbari. It is not actually a grisaille but in two colours. 181 Salles retired as the Director of the Museums of France in 1957, a post he had held since 1945. 182 In July 1956 Colonel Nasser had occupied the Suez Canal and in late October Israel invaded and occupied Sinai, events which led to the Suez Crisis, a political turning point for Britain and France. In March 1957 Israeli troops left Egypt and the Suez Canal was re-opened. Berenson was horrified when the usa voted alongside the ussr in the un Security Council to condemn the British and French action. 183 French for ‘let’s hope it stays that way’. 184 Walter Lippmann 185 There was a major Stubbs exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, 1957, catalogue by Basil Taylor.

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Soon I hope you will see Colette or rather allow her to visit you and Nicky. She is very well again but needs some sun not that it isn’t lovely here now – in fact we have a drought! The lawns are bright with daisies as it is too dry to mow! But when one is young home isn’t a holiday or a relaxation. She will stay with the Rasponis on her way to Ischia where the Waltons are going to have her to stay and she looks forward very much to seeing you if you and Nicky haven’t too many people. Queen Elizabeth the q.m. is coming to stay here end of June. She leaves us for a destroyer to sail to Dunkirk to unveil the Guards Memorial.This means bringing Lady Spencer, an equerry 2 maids, 2 chauffeurs a footman and a detective so I am slightly panicked. However David and Mary Crawford are coming to stay and will be a great help. I’ll write and describe it to you afterwards! We lunched with your old friend the Majesty of Sweden today before leaving London. He is already looking forward to his visit to you in the autumn and as you can imagine we all talked about you with the greatest love and admiration. We shall be alone here for Eas[t]er as K is tired and also wants to write. Alan and Colin will I hope come over for a night. The latter very busy working for Larry. Colette will tell you about the new play. Colin then goes round Europe with Larry with Titus.186 He is very lucky and very happy.

Best love from us both dear B.B. to you and Nicky Ever affec Jane

I Tatti Settignano Florence

Apr. 27, 57

Dearest Jane Thanks for the dear, newsy letter of 18th. It reached me yesterday. Also for catalogue of Stubbs show. Colette dined a few days ago and was charming. She is truly now une jeune fille en fleur187 – such exquisite throat, neck and arms. Face shaped like yours but

186 Peter Brook’s production of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, starring Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, had opened in London in 1955 and a touring production went to Paris, Venice, Belgrade, Vienna and Warsaw in May–June 1957. 187 À l’ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs is the title of the second volume of Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu.

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with expressions of K. Talked easily, no juvenile aggressiveness, or inhibitions. I envy her going & staying in Ischia with the Waltons.They live in one of the most [illeg] spots I have ever seen & felt. Spring has never been so wonderful, such tulips, irises, lilies, wisteria as never before. Sun very warm, but high up when I take my noonday walk le fond de l’air is still nippy. That half hour I enjoy being alive. The rest of the day is full of woes altho’ I forget them when talk is stimulating, or when I listen to music. The re-discovery of Stubbs may be a change a big one, of a return to what a gifted and trained eye can see, and paint. Therefore I welcome it. I wish I could see Allan [sic] or what he is writing. Glad that Colin has found a job that suits him.

Dearest love to yr.self, to K and best wishes fr. [illeg] this visit. B.B.

B5 Albany Tuesday 26th May [1957?]

Darling B.B., Colette got back on Sunday looking very gay and well in spite of the worst crossing for years on the Channel. There were no seats much less a cabin so the sailors tucked her up amongst the luggage where the spray didn’t penetrate. Jock Murray188 spent last weekend with us – poor K had ’flu so was in bed. He says you are going to Mollie Berkeley again for your birthday. I wish we could be there. Colette says you were very well and looked it when she saw you and Nicky. She couldn’t have enjoyed that more. Colin is on tour with the Oliviers – Paris with Titus was a triumph. We saw Rene Massigli last week after he had given Colin and the Oliviers supper at Meurice!189 I also had a letter from Georges about the success they had. They are now in Venice at La Fenice. Then Belgrade. Colin is v. happy and v. lucky to have found his metier. Do you get the

188 John (Jock) Murray (1908–1993) was Clark’s publisher and the driving force behind the family firm of John Murray, whose origins and roots were in the 18th century. Believing in the importance of a personal relationship between publisher and author, he took infinite care of them and was much loved and respected in return. 189 Le Meurice is one of the highly luxurious and expensive hotels and restaurants in Paris.

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Sunday Times? K is doing six articles for them on pictures. If you don’t get it I will send them to you.190 He gives up the i.t.a. in August – till then he is overworked and tired. We fly to Rome for Whitsun to stay with the Ashley Clarkes. I wish we could take an aeroplane to Florence. But please may we come back to stay with you in the autumn.

Our very best love to you and Nicky darling B.B. Ever affectionately Jane

[Postmarked 1957–vi (i.e. June)] Postcard of Hotel Excelsior, NAPOLI. [addressed by BB to:] Sir K Clark. Saltwood Castle

Congratulations on ‘Meninas’. To my mind better than anything you have written before. I affectionately envy you. Here to compose rest – till 13?

B.B.

190 Clark wrote three separate series of articles for the Sunday Times, each prominently featured article being on an individual painting. First series: On Looking at Pictures 12 May 1957; Titian: The Entombment (Louvre) 19 May 1957; Leonardo: Virgin with St Anne (then at the Royal Academy, now at the National Gallery, London) 26 May 1957; Velásquez: Las Meninas (Prado, Madrid) 2 June 1957; Delacroix: Crusaders Entering Constantinople (Louvre, Paris) 9 June 1957; Seurat: Une Baignade (then at the Tate, now at the National Gallery, London) 16 June 1957; Rembrandt: Self-Portrait (Kenwood House, London) 23 June 1957. Second series: Courbet: Painter’s Studio (then at the Louvre, now at Musée d’Orsay, Paris) 28 September 1958; Raphael: Miraculous Draught of Fishes (Victoria and Albert Museum, London) 5 October 1958; Constable: Study for the Leaping Horse (Victoria and Albert Museum, London) 12 October 1958; Botticelli: Nativity ( National Gallery, London) 19 October 1958; Watteau: L’Enseigne de Gersaint (then Dahlem Museum, now Charlottenburg Palace, Berlin) 26 October 1958. Third series: El Greco: Espolio (Toledo, Spain) 27 September 1959; Vermeer: Painter’s Studio (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna) 4 October 1959; van der Weyden: Descent from the Cross (Prado, Madrid) 18 October 1959; Turner: Snowstorm (then National Gallery, now Tate Britain, London) 25 October 1959. All the articles, expanded and edited, and with an extra article on Goya’s The Third of May, 1808, were issued as Looking at Pictures, London: John Murray, 1960.

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Saltwood Castle Kent Hythe 67190 7 Sept ’57

My dear BB, It was so good of you to send me the article on the art of seeing,191 and I have read it several times with great enjoyment & admiration. In fact it seems to me one of the most beautiful & valuable things you have written both as a revelation of your own responses to art & nature as a reasonable objection to modern art. This question how much we enjoy what we see as a result of some painter having taught us how to look is a delicate one, worth investigating. One grand exception is the beauty of industrial towns – perhaps more sublime than beautiful, but what ever word one selects, Sheffield & Newcastle can look absolutely stunning.Yet no painter has ever tackled them – nor even tried. Thames Monets are completely transformed & Whistlers warehouses are a different effect. Turner could have done it – if the scenes had existed then. Then I am not sure how far the ability to see mountains as beautiful did not precede rather than follow the artists vision – also snow, which was much enjoyed, but was practically a forbidden subject before Courbet. Talking of snow, we have just come back from a large exhibition of Monet in Edinburgh, & I must say it was an eye opener.192 He gained greatly by being seen as a whole, & the years 1878 to 1884 when everyone else was stuck are really marvellous. I will bring you out one of the Catalogues in hopes that we may meet in Venice – although I expect that Cooper will have sent you one. As usual with Cooper it is a masterly performance. His energy & ability have no limit – would that he was a more lovable character. We are off to Abano on Monday, & I hope it may cure Jane’s lumbago or whatever it is, which quite spoils her pleasure in gardening – & gardening is really the only thing she enjoys. I am given fearful warnings about the exhausting effects of the cure & am rather worried for her. I shall have lots of time to read & am lugging out Krautheimer’s immense volume on Ghiberti193 which looks very good in its New Yorkish way – also many small volumes of Ruskin as I am at last free to follow your advice & attempt to make a selection of his work with

191 Bernard Berenson, Iterum Censeo, 1957. 192 The Edinburgh International Festival, August–September 1957, featured Claude Monet: An Exhibition of Paintings, catalogue by Douglas Cooper. 193 Richard Krautheimer, Ghiberti, co-authored with Trude Krautheimer-Hess, Princeton University Press and Oxford University Press, 1956.

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an introduction.194 I returned to the task this week – god, what pages of rant one has to struggle through! But I have fished up some genuine pearls. I had a message from Jock Murray that you liked my attempt at journalism – all but the last sentences in Rembrandt, which of course was what some people liked best!195 I tried to make them various & to keep a drowsy senator awake after his Sunday lunch,196 & some people did need them who had certainly never thought about a work of art before. But I am always worried by the plaudits of the bien pensants, which are never [illeg] unless they detect some compromise with their own conventional values. I dread trying another six, but curiously agreed to do so when I did the first, never thinking that they would be required. My television years are over. I was a great success and beloved by all! An experience I never had in the art world, so I am sorry to leave. I suppose some inherited commercial instinct & a slight trace of vulgarity made me more successful with music hall proprietors than I ever was with museum directors. From all I have heard this summer has not gone too badly for you. I shall try to come and see you wherever you are during the next fortnight – if at i Tatti I could leave Jane for a night at Abano. Could Nicky send us a postcard to the Hotel Orologio, Abano Terme, Padova, to tell us where you will be? I long for the pleasure of your company.

Heaps of love to Nicky Ever your affectionate, Kenneth.

Grand Hotel Royal Orologio Abano Terme 21st [September 1957]

Darling B.B., How lovely to hear from K how quickly you have recovered – talking beautiful philosophy and walking miles in the country as usual! K couldn’t

194 Kenneth Clark, Ruskin Today, London: John Murray, 1964. 195 The Sunday Times article on Rembrandt ended ‘I suddenly recognise the shallowness of my mortality, the narrowness of my sympathies and the trivial nature of my occupation.The humility of Rembrandt’s colossal genius warns the art historian to shut up.’ 196 Probably a cryptic reference to a misremembered anecdote from his schoolboy Latin lessons. The Roman historian Suetonius narrated thus: ‘A noted incident concerns Aponius Saturninus who was nodding off on the benches. The auctioneer had been instructed by Caligula not to overlook the praetorian gentleman [KC’s drowsy senator?] who was nodding with frequent movements of his head. The bidding was not concluded until thirteen gladiators had been knocked down to the unconscious sleeper for nine million sesterces.’

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have enjoyed seeing you and darling Nicky more or been happier with you now that B.B. was feeling better again. I wish I could have come but as we have to go home tomorrow (as K has a meeting of the Arts Council which is very important and there is no money and the operas are going bankrupt) the doctor wanted me to stay. But it was very disappointing. However I look forward to seeing you in the spring if not sooner. We lunched at Villa Maser197 yesterday and everyone was very kind and of course were missing your visit very much and in your honour we lunched upstairs among those marvellous Veroneses. But there were 20 people at lunch and ten children staying in the house and a birthday so I really don’t think it would have done you much good to be there! By three o’clock another 15 people had arrived and our hostess hadn’t a clue who some were. K was very happy he had had the enchanting experience of again being alone with you and you were sweet to him. Best love to you and Nicky and Alda Jane

Grand Hotel Royal Orologio Abano Terme (Italia) 90-111 22 Sept ’57

My dear BB., It was such a joy to see you & Nicky. I have never enjoyed a short visit more, or felt more completely in my old home; & the greatest treat was to go once more on that beautiful walk. Thank you again, dear BB., for all you have taught me of what is really valuable in Civilised life. We went to Maser yesterday & of course our hostess loudly lamented your absence, & still seems determined that you should go there. But I must say I

197 The Villa Barbaro, also known as the Villa di Maser, is a celebrated villa in the Veneto, designed by Palladio with frescoes by Veronese and sculptures by Alessandro Vittoria. It was built between 1560 and 1570 for Daniele Barbaro (who was the ambassador to Elizabeth i of England) and his brother Marcantonio (who was an ambassador to Charles ix of France). In 1934, Count Giuseppe Volpi di Misurata (1877–1947), a businessman and politician who had been the minister of finance for Mussolini in 1925–8 and who founded the Venice Film Festival, acquired the villa for his daughter Marina (1908–1977), who carried out extensive restoration.

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think you would find it very tiring. This jolly prosperous goodhearted Italian society makes such a noise. I was deafened & exhausted by the end of luncheon. However, they were very kind & considerate, & let us slip away to visit Palladian tempietto, which I had never seen, & which is enchanting. Jane is very sad to have missed seeing you both – she is writing to tell you so herself. If we may, we shall come back in the Spring, & hope for more walks and talks. With much love to Nicky

Ever your affectionate Kenneth Clark

4 St James’s Square198 London, s.w.1. Whitehall 9737 14 Oct ’57

My dear BB. Here are very few photographs which I promised you – the Pollajuolo workshop fragment from the de Pass Collection & the Jacopo da Empoli from the same source;199 the Raphael recently acquired by the Ashmolean;200 & a drawing of ours, which I bought 30 years ago, so you may have had it already – but I have just come on the photo & thought it rather attractive. I don’t know what it is. I have a few rather more worthy offerings, but they are down in Saltwood, & we are spending a week in London to clear up a few of the Augean stables which I seem to create all round me. We have just been lunching with Ben & Luisa – they seem very peaceful & happy, & their little daughter is like an infant Virgin in a Spanish picture.

Ever your affectionate Kenneth.

198 The Headquarters of the Arts Council. Clark was the Chairman in 1953–60. 199 See Marianne Joannides, Exhibition Catalogue of Master Drawings from the De Pass Collection, Royal Cornwall Museum, Truro, 1994, pp. 12–13, no. 1: Youth brandishing a Cutlass (catalogued as by Maso de Finiguerra, 1426–64); pp. 36–7, no. 13: Lady kneeling in Profile to the Right (catalogued as by Jacopo da Empoli, c. 1554–1640). 200 Probably Raphael, Allegorical Female Figure, c. 1514–15, red chalk, purchased (Eldon Fund) 1956.

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Saltwood Castle Kent Hythe 67190 16 Nov. ’57

My dear BB., The illustrated ‘lists’ had just arrived & are in every way beyond my expectations.201 They are admirably produced, & the selection of illustrations exactly what was needed, that is to say lots of obscure painters represented by signed or documented pictures. What a marvellous basis for the study of Italian painting! The effect is to make your work far more impressive than before. Critics have naturally concentrated on the great names, & forgotten the huge substructure of knowledge of minor painters on which all your judgements rested. It is moving to see a work begun so long ago brought fulfilment &, as far as is humanly possible, perfection. All future scholars will be grateful to you, and I have reason to be more grateful than most. I hear from Colette that you had an exquisite autumn, sunny and warm, & I hope that you were able to enjoy it. She is still in Copenhagen, where we went to see her. I think she has got rid of her virus infection at last. I struggle away happily with dozen different tasks – lectures, broadcasts, my selection of Ruskin & of course my work at the Arts Council. All goes well as long as I can be at Saltwood from Friday to Monday – without that I degenerate. My whole aim is not to have guests. I love seeing friends, but for meals only: if I feel that they are keeping me from my work or the garden my love turns instantly to loathing. I know I promised to send you some photographs – they are ready & you shall have them almost as soon as you receive this letter. The only old picture of note which I have seen lately for the first time is the Dürer St. Jerome in the Wilderness, which is exhibited in the Ashmolean.202 It is what used to be called a gem – for once it is a painting and not a coloured drawing & the landscape is

201 Bernard Berenson, Italian Pictures of the Renaissance: A List of the Principal Artists and their Works, with an Index of Places,Venetian School, 2 vols, London: Phaidon, c. 1957. 202 This small panel, c. 1496, which had been in the collection of Sir Francis Bacon at Raveningham Hall, was rediscovered by David Carritt in 1957 who recognised it as by Dürer. It was previously attributed to the Veronese painter Giovanni Francesco Caroto (1488–1555). Now in the National Gallery, London, (NG 6563), bought with the assistance of the Heritage Lottery Fund, the Art Fund and Mr J. Paul Getty Jr through the American Friends of the National Gallery in 1996.

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as rich as Altdorfer. I was looking at the marvellous landscape of the Mantegna at Copenhagen, as micromosaically perfect as the Madonna of the Quarries,203 & thinking how much Durer owed to him as well as to Bellini.You will have read about the exhibition at Manchester.204 Nothing new, except in the 17th century where the indefatigable Mahon has furnished two rooms with his favourites.205 Mahon is like the fable of the dumb wife – when I knew him first he never spoke; now he never stops & has become a terrible bore. Like all monomaniacs, he has irresistible powers of persuasion, & I foresee the National Gallery buying nothing but seicento for years to come.You know that they gave a stiff price for the enormous Guido from the Lichtenstein, which a few years ago one could have paid a firm of contractors to take away.206 Jane sends her love to you & Nicky. She is well and happy and seems to be the better for Abano, so I expect we shall go there again. We saw Willie Mostyn Owen last week – debonair & well-informed and genuinely friendly. He seems to have great embattlements which prevent him having his mother for a month or two more.

With heaps of love to Nicky, Ever your affectionate Kenneth.

203 Mantegna’s Christ as the Suffering Redeemer, 1495–1500, Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen, Denmark, is stylistically related to his La Madonna delle Cave, 1488–90, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence. 204 The City of Manchester Art Gallery organised an exhibition of European paintings in October– December 1957 to commemorate the famous Art Treasures of Great Britain exhibition which had been held in Manchester in 1857. That exhibition had been one of the outstanding art events of the 19th century. Drawn entirely from private collections, it assembled some 16,000 objects: more than 2000 paintings, 1000 watercolours and sections devoted to drawings, engravings, photographs, architectural drawings, furniture, ceramics, glass, metalwork, ivories, enamels and arms and armour. The 1957 exhibition was a much more modest affair: just 250 European paintings were exhibited, many from private collections, and as many as possible of those which had featured in the 1857 exhibition. 205 Denis Mahon 206 As a newly appointed trustee, Mahon persuaded his fellow trustees of the National Gallery to purchase an enormous painting by Guido Reni, Adoration of the Shepherds, c. 1640 (NG 6270), from the Prince of Lichtenstein. According to Peter Cannon-Brookes, Mahon would tell with relish how, because the picture was too large for him to study in the Schloss Vaduz, it was taken outside by two stalwart lederhosen-clad retainers, but the wind caught it and it was blown into the valley below with the two retainers still hanging onto it.There are other versions of the story, including an impaling on a fence.

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Dec 27, 57 I Tatti Settignano Florence

My Dear K. Thanks for all your and Jane’s missives and now for the photos and for promise of more. I want news of each member of your family, particularly of the ‘problemchild’ Alan. He fascinates me. John Pope-Hennessy is spending ten days with us. Of course we talk endless shop about the Florentines and my next task. I really do not know how I shall go on with it. Eyes, hearing, stamina so reduced! I do not [illeg] words of comfort from America either. Things there are going in a way more and more estranging. Every possible good wish to each and all of you. Affectionately B.B.

[16 March 1958] Saltwood Castle Kent Hythe 67190

My dear BB. I was glad to see your writing, but very sad to read your letter207 & know how miserable you feel. It is horrible to be in continuous discomfort & pain, & for you, in particular, to know that there is so much you could be doing if given a chance. I have been meaning to write to you about a correspondence I have had with an American publisher named Holt. He asked me to do your biography. I told him that I had long ago thought of doing this & promised it to Hamish Hamilton.208 Then when Mrs Sprigge set to work it seemed foolish to publish

207 Letter missing. 208 See Jamie Hamilton

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two biographies at the same time. I have, however, always kept in mind writing a non discursive & personal book of BB and his circle, & should like, with your agreement, to take up the project again. Hamish Hamilton would like to publish it – what arrangements he makes in the us it is for him to say. I think it would be something of lasting value – the picture of a vanished civilisation, as well as the portrait of a philosopher. All goes very well with us. Jane is extremely well & perfectly happy as long as she stays in Saltwood. Alan has completed a second novel, which I haven’t seen. The first was funny & well done in a horrifying way a sort of up to date Evelyn Waugh. But it was about the Stock Exchange, which is such an animal world that we lost interest in places. The second is about his life in Rye.209 He has been for two months at Zermatt, where he skis & writes. His brother has been with him, but has now returned to the entertainment industry which has a paramount fascination for him. Poor Colette, after getting perfectly well, caught jaundice, & is much pulled down by it. It is sad to waste the flower of her youth like this. My public life aborts [sic] most of my time, and grows more & more complicated. I have been trying to do some television programmes which so far haven’t been a success:210 it ought to cure me of trying to popularise art. Alas, I have had to say that I will do some more Sunday Times articles, and I have absolutely no appetite for them. Sequels are always a mistake: the first lot just struck lucky, & I won’t get that back again.211

Jane sends her love, & please give our warmest love to Nicky. Ever your affectionate Kenneth.

209 Alan started work on his novel about the Stock Exchange, Bargains at Special Prices (provisionally and originally titled Guilt Edged), in 1955 and it was eventually published in 1960. The vicissitudes of its creation and publication, including the lawsuits, are chronicled in Ion Trewin, Alan Clark: The Biography, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2009. His second novel, Summer Season, was about a young man called Kenneth Crane who takes a post as temporary tutor in a small seaside town and finds himself a prime suspect for murder. It was published in 1963. Alan moved to Rye in 1956 and eventually owned several houses there. He spent the early part of 1957 in Zermatt and purchased property there in 1958. 210 The programmes which Clark made for Associated Television, in black and white, were broadcast as follows: ‘Is Art Necessary?’, 8 February 1958; ‘Encounters in the Dark’ (in conversation with Henry Moore in the British Museum at night), 17 March 1958; ‘Should Every Picture Tell a Story?’ 14 April 1958; ‘Do we want Public Figures?’ (in conservation with Osbert Lancaster and Hugh Casson), 19 May 1958; ‘Can Art be Democratic?’ 15 December 1958;‘Can Photography be an Art?’ 9 March 1959; ‘Should we have him Painted?’ 23 March 1959; ‘What is Sculpture?’ 6 April 1959. 211 See n. 190.

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I Tatti Settignano Florence March 24 1958

Dear K Thanks for yours of the 16th. I am so sorry about Colette and what you write about Alan. I have a ‘hunch’ that something unusual will come out of him. I understand too well how broken engagements can be. Surely nobody of yr. generation has your gift as interpreter of art to Das Grosse Publicum. Nothing comparable to your paper on ‘Las Meninas’ not to speak of your fabulous [illeg] on ‘The Nude’. You still have unpublished the exquisite admirable pages on Rembrandt which you kindly let me see years ago. x As for writing about me.You thrilled me once by proposing to do me as the ‘New Winckleman’. Nothing could make me happier ‘exalt my heart’. Why were you put off, and remain put off by Mrs Sprigge. Her book is a successstory of a bright Jew-boy from the meanest birth and status built up by Mrs Gardner and Lord Duveen into a being of maturity and affluence. It is a book, by the way that will never be published. One publisher after another takes it, keeps it a certain time, and then returns it. It is burthened with an advance of £200. In any event not to appear in my life. Doubts arise but I am fit to live some years still. So the field is free for the ‘new Winckleman’. A rumour reached me years ago that you had in mind to write about English in Florence and centering on Vernon Lee. I wonder how any one could do that. The only survivor who knows, and recalls is myself. To do it on documents? What documents are there? I doubt whether there is [illegible] haste. So there would [be] time to discuss. I only wish to be written about as a historian, thinker, etc and not a myth. Love to you all Yours B.B. PS let me hope you can decipher these [illegible] and thoughts. My handwriting is so hard to read that I cannot decipher it myself.

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c/o Christabel A[berconway] Maenan Hall Llanrwst North Wales Saturday [17 May 1958]

Dearest B.B., We are so glad to have Nicky’s postcard saying that the dialthermy was helping a little and that you were working again in spite of the pain. It is sad the surgical waistcoat was useless. Nothing is so tiring as constant pain and I do hope B.B. is a little easier now. We saw Umberto at the Italian Embassy last week but he had no extra news. That reception was far too crowded – embassies always seem to invite twice too many people. But the State Banquet the night before was very beautiful and great fun.212 One advantage of being older is that one knows and likes so many people and is glad to see them at intervals. I was also delighted to have the excuse to have a new grand dress! When I said Embassy’s usually spoilt their parties, the great exception is of course the Schwarzenbergs.213 They have really taken the place the Massiglis used to have and everyone enjoys it. I hope you got the postcard we all sent you from Saltwood (and Georges Salles) a few weeks ago. K has nearly finished his television series which is a relief. The one next Monday is on outdoor sculpture and is I think very good but they take too much time.214 We had a glimpse of Johnny and Margaret Walker – alas too short. Alan Jarvis (head of Canada n.g.) comes to stay soon with his unknown wife (a widow with three children). He is a very old friend of ours – we knew him first as a Rhodes scholar.215 Vincent Massey216 said he was making a great success of

212 Giovanni Gronchi (1887–1978), 3rd President of the Italian Republic (1955–62) and a Christian Democrat, made a state visit to London in May 1958. On 13 May the Queen hosted a state banquet at Buckingham Palace. 213 See n. 16. 214 Clark’s television programme, broadcast on Monday 19 May, was in fact ‘Do we want public figures?’, with Osbert Lancaster and Hugh Casson. 215 Alan Jarvis, the young and charismatic director of the National Gallery of Canada from 1955, had already won a Rhodes scholarship, managed an aircraft factory, written a best-seller, produced films, run a slum settlement and moved in a London social circle that included Noël Coward and Vivien Leigh. He shook the Canadian art world out of its complacency and introduced modern art into the National Gallery. In 1959 he had to resign after a disagreement about his purchase of works by European painters. 216 Charles Vincent Massey (1887–1967) was a Canadian lawyer and diplomat who served as the Governor General of Canada in 1952–9.

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the Gallery. We shall see it as we have arranged to go to Canada in the autumn. We have never been and it seems a pity not to cash in on a Governor-General when he asks you to stay! I think you and Nicky know Alan Jarvis? In between ordinary toil K works away on his proposed Ruskin anthology but it is a long job, as some of it is quite unreadable though it has to be read, in case. K sends his best love and we will propose ourselves to see you as soon as K is freer and you are better and not too harried by visitors and Nicky thinks it possible. We shall not go to Brussels – only to Amsterdam for 24 hours to see Roel’s exhibition end of June. Best love to you and darling Nicky and I do hope the pain is easier or has gone

Ever affectionately Jane

Saltwood Castle Kent Hythe 67190 22 May [1958]

My dear BB, I cannot tell you how touched I was to receive your card217 commending my Ghiberti review.218 I had thought it very flat-footed, & was quite prepared for Ben to decline it; & I certainly never supposed that anyone would read it. We were so distressed to read of the latest affliction which has assailed you – great pain added to perpetual discomfort. Alas, there are no possible words of consolation. I am glad to hear that David Crawford is going out to i Tatti as I know you will enjoy his company, & he yours. We are all well & happy. I wish you could once have seen Saltwood on such a day as this – it is an earthly paradise. At this time of year there are too many things going on in London, & I have missed almost ten days of Spring here. As

217 Card missing. 218 Clark wrote a lengthy and admiring review of Krautheimer’s ‘noble work of scholarship’ on Ghiberti, Burlington Magazine, May 1958.

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you know, I do programmes on television, and which now go quite well. Heaven knows what il popolo make of them. They bring me the money necessary to live here. But I sometimes reflect that by selling one of my 19th century pictures at the present grotesque prices I could make just as much & could spend rather more time here. However, I suppose the fact is that I have in me a buried actor, and rather enjoy giving performances. Also it is interesting to try and put things simply, in a way which even the lazy, ignorant television public can understand. But I must start writing again soon, & looking forward to making my first sketch of BB. & his circle. As you say, it will be difficult to find documentation for many members of the circle, & I fear I shall have to bother you with some questions. I am not even sure how far to make the book personal. I do not send you London news, partly because I know so little, & partly because Jamie Hamilton says he keeps you posted. We have had a Gronchi week – rather magnificent, as the English do that sort of thing well; & now we are having a Russian week with the Moscow Art Theatre doing a marvellous series of Chekov plays.219 If only Jane & I could do with six hours sleep – unfortunately we require eight, & prefer 10, & simply cannot go to late parties. All our love & wishes for the least possible discomfort, & love to Nicky.

Your affectionate K.

219 The Moscow Art Theatre, which had been co-founded by Stanislavsky, visited Britain in 1958 with 9 plays, all performed in Russian, 5 of which were by Chekov.

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Saltwood Castle Kent Hythe 67190 14 July ’58

My dear BB, I wonder if you have heard that our Alan is getting married.220 The whole episode is characteristic of his oddity. [He took a fancy to a girl who lived near him in Rye.] After a time the parents became alarmed, & took her away to Malta (her father is a Colonel in the Army) where they destroyed in classic style, Alan’s letters to their daughter, & hers to him. However when she came back they were equally devoted to each other, & soon after her 16th birthday Alan came to us & said that he wanted us to meet someone whom he wanted to marry. The first we had heard of her, of course. Fortunately she turned out to be most attractive – charming to look at & with none of the silliness or self-consciousness of most young girls. So we spurred him on, and her parents consented, & the marriage takes place on the 31st of this month. It seems to me no more chancy than any other marriage. Alan is capable of great devotion, & will really try to look after his little shrimp. But he is terribly imprudent & impulsive; so that they may both get into trouble before she is old enough to talk sense to him. He still hasn’t had one of his books printed, though I think they are excellent of their kind & will one day bring him in a reasonable amount of fame and fortune. He is taking his beloved to Italy, and is most anxious to visit you, if only for a few minutes.221 I know you don’t see many visitors now, but if you felt up to it the sight of this strange young couple might please & interest you. We have been distressed and hear how wretched you had been feeling, & hope that things are a little easier now. We are all well, though rather flustered by the approaching marriage. In a fit of madness I even bought some pictures at the sale of the last remnants of the Cook Collection, including the very beautiful Alonso Cano of Tobias & the Angel, and a Giulio Romano; also a splendid Granet.They were sold for the price of a small Cézanne pencil drawing. I nearly

220 Alan and Jane Beuttler first met in mid-August 1956. See Introduction above. Her father was a serving army colonel, often overseas, and they had bought a house in Rye, where Jane was at school, as a permanent base. There appears to have been immediate interest on both sides. They were married at the Grosvenor Chapel, South Audley Street, London, and a reception was held at the headquarters of the Arts Council in Piccadilly. The wedding attracted much press coverage, including newsreels and television, in part because of the society interest and in part because of the age of the bride who was only just of legal age. Colin Clark was best man. 221 The honeymoon was spent visiting, by car, the First World War battlefields in Flanders, Nuremberg, Positano and Zermatt. They did not go to I Tatti.

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bought the Botticelli Pentecost, as the Virgin is so beautiful, but didn’t know where to put it.222 How queer museums are! Much love to Nicky – I do pray that the weather isn’t too hot so you can stay comfortable at i Tatti.

Love from Jane. Ever your affectionate Kenneth.

Saltwood Castle Kent Hythe 67190 5 Sept ’58

My dear BB., We have been worrying all summer that it is such a long time since we saw you last, & when we suddenly realised that we should be away in Canada till the middle of October we sent you the telegram suggesting we came out for a sight of you before we went. Of course it would be far nicer for us to come in November when you are back at i Tatti, & I hope that you may then be feeling rather more comfortable – or less miserably uncomfortable. Our summer has passed with its usual succession of incidents which sound all-important at the time & have now vanished from the memory – all but Alan’s wedding which really was memorable, as they both looked so beautiful & happy, & Alan’s whole character seemed suddenly to change & loose its defensive inconvenience. I hope you may yet see him & his bride when they are in Italy again, as you would love to look at her.

222 See Herbert Cook. The Cook Collection was sold at Sotheby’s, London, 25 June 1958, 136 lots. See Elon Danziger, ‘The Cook Collection, its Founder and its Inheritors’, The Burlington Magazine, vol. 146, no. 1216 (July 2004), pp. 444–58). Clark purchased: Alonso Cano (1601–1667), Tobias and the Angel; Giulio Romano (1499?–1546), St Catherine (copy from Christ and Saints altarpiece in Parma); François Granet (1775–1849), The Interior of a Sacristy, Rome. The Descent of the Holy Ghost, 1500–10, attributed to Botticelli and his workshop, was acquired by Birmingham City Art Gallery in 1959 with help from the nacf; it measures over 2m in both height and width.

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We decided to stay at home all summer, & have been rewarded with the worst weather on record – deluges of rain & an atmosphere like Bombay.223 I went to Madrid for two days to see the Rococo exhibition – not that I like 18th c. art, but I am doing a new series of articles for the Sunday Times, & I had a fancy to write about Watteau’s Enseigne de Gersaint, which is on exhibition there.224 It is as beautiful as I had remembered, & I have managed to write something about it which is up to sample. The rest of the articles seem to me a little worse than the first lot – not from want of trying, but the formula becomes monotonous, & they are lacking in freshness. I remember your urging me to attempt the Primavera. Alas, I dare not. I have tried my hand at the National Gallery Nativity, but I fear that the result is a bit pretentious.225 One way & another I came to regret the whole enterprise – it is like writing advertising copy (or so I imagine – I have never written any). I am also dreading our visit to Canada, as I have to make a lot of speeches on the subject which bores me most – public patronage of the arts. The poor Canadians have decided to spend a lot of money on art & want to be told how virtuous they are. But my sympathies are all with the New Zealanders who have passed a law prohibiting the import of any works of art at all – a truly democratic measure. Signor Papi has very kindly sent me his book of a visit to i Tatti.226 Of course I can’t make head or tail of it. Every now and then a few images emerge from the swirling mist of words – hats, sticks, the house cat & so forth – & I clutch at them desperately, but they vanish or are transformed into something else before I can grasp them. People always say how pragmatic the English are, and I certainly feel it as I flounder in this sort of metaphysical eloquence. By the way, I met, for the first time, yesterday Mary McCarthy,227 & liked her. As I have never read one of her books I had no preconceived ideas about her. It seems that she promised to translate Papi’s book – not an easy task.

223 In 1958 there was a notably wet summer and September saw violent storms especially along the south coast of England. On 5 September occurred one of the fiercest hailstorms on record, with tornadoes which moved from Sussex into Kent, followed by rainstorms and flooding. 224 See n. 190. 225 Botticelli, Mystic Nativity, 1500 (NG 1034). 226 Robert Papi, Una visita al signor Berenson e ai Tatti, Florence : Sansoni, 1958. Papi was a good friend of Arturo Loria and was married to the daughter of the dealer Count Contini-Bonacossi. 227 Mary McCarthy (1912–1989), American author, critic and political activist. Her two books about Italy, Venice Observed and Stones of Florence, had been published in 1955 and 1956.

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Jane sends her love to you & Nicky. She is very well, but needs a holiday from Saltwood, which is too big for her to look after alone – & I have been trying to write, so haven’t been much help. Much love, dear BB., & sympathy in your afflictions, from your affectionate K.

Government House Ottawa 7th October [1958]

Darling Nicky and darling B.B., Very pleased to hear a p.c. has arrived from Nicky at Saltwood – but alas the silly country secretary hasn’t had the wits to enclose it. Have written to have it sent to Boston and will write again from there. Meantime we have thought of you both so much and with such sympathy and do hope poor darling B.B. is more comfortable and able to move without pain. Have been looking for photographs to amuse B.B. but wherever we have been either there are no works of art or photographs were proudly dispatched years ago. Quebec as you know is a provincial city with no works of art – it was very romantic staying at the Citadel with h.e. guarded by little red soldiers and their white goat with gold horns! But at the State banquets we never succeeded in meeting anyone who had heard of the visual arts existing much less seen more than an engraving of a rose or a Napoleonic soldier. Tho’ they were all nice clever people Lord Chief Justices and the like! One exception was dear Father Levesque – the Dominican head of Montmerency228 – the modern chapel he has had built there is tiny and without stained glass but is the most beautiful we have ever seen except the Matisse chapel at Vence. After Quebec we were allowed loose in the Ritz in Montreal – now we are back in our prams pushed about by dear little Canadian adc’s, and occasionally dropping our toys over board so as to give them something to do. (It is wonderful how quickly one can get accustomed to being grand!).

228 Georges-Henri Lévesque (1903–2000), priest, sociologist, Christian humanist, was the creator and administrator of the Dominican Order’s Maison Montmorency (1955–63).

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The Montreal gallery very moderate except for its objects – Japanese porcelain Chinese bronzes etc which are enviable. Johnny Steegman229 told us that he had sent you photographs of the Italian pictures. Our most enjoyable experience was a visit to the Randalls’ (nee Rosentahl!) He was not there but she was beautiful as an Egyptian relief and with a remote dignity very agreeable on this side of the Atlantic. They have marvellous drawings, mostly medieval. You and B.B. would adore them – a Hugo van der Goes silverpoint virgin which is both large and exquisite – two shaky shadowy Durers in pen, endless dear little Gothic virgins – the famous Memling angel (looking very Leonardesque) etc. Amongst the miniatures there was a beautiful and interesting dark Signorelli – quite large for a miniature – of the building of the Ark. I asked Mrs Rosentahl (sorry Mrs Randall) to send B.B. a photograph and she promised to gladly so I hope she will but of course you are sure to have it. All B.B.’s books lined the bookcase and she said how much she and her husband regretted never having met B.B. K lectured on Turner at McGill and J-F Millet at the Catholic University – the latter in French. Here he is mostly talking on the Arts Council to the Canada Council but tomorrow at the Museum he is calling his talk ‘The Blot & the Diagram’ (Leonardo and the Tachists – B.B. will understand the idea). I am having a v. enjoyable holiday nothing to do but dress up. Dickie Mountbatten230 is also staying here.When they wanted to cut expenses in Delhi, they managed to do with 380 gardeners instead of 420 – difficult lives people lead. Forgive this long scribble – no need to read any of it – its only point is to bring our best love and sympathy to you both. Ever affect. Jane

229 John Steegman (1899–1966), was British-born and spent much of his career at the National Portrait Gallery and with the British Council. He was the head of the Museum of Fine Arts in Montreal in 1952–9. 230 Lord Mountbatten (1900–1979) was the last Viceroy of India (1947). He was the First Sea Lord in 1954–9. He was a controversial figure in Canada because of his responsibility for the disastrous Dieppe raid in 1942, when Canadian troops suffered severe casualties. Earlier in 1958 the Royal Navy had visited Halifax, Nova Scotia, the first appearance in Canadian waters since 1758, and conducted exercises with the Canadian navy.

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[This is a postcard published by the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, of Arnolfo di Cambio (1260–1302), Censing Angel (Acc.1957.57 – Gift of Mrs. A. Kingsley Porter in memory of her husband), but posted in England on 16 October (year illegible but must be 1958; see next letter)] Boston We are thinking & speaking often of you dear BB. during a rapid visit to your old home town. The museum is enormously improved since we saw it 23 years ago: now it is too big, like everything else except the Freer & the Gardner Coll. Love from us both. K.

Saltwood Castle Kent Hythe 67190 22 Nov ’58 My dear BB, I am so glad to hear from friends who have visited us lately a rather better report. We have been so sad to think of you suffering & dispirited. At last we can make a firm date for a visit to see you – any time between the 16th & the 21st of January. If it is a trouble to Nicky to have us at i Tatti we can stay in Florence & see as much or as little of you as you wish. All I want is to experience once more the joy of hearing your conversation & telling you once more how much I owe you. We had, to be truthful, rather a boring time in Canada. There are practically no works of art, & the scenery is extensively dull – no surprises, like Australia. Even the celebrated view from the citadel of Quebec isn’t beautiful, merely extensive. Much the most interesting thing is the political situation, with the french-speaking [sic] provinces still regarding themselves as a conquered country & dreaming of independence. Quebec is more priest ridden than Ireland – or Ceylon. I must say that the universities are excellent, but the politics pure tammany – or Huey Long.231 It was nice to get to Boston.The museum is greatly

231 Tammany Hall was the New York City Democratic Party political machine that played a major role in controlling New York City and New York State politics. Its enormous power came through the support of millions of Irish immigrants in New York. Tammany Hall was notorious for political corruption. Huey Pierce Long, Jr. (1893–1935) was an American politician who served as the 40th Governor of Louisiana in 1928–32 and as a member of the us Senate from 1932 until he was

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improved & the new director is a fine, bouncing fellow.232 But it is now too big, like everything else (talking of which, the Chinese Collection in Toronto is the only thing of that kind worth seeing in Canada, & stupendous).233 It was very agreeable to find the Gardner Collection unchanged: & what beautiful things you made her buy! I had forgotten how fine the Botticelli is – or rather both of them are,234 & the Pollajuolo profile is astonishing.235 It was a sunny afternoon, and I have never seen Titian look so well – it remains the most beautiful picture in America.236 I am not often moved by patriotic feelings, and am sickened by all the cant about national treasures – still I do think it was a disgraceful thing to let the Rubens’ portrait of the Earl of Arundel leave England.237 I suppose Poynter was director of the N.G.238 What a happy, complacent somnolence in this island then. I am still engaged in television’s talks & other odd jobs.239 The former are chiefly a way of making money, which I now must do if I am to stay on at Saltwood. But I confess I find it interesting – tho’ very difficult – and curious. One’s ideas have to be very clear – little flowers of rhetoric are meaningless. Talking of flowers, I did a broadcast on Wind’s book which enraged him because after cracking him up much beyond his deserts, I compared him to a conjurer pulling paper flowers out of a hat. I see that the word ‘paper’ was rather offensive.240 Alan, your great admirer, is now happily married to his dear little girl, & is now engaged on a book about the 1914–17 campaign in Flanders – I suppose

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assassinated. He was a controversial figure, an unashamed populist who denounced the rich and the bankers and was accused by his enemies of demagoguery. An effective and forceful political boss, he commanded a wide network of supporters. The Director of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, 1955–72, was the ebullient Perry Rathbone (1911–2000). He transformed the museum into a lively, broad-based cultural institution, with a much greater attendance. He was also known for shrewd acquisitions, appealing exhibitions and publicity stunts. After retiring from the museum, he became the head of Christie’s office in New York. The Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto, has extensive and outstanding collections of Far Eastern art. Botticelli, The Tragedy of Lucretia, c. 1500–01, purchased in 1894 from the Earl of Ashburnham, through Berenson, and Virgin and Child with an Angel, early 1470s, purchased in 1899 from Prince Chigi, through Colnaghi, London, and Berenson. Piero del Pollaiolo, Portrait of a Woman, 1490s. Titian, Europa, c. 1560–62, purchased in 1896 from Colnaghi, London, through Berenson. Portrait of Thomas Howard, 2nd Earl of Arundel, 1629–30, purchased in 1898 from Colnaghi, London, through Berenson. Sir Edward Poynter (1836–1919) trained as a painter and worked in the studio of Frederic, Lord Leighton in Rome and Charles Gleyre in Paris. He was the first Slade Professor of Fine Art at University College, London, in 1875–81, the Director of the National Gallery in 1894–1904 and the President of the Royal Academy in 1896–1918. He was Charles Bell’s uncle. See n. 210. Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance, London: Faber & Faber, 1958. On 14 November 1958, Clark made a radio broadcast on the Third Programme of the bbc entitled ‘The Concealed God’ in which he discussed Wind’s book.

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inspired by his namesake’s Gallipoli.241 Irene had a great success as Maria Stuart in Shiller’s [sic] play, and was, I think, really magnificent. She has just done Mrs J. G. Borkman – not quite so good, but it is an ungrateful part.242 I am struggling through the new 3 vol edition of Van Gogh’s letters.243 It is very well done, with the drawings tipped in; but in the end it makes depressing reading, because I can’t see that all the suffering imposed on himself & everyone else was really necessary to his painting. I have got to review it for the New Yorker – I am also reviewing J. P. Hennessy’s Italian Sculpture, vol ii, which I think extremely good – Sensible & well balanced.244 Now Nicky will have had enough of my illegible writing, so I will send to her & you much love & our hopes of seeing you soon. Ever your affectionate, K.

241 Alan Clark, The Donkeys, London: Hutchinson, 1961, a study of the 1915 Western Front offensives. Alan Moorhead, Gallipoli, London: Hamish Hamilton, 1956. 242 Irene Worth appeared in Stephen Spender’s version of Schiller’s Mary Stuart at the Old Vic, London, in September 1958. Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkman is his penultimate play, written in 1896: a television production by atv with Worth and Olivier was broadcast on 19 November 1958. 243 Complete Letters of Vincent van Gogh:With Reproductions of All the Drawings in the Correspondence, 3 vols, London: Thames and Hudson, 1958. 244 John Pope-Hennessy, Italian Renaissance Sculpture, London: Phaidon, 1958.

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Ten Farewell 1959

Berenson celebrated his ninety-fourth birthday on 26 June 1959. At hand to celebrate this, his last anniversary, were John Walker, Freya Stark, Umberto Morra and Henry Francis, the curator of paintings at the Cleveland Museum of Art. McGeorge Bundy from Harvard was also present and assured him that they would do their utmost to fulfil his wishes. That summer there was one last visit to Vallombrosa, where, with failing eyesight, he sat in his wheelchair, wrapped in blankets, looking through dark glasses at the landscape and the sunsets. In early September a wound in Berenson’s mouth became infected and the subsequent swelling spread to his throat, distorting the lower part of his face. Treatment was ineffective and impaired speech was now added to failing eyesight. A month later, his doctor, fearing that Berenson might die of suffocation from the swelling in the throat, administered a powerful antibiotic. His frail body was unable to withstand the shock of the treatment and in the early hours of 6 October, he died. The local village priest performed the last rites and he died peacefully in a dimly lit room, attended by Nicky and Alda, his sister Bessie, the estate manager, Geremia Giofreddi, and his daughter, Fiorella, and by Emma and the night nurse. Berenson lay in state in a walnut coffin in the large library of I Tatti, wrapped in an ivory-white cashmere shawl, a Sienese cross on his chest, and with candles burning nearby. During the day friends and neighbours came to mourn and filed by the coffin. On the following afternoon his coffin, covered with oak leaves and roses, was carried by workmen from I Tatti to the little church of San Martino al Mensola, half a mile away. At the funeral, hooded monks of the Misericordia, in white robes, carried lighted torches and black crosses outlined in gold. The funeral cortège, which included children, nuns, local people, as well as representatives of the great and the good, stretched for nearly half a mile. When the coffin was brought back from San Martino it was placed before the chapel door at I Tatti, and it was there that he was laid to rest and still rests. 467

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Mary’s coffin was later brought down from Settignano so that they could be next to each other, and in the place where they had chosen to live and make their lives together. The last time that Clark saw Berenson was in early January 1959. On his return he wrote to Harry Hodson, the editor of the Sunday Times, ‘[I] fear he cannot live very much longer. . . . I have thought of writing you the short article on Mr Berenson’. Clark had been asked by the paper in August 1957 to prepare an obituary, but they feared that Clark might already be committed to write one for The Times. (He had, in fact, been asked to do so in 1934 and had been reminded again in 1940 that he had not done so. In the end The Times asked someone else to write it in 1942.) On 6 October, within hours of Berenson’s death, Clark sent to Harry Hodson the first draft of his article on Berenson which was published on the following Sunday, 11 October. During the intervening few days there were revisions and queries to be attended to. It is not recorded how, or exactly when, Clark received news of Berenson’s death. He was in London at the time and he dealt with the article and the editorial changes from the offices of the Arts Council in Piccadilly. He did not attend the funeral. Clark’s opportunity to pay his last respects, personally and publicly, came eight months later when, at Nicky’s request, on 7 May 1960, he gave a lengthy address in Italian in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence (see Appendix 3).

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[Postcard dated at the bottom 9 Dec. ’58].

My dear BB, This is only to say how glad we are that we shall be seeing you before long. I think of you many times in every day – so many ideas that I owe to you, & fancies that I should like to discuss with you. So many allusions & turns of phrase that no one else will understand. I feel that I have wasted my time by not spending more of it in your company. Our love & wishes for as much happiness as your body allows you. Ever your affectionate Kenneth. 9 Dec. ’58

Saltwood Castle Kent Hythe 67190 Jan ’59

Dearest BB & Nicky, I began a letter to you in Paris, but never finished it, & as soon as I got home a deluge descended on me – Nicky knows that kind of desk, piled about 3 ft high with largely unanswerable letters, telephone ringing & meetings every day. All of which will make you realise, dear BB. how much I loved the peace of i Tatti. It was such a great joy to be with you again. The fact is that there are many things I like to talk about which no one else understands, & every thing you say to me supports, indirectly, my beliefs. It is sad that you can no longer communicate with many people but the great thing is you can still inspire the few who have entered into your world of values. How marvellous for you to have darling Nicky. I can’t imagine greater good fortune on Earth. All love to you both, Kenneth.

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I Tatti Settignano Florence Jan 23, 59

Dear Kenneth How sweet of you to write as you have.When you get to be my present age you too will realise how precious is the appreciation, the affection and the sympathy of one’s juniors, particularly as one only survives [‘survives’ is re-written over first attempt] as is the case with you. I look forward eagerly to seeing you but Tatti is taken up with so much [sic] with guests or with urgent pre-occupations that would prevent my devoting myself to you entirely and with my whole mind. Talk is like water. It flows away a mere trifle faster than seemingly more solid thought. Ubi sunt qui ante nos fuerunt?1 We have been enjoying Irene.2 How she has flowered since we last saw her! She now can hold her own in any talk on any subject, and is a dominant personality. I envy you all seeing so much of her. World affairs make me sick, literally give me nausea and heart-burn. Thanks overwhelmingly to dear ‘Ike’ and Mr Dulles3 Much love to each and all of you Ever B.B.

From u.s.a. I keep getting letters of wild enthusiasm about the Book. B.B.

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Latin for ‘Where are those who, before us, existed in the world?’ Irene Worth Dwight (‘Ike’) Eisenhower’s presidency, 1953–61, coincided with the height of the Cold War. John Foster Dulles was his Secretary of State, and Richard Nixon his Vice-President. After the Suez Crisis of 1956, the United States sought, from 1958 onwards, to shore up unstable but friendly governments in the Middle East. Designed by Dulles, this ‘Eisenhower Doctrine’ stated that America would use armed force to resist aggression from any country controlled by international communism, and would provide economic and military aid to stop the spread of communism in the Middle East. On 2 January 1959, Fidel Castro took power in Cuba. On 12 January, the Soviets confirmed their supremacy over the usa in the so-called ‘space race’ by launching the first spacecraft to escape the earth’s gravity, flying past the moon towards the sun. The us presidential election of 1960 was won by John F. Kennedy.

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I Tatti Settignano Florence Jan 27. 59

Darling Jane – Thanks for the caressing shawl.4 I already have worn it on our noon-day walk today. Willy5 reports how much he enjoys staying with you but also how ill Colette has been. All my sympathy! Irene has been with Alda6 to Rome and lunched here today. In splendid shape. I learn that K’s book is selling like a popular best-seller. I rejoice as if it were a book of mine. Glorious wintry weather that does much to alleviate my senile troubles. I am never comfortable altho I succeed occasionally in forgetting my used up body. How I look forward to seeing you all! Love B.B.

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Although it is not possible to be entirely certain, it seems probable that this is the shawl in which Berenson’s body was wrapped to lie in state. William Mostyn-Owen Alda von Anrep

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The Sunday Times, 11 October 1959 ‘The Sage of Art’ By Sir Kenneth Clark

Bernard Berenson, the world’s greatest authority on Italian art, died at Florence on Tuesday, aged 94. Sir Kenneth Clark, one of his ‘pupils’, has written this appreciation of the man and his work for the Sunday Times, and in view of this the third in a series of articles on great paintings is held over until next Sunday. During his long life Bernard Berenson enjoyed four different periods of fame. The first began in 1888, when as a poor scholar from Harvard he came to Europe and enchanted the intellectual society of London and Paris by his intelligence, his ardour and his exquisite beauty. At that time he was known chiefly as a student of oriental languages. He had taken top honours in Sanskrit and had gained a good knowledge of Hebrew and Aramaic, which he retained until late in life. He had been the favourite pupil of William James, and James’s way of expressing his theories through yarns and popular wisecracks still influenced his talk and the best of his later writing. But these siren strains of the aesthetic movement had floated across the Atlantic and Berenson had fallen under the spell of Walter Pater’s ‘Renaissance’. This was the world he hoped to enter in Europe; and he succeeded. I don’t think he ever met Pater, who was shy of brilliance, but he became a close friend of Wilde, and in Paris he made the acquaintance of Robert de Montesquieu. He never wavered in his admiration for Wilde; but he soon discovered that fin de siècle was not for him, and the deepest single influence in his life pointed in the opposite direction. This was Goethe, whom he read as a boy in his little canoe, moored in the backwaters of the Boston river. He determined then ‘in Goethe’s untarnishable words, to live manfully in the whole, the good and the beautiful’: and for almost eighty years he allowed nothing to deflect him. To a mind so formed Greece and Italy were the goals. He was too poor to go to Greece at once: Italy was more accessible and for several years he travelled insatiably, treating works of art more as pretext for pilgrimage than as objects of study. His ambitions were still boundless and undefined. Then one day he decided to concentrate. He had discovered that the outlines of the great Italian painters were blurred by uncertainty. Legend and optimism had attributed to them many works by inferior hands which diminished their fame. It would be his task to establish once and for all who had painted every Italian picture of the Renaissance.To do so he would apply the method of the only writer on art who then commanded his respect, Giovanni Morelli; that is to say he would rely on the internal evidence of style rather than on documents or signatures. It seemed to him a temporary contraction of his energies; in fact it was to be like a tin tied to his tail for the rest of his life.

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By themselves the lists of authentic pictures might not have brought him fame. But they were prefaced by four essays on the various schools of Italian art, two of which – the Florentine and the Central Italian – are masterpieces. They do what practically no one else has done since Winckelmann: they apply a consistent and appropriate aesthetic theory to an historical process in such a way as to evaluate the work it produced. The First Function Berenson took from Goethe the idea that the first function of a work of art was to be life-enhancing, and, following the physiological approach of James, he believed that this was achieved through ideated sensations. Thus, the vivid presentation of form in Florentine art, stimulating our sense of touch, increases our grasp of reality; the vivid presentation of movement makes us feel the thrill of violent action without its fatigues; and when we contemplate the ordered space of Umbrian painting we seem to breathe more freely. After all the high-flown language which has swirled around the summit of art during the last sixty years, these conclusions seem shockingly flat; and I suppose that in the end we can never be satisfied by a physiological theory of aesthetics. But at least it was concrete. It did not simply repeat a magic formula of approval in more fashionable language, by substituting ‘significant form’ for ‘ideal beauty’. It was a short, firm, positive step forward. These essays on the Italian painters were written between 1892 and 1897, and they established Berenson’s position as the leading scholar of Italian art. But the author was not destined to live in the modest penumbra of scholarship. Among his occasional writings was the review of an exhibition of Venetian Art at the New Gallery in 1895, to which the chief English collectors had sent their most valued ‘old masters’. Convincingly, sarcastically and with obvious relish Berenson pointed out that about three-quarters of the pictures bore names to which they had no right. In an hour the value of the collections was halved. There were protests, black-ballings, terrible threats. But Berenson could not be suppressed.The only solution was to turn this insufferable poacher into a gamekeeper. The dealers came forward and asked him to authenticate their pictures, offering him a percentage of the purchase price in return for his certificates. Money Poured In For a long time Berenson hesitated. He was poor, but he was free, and all his energies were occupied with a great work of scholarship, The Drawings of the Florentine Painters, which he had begun the same year. He knew all too well the Goblin Market which he was being asked to enter. Finally what tempted him was the dream of forming a great library which could be a unique means of study both for him and for future students. He agreed, and immediately the

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money came pouring in. On the first day of the new century he moved into i Tatti, the villa near Settignano where he lived till the end of his life. There followed thirty years of prosperity such as has not been the lot of any scholar since Petrarch. Inevitably this entailed certain losses. Very little of what he wrote in those years is of lasting value, for the Florentine Drawings, although not published until 1903, was almost completed in his years of poverty and independence. But then, as he frequently said, writing was not his chosen means of expression. It was talk. His Self-Portrait contains a confession which all who knew him will confirm. He did not like a critical audience. He dried up like a medium if he felt the presence of an unsympathetic listener. He liked best an audience of well-dressed ladies, but was quite content with an American momma who asked him the meaning of life. For this reason very few intellectuals can have heard Berenson talking at his best, and so are apt to underrate what was certainly the most remarkable performances of their kind that I have ever heard. During the years of his prosperity there was an unfailing audience at every meal: social and international celebrities for lunch, the talk conducted in at least three languages; humbler pilgrims and a few young people for tea; old friends and house guests for dinner. B.B. never flagged; in fact, on the rare occasions when there wasn’t someone fresh to talk to he said that he felt like a cow that hadn’t been milked. He talked seldom about art, often (and best of all) about history, and often, alas, about contemporary politics, on which he had the onlooker’s uncertain grasp, at once too hopeful and too cynical. He loved vituperation. Naturally his success had made him many enemies, and the mention of their names would bring down on the head of some benevolent old sheep of a visitor a clatter of epithets worthy of an Old Testament prophet.Then he would pat her hand, and gaze at her with his grey Slav eyes, and she would soon be purring again. In 1930 a change began to take place. The slump had restricted the traffic in certificates of authenticity; and in any case B.B. had long been sick of the whole business. His whole interest was in the decline of classical and the rise of mediaeval art and he planned a great book on what he called the deformation of form. To this end he travelled in Syria and North Africa, and to this end enlarged his library. In fact none of it was ever written, except for the fragment of a chapter on the Arch of Constantine. His great book remained, radiant and fructifying, in the realm of conversation. In these years Berenson’s talk was at its best. Display and vituperation had diminished, but his marvellous memory was unimpaired, and the ideas thrown up in conversation were illustrated by a confluence of facts equalled only in the pages of Spengler. This comparison, though just, would have displeased him; for he disliked the solemn attitudes of our apocalyptic historians, dreaded, too, all

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forms of freelance mysticism saying that although you could bamboozle people in a second it took centuries to debamboozle them. Fall in Favour While his powers were at the height his public reputation had declined. There were fewer visits from potentates, fewer calls from anxious dealers, and the sales of his books almost ceased. In the spring of 1939 I went to say goodbye to him: it did not seem probable that we should meet again. I admired the new libraries which he had recently added to i Tatti. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘the library is my only personal achievement: the only thing which will give posterity any idea what I am like.’ I could not help agreeing; and I doubt if any of his friends could have foreseen the new phase of eminence which he was about to enter. How can an artist or philosopher who has achieved worldly success withdraw from the world? A monastic life is too constricting, exile produces the déraciné, bankruptcy involves many petty annoyances. The war provided Berenson with an answer. He was cut off from society, first in his own villa and then hidden in the house of a friend with diplomatic immunity. He had time to gather his thoughts. As a result he wrote two books from which prosperity can derive a fair idea of his personality and conversation. The first is the Aesthetics and History in the Visual Arts. It was written in his own library and some of the restraints of scholarship survive. I cannot say that it is all easy reading; it is so packed with ideas that after every page or two one is obliged to lay it down and digest. And of course many of these ideas run counter to our accepted notions. But that is its great strength. It is entirely free from fashionable cant. Every conclusion has been tested by experience and by a prodigious reading of history. In Hiding In the second of these wartime books, the Sketch for a Self-Portrait, Berenson is far more liberated. It was to a great extent written while he was in hiding, cut off both from his friends and his books. All the familiar props and stays had been removed. ‘And then he came to himself.’ He wanted to call it ‘self dippings’, and sure enough it is not a piece of systematic self-analysis, but a number of random samples, produced without order and without shame. Digression builds upon digression, an image suggests a train of memories, and in this way it acquires something of the movement of thought itself. And what sort of man is revealed? Not, certainly, the sort of man we were encouraged to be in an English public school; but a human being of such intelligence and candour, and a mind so richly stored and free from prejudice, that any grown-up person will find his companionship irresistible. It will keep its place on the small shelf of books in which the finest minds have mapped out the

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crooked path to wisdom; and if it be the sign of the true artist to pass unperceived from detachment to engagement and back again, it is also an extraordinary work of art. No one in England foresaw that the Self-Portrait would be a best seller. But its quality was immediately recognised in America, and at the same time the prefaces to the Italian Painters of the Renaissance achieved, in an illustrated edition, an enormous popularity. From having been the somewhat awe-inspiring wizard of expertise, Berenson suddenly became an acceptable myth. He was just what the great American middlebrow public was looking for – a sage. And soon the potentates of democracy, reporters and cameramen, were pouring to i Tatti, as eagerly as the rich and smart had flocked there in the 1920s. This time success left him unmoved. He was over eighty and thoroughly inoculated against the poisons of the world. His zest for life and his curiosity were undiminished: his love of nature increased. Walking with him in the hills – and up to his ninetieth year he tripped about them like a mountain goat – one realised why he maintained that he had been a failure. He was a lyric poet who never mastered language. He could only point and clasp his hands in a gesture of mingled gratitude and despair. The Dandy Berenson was small and slight, with beautiful but brittle-looking hands, grey eyes with long lashes and a large mouth full of formidable teeth. He was a dandy with an endless repertoire of beautifully-cut suits in which he always wore a fresh picked buttonhole. This effect of neatness and fragility was enhanced by contrast with the Giottoesque bulk of Mrs. Berenson. As one walked behind them in the garden one had the impression of a chivalrous mahout guiding the steps of an absent-minded elephant. In fact Mrs. Berenson gave her volatile husband some of the ballast he lacked. She was the daughter of a famous American evangelist named Hannah Whitall Smith; her brother was Logan Pearsall Smith, her sister the first Mrs. Bertrand Russell. When they were all together in the nineties it was the nearest thing to normal family life which Berenson ever knew. Life at i Tatti was much more like that of a small Renaissance court. Up to B.B.’s ninety-second year it followed the same pattern every day, and even in Baalbec or Leptis Magna an effort was made to reproduce the usual time-table. In later life he was easily fatigued and suffered acutely from the cold, but only in the last two years was he seriously ill. He was looked after by one of the most angelic companions who have ever fallen to the lot of a great man, Miss Nicky Mariano, who came to help in the library as a girl, and remained at i Tatti as the devoted friend of Mr. and Mrs. Berenson for over forty years.

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Unforgettable Berenson’s isolation not only gave him a sort of posteritorious wisdom, but saved him from many activities in which public figures waste their time. He never sat on a committee, never went to a public dinner, never made a speech; even when he was given the freedom of Florence he simply bowed and withdrew. The thought of academic life made him feel uneasy. His fear of pedantry made him unwilling to give the generations of young men who frequented i Tatti any sort of formal instruction. But I think we may properly consider ourselves his pupils; for at almost every meal, and on those unforgettable walks, our eyes were opened and our minds were filled. At first we might resent the hard knocks administered to local gods. But as we came to realise that neither Oxford, nor Bloomsbury, nor Cambridge, Mass, had established the ultimate boundaries of civilisation, we found ourselves entering a larger inheritance. We were educated, as few young men have been educated since the Renaissance; or perhaps I should say since the Reformation, for we learnt to think of civilised life as catholic and apostolic. We learnt, in Johnson’s immortal phrase, to suspect ‘the cant of those who judge by principles rather than perception’; and we came to believe that the love of art is only a part of the love of life. I owe him more than I can say and probably much more than I know; and I can only try to repay this debt by holding on to the values which he maintained for so many years.

Afterword

Why? Why did they first start writing to each other, and why did they never stop? Was it love at first sight, or was it simply opportunism? Clark was young and ambitious, not as secure financially as he had once expected, his father having recently lost a large part of his enormous fortune as a result of the Welsh Dam Disaster. If he was going to make his mark in the art world he needed a mentor. No one fitted his ambitions better than Bernard Berenson, for he had the knowledge, the expertise and the contacts that Clark needed to acquire sooner or later. The Berensons were looking for an assistant and Clark seemed to be the answer. Even if he did not immediately love the Berensons, Clark fell in love with i Tatti - the place and the way of life - and there grew from that first meeting a remarkably strong friendship which deepened with the years. There were numerous occasions when the relationship and the correspondence could have wavered and ceased. The first occasion was when Clark delayed going out to I Tatti.The second was when he announced his engagement to Jane.The third was when he was dismissed as the collaborator on The Florentine Drawings. The next was when he joined the Committee of The Italian Exhibition. The Clarks’ busy pre-war life in London at Portland Place and the National Gallery left little time for personal letter writing, but his correspondence never petered out. The long interruption of the war years might have resulted in a break but, as soon as the postal services resumed, the correspondence was taken up again, even more fulsomely than before. Friendship Why do friendships start and then deepen? Opportunism is probably as good a starting point as any, but it is not sufficient by itself in the long-term. Deep friendships have to be consciously nurtured, especially when they run into choppy waters. Both sides have to will it to continue when the original raison d’être no longer applies. Mutual interests and friends in common are essential, and these Berenson and Clark had in abundance. Trust is also essential: the 478

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confidence that personal sensitivities will not be trespassed on. It is notable, for example, how money, the art market and Joseph Duveen do not come into the correspondence; nor do the amours and consequent marital complications, even though all were, in a sense, pre-occupations in common. Trust and affection are not the same thing: over-affectionate expression can sometimes be used as a means of disguising reservations. Did they trim their views, curtail their criticisms of each other, over-praise each other, while simultaneously expressing a different point of view to others? The letters speak for themselves. In any close friendship there is always a certain amount of manoeuvring, turning a blind eye, and a wish for something more or slightly different. Sometimes this comes to the surface of the correspondence, as for example when Clark manoeuvres round his dismissal from The Florentine Drawings; when Berenson overlooks or forgives Clark’s participation in The Italian Exhibition; and when he discharges his exasperation at Clark’s unwillingness to be more affectionately responsive. A sustained friendship between people of different generations is not easy to achieve. In early adult life, thoughts are of the future and tend to dwell on hopes and aspirations. In old age, thoughts are more of the past, of what has, and has not, been achieved rather than what will be achieved, of time running out and of infirmities.To bridge the gap both sides need consciously to reach out, to edit, to listen, to proceed with caution. Berenson was a demanding friend, forever seeking favours – photographs, visits, affection. Clark was useful for him with access to what he wanted, and his own connections and knowledge were useful to Clark in return. It was not until after the war that the mutual opportunism seems to translate into genuine deep affection. John Updike once observed, apropos his own father with whom he had an uneasy relationship, ‘It is easy to love people in memory; the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you.’ Berenson seems to be an instance where the opposite holds good. All his relationships were complicated. Those who were his friends could suddenly become his bitter enemies, or be consigned to a unique category of his own creation which he called ‘enemy-friends’. Yet there seems to have been something charismatic about his company and presence. John Walker noted that Clark’s relations with Berenson were always complex. Clark told Walker that for many years he and Berenson were never completely at ease together. He cites a letter from Clark where he says ‘after 1938 I believed myself to be on comfortable and affectionate terms with B.B., and after the war he behaved to me with the utmost kindness and sympathy. It was only later on that I discovered to my surprise that B.B. did not really like me. A friend of mine who looked up my name in the index of Sunset and Twilight, said to me: “Heavens! How Mr Berenson disliked you!” It was a great shock, and it proves how sweet he was that he never let me feel it when I was in his company’ (Walker pp. 291–2).

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Second Thoughts Sunset and Twilight, which is a selection of entries from Berenson’s dairies chosen by Nicky Mariano, was published in 1963. What Clark’s friend had read was this: November 13th 1952, Rome. Kenneth Clark is in every way a homo novus, but his father was rich so his career is not regarded as a success story, while mine is, because my father was poor. Yet he has had every possible success, held high positions and continues to fill them, frequents highest official society, and is considered the best art lecturer in English language, the best art writer and critic ditto, has a brilliant wife in foremost ranks of fashion, promising children.Yet his is not a success story, and mine is – not because I have done this or that, but only because I have succeeded in attaining to enough money to live decently. K. C. not only inherited his fortune, but increases it. He buys and sells works of art, and that counts only as a gentleman exchanging a good thing for a better one. If I sold any picture I should at once be put down as a ‘dealer’, because I started poor. (Berenson S&T p. 283) Clark would have been sensitive to the term novus homus, which carries implications of someone of plebeian origin rising to high office in the Roman Senate or a Renaissance court, through cleverness. Yet the only other directly negative comment in the published diaries is: ‘June 5th, 1954 Venice. I learnt that Kenneth Clark is preparing to write about me as a product of my American “contacts”, as well of contacts with Vernon Lee, Janet Ross, Edith Wharton, and the like, abroad, i.e. in Europe. What will come out of it I shall not see, nor do I greatly care’ (Berenson S&T p. 348). Clark was not being singled out for reproof, and what Berenson confided to his diary was quite often at variance with what he said in conversation. In contrast, Berenson also wrote: ‘May 22nd, 1957, I Tatti. The work done by young men, yet as old as Kenneth Clark, seems to me miraculously superhuman’ (Berenson S&T p. 479). Berenson said things that, even if he did not regret them, he should not have uttered, and they spiced up his conversation and his writings. It was gossipy entertainment until it became one’s turn to be on the receiving end. He could also be just as hard on himself, to the point of tedium. The subject of his most intense and tortuous love-hate, after Mary, was probably himself. Isaiah Berlin, whose family were also Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe, did not take to Berenson at their first meeting but later warmed to him, and was then deeply offended when he read Berenson’s recollections in the diaries. Iris Origo, who had known him since childhood, and had written with deep and loving emotion about what she owed to him, was asked to write an introduction to Sunset and Twilight. She accepted, only to find that once she had read the diaries she then felt ‘considerable distaste’ for him.

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In Another Part of the Wood, published in 1974, Clark gives a surprisingly chilly account of the first meeting at I Tatti. He slips in Charles Bell’s supposed comment, ‘he’s only a kind of charlatan, and all that business of attribution is pure guesswork’, and gives a witty but waspish account of Berenson’s greeting of his guests. Clark then says: ‘by this time I had taken the strongest possible dislike to him. I had a strong instinct that Mr Berenson’s personality would remain foreign to me, and I did not like what little I had experienced of the atmosphere of i Tatti’ (Clark APW pp. 127–9).Why are the sentiments expressed here in such contradiction to those he expressed immediately after Berenson died? In 1981 Clark took the text of his Memorial Address at the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence in 1960 (see Appendix 3) and expanded and amended it. Now entitled The Work of Bernard Berenson, it was included in his book of essays, Moments of Vision, and was offered as a fresh evaluation. His original opening, ‘I can imagine no greater honour than the invitation to speak to you in this noble hall, which seems to stand at the centre of European civilisation on the subject of one who became almost the embodiment of that civilisation, Bernard Berenson’, was changed to ‘For almost fifty years Bernard Berenson knew himself to be a legendary figure. His delicate frame, his beautiful eyes, his slightly artificial courtesy and the tone of infallibility which he sustained in the unbroken line of his conversation, made it very difficult to believe that this exquisite little conjurer was not bamboozling us but had made solid additions to our knowledge and understanding of art’ (Clark MV p. 108). Money and Scholarship Did Clark realise, in 1975 and again in 1981, that books were about to be published about Berenson with the aim of destroying his reputation, and that, therefore, it might be wise to establish some distance between them? Berenson’s vulnerable spot was always his relationship with art dealers. The issue was: did Berenson knowingly give false attributions in order to make money? He himself knew that such accusations were made, behind his back, and it plagued him. Whatever the truth, once the allegations had been made in print (but no one dared print them while he was alive), the mud stuck. Whereas the mention of Berenson’s name in general conversation once elicited a respectful reply – ‘Ah! The sage of Settignano’ – now it gleans the response ‘Oh! The crooked art dealer.’ He was not an art dealer and never was. You could not call at I Tatti to shop and buy. He did not buy for stock as did Duveen, Colnaghi or Wildenstein. He received commissions from such dealers by providing them with advice and services. Having started with not a penny to his name, by the time he and Mary first settled at I Tatti in 1900, in their mid-30s, he was well-off. He had acquired his money by encouraging American collectors to buy works of art,

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invariably through dealers who paid him commission or profit share. Colnaghi’s in particular supplied Isabella Stewart Gardner in Boston with copious works of art at high prices. She trusted Berenson’s judgement and expertise and he roamed Italy searching for suitable treasures. Secretly, without disclosing what he was doing, he took a double commission, simultaneously from her and from Colnaghi’s. This was unethical. Isabella Stewart Gardner never knew, although her husband, Jack, began to have his suspicions. From 1907 to 1937 Berenson was in the pay of Joseph Duveen. He kept an eye open for masterpieces to buy, arranged to meet clients who wanted to purchase and, above all he gave certificates of authenticity on Italian paintings. This was common knowledge. What was kept secret were the financial terms of the agreement. These changed several times but, essentially, he was paid a combination of a fixed annual retainer and a commission on the purchase price or sale price of any transaction. After Duveen died, he had a similar arrangement with the Florentine dealer Contini-Bonacossi and then with Wildenstein’s. Royalties from his books were minor in comparison. These dealers provided his principal sources of income that enabled him to sustain I Tatti, his lifestyle and his travels. He also used his earnings to support his parents and siblings in Boston and to accumulate an endowment for the future of I Tatti. Did Berenson deliberately and knowingly make false attributions so that the dealers would get a higher price on which he would thereby get a higher commission? No substantive evidence has yet been produced, and in any case it is inherently unlikely. Any work of art that he attributed would, sooner or later, have to appear in The Lists: if its attribution was patently wrong, his expertise would be called into question and his reputation, on which his earning power depended, would be compromised. In any case, he first made his mark in the art world not by talking attributions up but by pointing out that they were incorrect, and he finally broke with Duveen by refusing to attribute the Allendale Adoration to Giorgione. It is also important to take into account the state of the art market, and the mindset of collectors in his lifetime, particularly between the wars. There was an abundant supply of paintings into a market in which dealers, not auction houses, were dominant. Spotting an overlooked great work was a popular game and Lord Lee’s diaries offer a fascinating insight. Although he had no training, Arthur Lee thought he had a good eye and he liked to think that he could outsmart the dealers by ferreting out pictures whose attribution they had missed and had therefore under-priced. He also regarded his ability to do so as a useful source of personal profit. Like many others at the time, he speculated in art, and inside knowledge and secrecy were consequently paramount. It was a perfect breeding ground for chicanery. Clark also enjoyed hunting for neglected or overlooked treasures which were under-priced. The irony for Arthur Lee was that although

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he occasionally got the better of the dealers, generally speaking they got the better of him, and his collection swelled with pictures that were over-attributed, over-restored and over-priced.This is the background from which the four little panels that Clark thought were by Giorgione emerged, and whose acquisition by the National Gallery caused him so much grief. There were many experts, some with high scholarly reputations, who were willing to sign certificates of attribution for a fee, and who touted for business on this basis. Indeed, it is pertinent to ask, when one sees how many collectors were clearly taken for a ride by unscrupulous dealers with worthless certificates of attribution, how often was a collector prevented from wasting money because Berenson would not make a false attribution? Such instances are, of course, impossible to prove but anyone who makes accusations against him should also take this likelihood into account. John Walker wrote in his autobiographical reminiscences that, apart from a few early commissions, Berenson had nothing to do directly with the sale of works of art. He admitted he sometimes unduly praised pictures, and the lists became more inclusive, but Walker takes the view this was because he recognised that virtually all Italian Renaissance paintings were the product of a shop with assistants and so ‘he came to care less for the autograph of the master himself than for the evidence that the fundamental drawing, composition, and colouring were his’ (Walker p. 93). This, in Walker’s view, was not because of any money he received from Duveen Brothers. John Pope-Hennessy, who could be a merciless destroyer of reputations and others’ scholarship, and would have had no hesitation in demolishing Berenson’s if he had thought it justified, said of him: ‘the main thing I learned from him was honest mindedness. It affected points of attribution . . . but it affected value judgements too’ (Pope-Hennessy p. 151). He wrote an excoriating review (The NewYork Review of Books, 12 March 1987) of Colin Simpson’s book, Artful Partners (1987), which attempted to portray Berenson as dishonest, concluding: were Berenson’s attributions honest, we are justified in asking . . . my own answer . . . would be an emphatic ‘Yes.’ . . . Berenson’s value to Duveen was not that his attributions were invariably right, but that, of the opinions then available, they were least likely to be wrong. The reason for this was that the attributional method applied at I Tatti was a good deal stricter than that used by other scholars . . . re-reading his lists of paintings I cannot find a single case in which the definition of an artist’s personality is queered by a commercially motivated attribution. John Updike, who had no art-world axes to grind, wrote an equally condemnatory review for the New York Times (29 March 1987): ‘what, exactly, did Berenson do wrong? To recommend artworks for purchase and resale is surely no sin, nor is

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asking a fee in exchange for scholarly expertise notably venal. . . . if B. B. badly cheated anyone, it was himself ’. Clark, in contrast, did harbour doubts about the absolute probity of Berenson’s relationship with Duveen and the integrity of some of his attributions. Perhaps he felt he had been let down by Berenson? On the one occasion when he could have done with Berenson’s support about an attribution – over the four Giorgionesque panels – Berenson demurred. Clark may also later have suspected that Berenson knew more than he had been willing to disclose about Duveen’s interest in the Chalandon Sassettas: if Duveen had not been paid by Mackay, Berenson would not have been paid any commission either, and he must have known. He did highlight a weakness in Berenson’s connoisseurship, namely that he never had enough respect for, and understanding of, the skill of restorers (see Chapter Five). Berenson’s other weakness, which no one denied, was that he was capable of over-praising a picture’s aesthetic qualities, in flowery language that would, if it were for sale, encourage a potential collector to acquire and pay handsomely. Yet one of his better qualities was his unquenchable optimism, and it was in his nature to get carried away by some spur of the moment enthusiasm. It was just such a passing impulse that triggered his invitation to Clark to come and work at I Tatti. Art Criticism, Art History and Connoisseurship Berenson had a dim view of art historians and the way in which the subject was developing. When he started out, those who wrote about art were called art critics, and that is what he considered himself to be – in the tradition of Goethe, Voltaire, Winckelmann, Ruskin, Burkhardt and Walter Pater. When Clark was asked, on Alan’s birth certificate, to state his occupation, he wrote ‘Art Critic’. Berenson regarded academic art historians, with few exceptions, as pedants. In his lecture, ‘Apologia of an Art Historian’, delivered at the University of Edinburgh in 1950, Clark said: I belong to rather an obscure profession – that of critic and historian of art . . . if I were to fill in a form with ‘profession – art historian’ it would be returned to me for correction. In Germany, on the other hand, the word Kunsthistoriker would have been considered an adequate, and indeed an honourable statement. Art history, when it becomes an end in itself, can easily become sterile and self-destructive, as it has done in some American universities which have inherited the less desirable side of German culture. It has in fact, only one ultimate aim and justification, and that is to increase our understanding and so our love of art. . . . the only reliable documents are the works of art themselves . . . their aesthetic value is essential . . . the history of art is absolutely inseparable from a sense of critical values. . . . I believe that art is concerned with life, and that the emotions aroused by a work of art are

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those which we experience in life, clarified and concentrated so that we may apprehend them in a flash. (Clark AAH) Berenson and Clark present three conundrums for art historians. The first is that the breadth and depth of their knowledge and interests make them impossible to pigeon-hole. Art history became almost exclusively concentrated on theoretical studies, and what a work of art signifies historically, whereas an art critic is just as much interested in what an historic work of art means to us now. Hence Berenson’s final summary of his philosophy in the introduction to a reissue of The Italian Painters of the Renaissance in 1952: [I do] not attempt to give an account of painters’ domestic lives or even of their specific techniques, but of what their pictures mean to us today as works of art, of what they can do for us as ever contemporary life enhancing actualities . . . too much time should not be wasted in reading about pictures instead of looking at them. . . . least profit is to be got from the writings of the metaphysical and psychoanalytical kind. If read one must, let it be the literature and history of the time and place to which the paintings belong. . . . We must look and look and look till we live the painting and for a fleeting moment become identified with it. The second conundrum is that Berenson’s connoisseurship, which is reliant on intuition, on a ‘good eye’ and on feeling, is unteachable, un-examinable and un-gradeable. Berenson’s art criticism is easily dismissed as ‘preciosity’ and mere ‘appreciationsim’, which in unskilled hands it undoubtedly is. The third conundrum concerns the value and quality of his and Clark’s scholarship. The answer is that both of them produced pioneering scholarly work of the highest calibre that set benchmarks, which are still regarded as such by art historians. The best of the Germans, notably Warburg and Panofsky, were opening up channels of exploration and new ways of thinking that were much more intellectually rigorous than Berensonian connoisseurship, and they could touch topics that were beyond its reach. Clark’s enduring strength as a critic, historian and writer was his ability to synthesise the two approaches in language that is easy to read and had the quality of literature – something which few have been able to rival; and, in fairness, Berenson quietly recognised this, and applauded it. Comparing such different ways of seeing, Clark concluded: [I]t is a curious fact that the great scholar and interpreter of the visual image, whose approach to art history has, for the time being, overshadowed that of Berenson – I refer, of course, to Aby Warburg – was also a peripatetic, a talker rather than a writer. Indeed his writings give even less indication of the almost hypnotic power he exercised on those who listened to his words. But, being a German and a natural pedagogue, he had a sense of apparatus academicus that

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Berenson lacked. His historical intuitions could be edited by disciples, and almost engulfed in footnotes and appendices. . . . The passages in Berenson’s work which are likely to retain their value are few . . . and with a scholar such as Warburg the actual writings are almost unreadable.The history and criticism of art is a literary form in which quantity and quality are seldom united.What we value in the critic is a general attitude of mind, revealed, it may be, in isolated judgements, which nonetheless imply a new direction of thought, fresh historical intuitions and insights to enlarge our own range of understanding. All these we find in the work of Berenson . . . they spring from qualities that are seldom found in combination – learning, intelligence, sensibility and faith in man – and I think that posterity (if I may invoke such a dubious concept) will value them, even though they often seem to us imperfectly expressed. (Clark MV p. 129) Clark could have been describing his own writings, and the fact remains that most visitors to art galleries are more likely to be seeking an experience that is within the gravitational pull of Berenson’s and Clark’s connoisseurship than that of the theoretical contexts of Warburg and Panofsky. It is Berenson and Clark who have written the genuine best-sellers that have offered something meaningful and readable to the public at large. Connoisseurship has an honourable lineage stretching back to Vasari in the sixteenth century, to Jonathan Richardson in the early eighteenth century and to Ruskin in the nineteenth century. The principal influences on Berenson’s and Clark’s connoisseurship were Walter Pater and the late nineteenth-century Aesthetic Movement, where intensity of feeling was everything.Temperamentally they both had a natural propensity to feel profound passion and emotion. Berenson came to the Aesthetic Movement as it waxed, Clark as it waned. Full moon was the 1890s, the decade which saw Oscar Wilde’s Importance of Being Earnest, his trial and imprisonment, and the publication of Berenson’s four essays on Italian art. True aesthetes felt intense emotion in the presence of art and they felt it so acutely that it affected them physically as well as intellectually and emotionally. That is why Berenson articulated his philosophy of ‘tactile values’ and ‘life enhancement’, and why, in popular literature and in Punch cartoons of the day, ardent aesthetic heroines were inclined to swoon in front of a blue and white Chinese vase and earnest young men went weak at the knees in front of a Botticelli. True aesthetes also sought equal intensity in their love lives and personal relationships, and in their response to nature. Master and Pupil or Father and Son? As a schoolboy, Clark declared an ambition to work for Berenson but had never dared to dream it would happen. His ‘apprenticeship’ was the event that set him on the road to fame and fortune, and his career developed with astonishing

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speed. Clark’s connection with Berenson was soon common knowledge in the London art world, and was one of the reasons why he was selected to participate in organising the Italian Exhibition. His work with Berenson was publicly cited as one of the reasons for his appointments at the Ashmolean and and the National Gallery. Berenson followed his every move with the keenest interest and never expressed opposition or jealousy over his work or writings. Wisely prescient was his letter to Clark in which he begged him not to accept the job at the Ashmolean because ‘you can do better . . . [and be] a formative influence upon the humanization of that fascinating biped man’ (see Chapter Four, letter of 10 June 1931). He could not possibly have foreseen the advent of television, or Civilisation or how well his protégé would fulfil this hope. What would Clark have been without Berenson? It is unlikely that he would have passed unnoticed. He had too many talents, too many good contacts and too much ambition. Nevertheless, from the first roll of the dice at that first meeting with Berenson, he continued to throw astonishingly well. The Italian Exhibition happened at just the right time. The National Gallery job fell into his lap and, given the trouble that it brought, it was fortuitous that it was interrupted, but not terminated, by the outbreak of hostilities. The war gave him all sorts of opportunities to make his mark in a much wider sphere than the art world, and made him into a much sought after national personality. His appointment as chairman of the Independent Television Authority gave him a key insight into the most popular and influential post-war medium, then in its infancy, and this enabled him to develop the last phase of his career as a television presenter and the opportunity to make Civilisation, for which he is now most remembered. Without Berenson and without his support – or indeed if Berenson had chosen at some point to turn against him – it might all have been different. Two of the principal ingredients of a successful master–pupil relationship are reverence and obedience. It is also for a finite period and can be terminated. A parental relationship is for ever (although banishment is a possibility); children see faults in their parents to which others are oblivious, and which they are anxious not to repeat, while parents see qualities and familiar traits in their children to which others are blind. And both feel remorse. Clark regretted that he had ‘never made the most of my opportunities . . . he [Berenson] had far more to give if only I had known better how to release his genius’ (Mariano p. xiv). They could not, of course, have had that instinctive familiarity that exists between blood relations, yet perhaps they knew each other’s foibles too well. Maybe the dilemma for Clark (and Jane) was that Berenson wanted the impossible from them – the reverence of pupils at the same time as the affection of children. Fortunately, the falling out and the banishment never came, so that when Clark wrote ‘I owe him more than I can say and probably much more than I know’, perhaps he was expressing relief as well as gratitude.

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Legacies Both Clark and Berenson dreamed of writing a great discursive, scholarly magnum opus by which they would be remembered and revered, but neither of them achieved, or even attempted, this ambition. Berenson’s legacies are: The Florentine Drawings, The Lists, his major role in laying the foundations that established art history as a proper scholarly discipline, his gift of I Tatti to Harvard University and above all, perhaps, his seminal role in the formation of American taste and collections. Through him the American millionaires first became interested in Italian art. ‘I want America to have as many good pictures as possible’, he said as a young man at Harvard, knowing that then there were few anywhere in America. There are now more Italian Renaissance paintings in the United States than anywhere else in the world, other than Italy. Any visitor to the great American museums that have holdings of such Italian paintings is in his debt. Whatever view one takes of Berenson’s character, the simple fact remains that without him the walls of the great museums of America would be noticeably and regrettably poorer, and the serious study of Italian Renaissance painting would have a markedly less secure foundation. Clark is most remembered for his writings and lectures, especially Landscape into Art, The Nude, and above all for Civilisation. He transformed the National Gallery, added many notable works, and ensured that its treasures were taken to safety during the war, to be returned in better condition.The War Artists Scheme provided the nation with a unique and remarkable record of a country at war, diligently and without grandiose heroics, getting on with the job in hand of making the world a more civilised place. The personal view that Clark narrates in Civilisation would not have been conceived without Berenson’s influence. One senses that in his conversational style, his emphasis on the importance of individual human achievement and of aesthetic pleasure, Clark was repeating many of the têtes-à-tête that occurred between them on their walks in the hills round Settignano. He embraced a philosophy and a way of understanding art that sought to be accessible to all, and to show how life-enhancing and necessary are art and connoisseurship for humankind’s spiritual fulfilment. The opening chapter of such accessible, humanistic seeing, thinking and enjoying was Berenson’s four essays on The Italian Painters of the Renaissance. The closing chapter was Clark’s Civilisation.

Appendix 1

This paper by Robert and Carolyn Cumming was delivered at the Convegno, ‘Berenson at Fifty’, at the Villa I Tatti, in October 2009. The full text of the paper, with illustrations and footnotes, was published in Joseph Connors and Louis A. Waldman, eds, Bernard Berenson: Formation and Heritage, Villa I Tatti Series 31, Boston, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2014.

Bernard Berenson and Count Umberto Morra: ‘Do Not Forget Me’ In November 1925, Bernard Berenson, having just turned sixty years old, wrote to the fortythree-year-old William M. (Billie) Ivins: ‘I wish I could see you very often. How sad that the handful of people who really life enhance are apt to be centrifugally located or disposed. Edith Wharton is at Hyères. I have a few playfellows in Paris, as many in London, as many again in New York. Here none, alas! Except such as are brought like Elijah’s food by the ravens.’ Ivins had first met Berenson in 1924 and had visited I Tatti earlier in 1925, but he resided in New York, where he was curator of the Print Department of the Metropolitan Museum. What Berenson did not realise, or failed to report, is that the ravens had already brought food which would provide continuous, lifelong and life-enhancing nourishment in the shape of two unexpected young visitors – Umberto Morra, whose first meeting with Berenson was in June 1925, and Kenneth Clark, who first set foot in I Tatti in September 1925. The reason for Morra’s visit was unusual and his immediate mission was unsuccessful, yet he was invited to stay for supper and immediately accepted into the whole Berenson family circle with a rapidity and intimacy which was, perhaps, unique. On the face of it, it was an unlikely friendship but it continued from that moment until Berenson’s death in 1959. Apart from the resident members of the household, Morra spent more time with Berenson at I Tatti and on travels with him than anyone else. Paradoxically, however, he remains the most unrecognised and unknown of all Berenson’s most important friends, acquaintances, and correspondents. The purpose of this short paper, therefore, is to sketch a brief portrait of Morra and, in particular, to explore what it was that drew the two men together and the bonds that evidently tied them closely to one another.

The First Meeting When Berenson and Morra met in 1925, Berenson was in his early sixties and Morra in his late twenties. For reasons we shall discover, it was between that first meeting and the outbreak 489

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of war in 1939 that each was most influential, the one with the other; and, in spite of the age difference, it was mutual. The significance of the friendship is recorded by that keen observer of human character, Nicky Mariano, in her memoir Forty Years with Berenson. Mariano (born in 1885) was twelve years older than Morra, but they formed a close and affectionate bond, as that of older sister and younger brother: From the first moment there was such a feeling of warmth, of mutual understanding between this young man and the three of us that he stayed on to supper that same day and from then on became a constant visitor. His name was Count Umberto Morra di Lavriano, the descendant of an old Piedmontese family of military traditions and no doubt he too would have been brought up for service in the army had he not been struck by coxitis as a small boy. Tall and slender he would have been well made but for the lameness that this illness had left him with. His subtle intelligence combined with great sensitivity showed in his features and in his expression. A great help in his becoming almost a member of the family was his familiarity with the English language, literature and history. For Mary at any rate it was essential. She never felt really at home in another language and probably was never able to think in it. (Mariano, p. 124) Later, when mentioning many of the young people that BB took under his wing, Mariano wrote: ‘perhaps of all these men the one BB talked to most during his frequent visits to I Tatti and to Poggio allo Spino was Umberto Morra. He had a special gift of drawing out BB’ (Mariano p. 147). These sentiments were echoed by Berenson himself: in 1935 he wrote to Mariano, ‘You ask about Morra. He is simply perfect and I feel not a thin sheet of paper between us. He takes almost as much interest as your darling self in all that pertains to me’ (Mariano p. 219). What brought the two together initially, and what held them together particularly in those pre-war years, was a passionate and indignant hatred of fascism. Morra had become an intimate member of a circle of young writers and intellectuals who were opposed to Mussolini, especially centered round the charismatic young radical, campaigning journalist Piero Gobetti. From time to time these men were actively harried, persecuted, imprisoned and even killed by the fascists. Gobetti, for example, was beaten up by fascist thugs in 1925 and died shortly afterwards in Paris from his injuries. They were also close to the eminent socialist writer Gaetano Salvemini, who, although a generation their senior, shared the same ideals and objectives. Salvemini was an old friend of the Berensons, having first met them in June 1908, and he became a regular visitor to I Tatti and Vallombrosa. On 2 June 1925 Salvemini was arrested in Rome and imprisoned in Florence. Following the arrest, Morra was asked either by Carlo Placci or Salvemini’s wife Fernande (or possibly both) to visit Berenson with two requests: to save any notices of the incident appearing in the foreign press, and to ask if Salvemini might borrow Berenson’s passport in order to effect an escape to Switzerland. Both men looked remarkably similar and it was an ingenious suggestion, but it did not meet with favor. It was in that fateful year of 1925 that Mussolini assumed dictatorial powers and began to construct a police state. All this was watched by Berenson with interest and anxiety. Morra did not bring to I Tatti any particular interest or expertise in art or the art world. What he did bring was his network of young anti-fascist contacts, and over the next few years many of them became visitors to I Tatti. Through Morra, Berenson met the Bracci family in Rome; the Ruffinos at La Rufola near Naples, with whom Salvemini took refuge after his release; Alberto Moravia; Pietro Pancrazi and many more. Gugliemo degli Alberti, Alessandro Passerin d’Entrèves and Morra were an especially close trio of anti-fascists connected with Berenson. Alberti, a descendant of Leon Battista Alberti, translated Berenson’s Rumour and Reflection into Italian for publication in 1950. Thus, in Mariano’s words, ‘BB ended by

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belonging to a network of anti-Fascist intelligentsia and wherever he went could be sure of meeting kindred spirits’ (Mariano p. 127). What Berenson and the I Tatti household gave Morra was an intimacy and a type of friendship which he clearly craved.

Umberto Morra Morra was born on 13 May 1897 in Florence, a healthy, lively, well-formed son, the first and only child of elderly parents. His father, then aged sixty-seven, was Count Roberto Morra di Lavriano, who had established a highly successful career in the military, politics and diplomacy. Close to the royal family, Roberto Morra had participated in the independence movement of 1848, fought against the Austrians in 1849 and fought in the 1866 war which recovered the Veneto for Italy. A deputy and senator between 1874 and 1890, he was sent by Umberto i to Sicily in 1884, where he was responsible for the bloody suppression of a peasant uprising. From 1897 to 1904, he was the Italian ambassador in St Petersburg, organising the state visit to Russia of Umberto i. In 1895, at the age of sixty-five, he married for the first time: his bride was Maria Teresa Bettini (always called Lucia), the widow of the noble Cortonese Pirro Laparelli di Lapo, whom she had married aged seventeen. General Morra and Colonel Laparelli were close friends in the army and when the colonel died of an incurable illness in 1893, the general wooed his beautiful and wealthy widow, then aged forty. Within two years of the marriage, Umberto Morra was born in the headquarters of the Eighth Army Brigade in Florence, which General Morra then commanded, and was christened in the Royal Chapel at Monza. King Umberto and Queen Margherita were his godparents. From his father Morra inherited a certain Piedmontese dryness and severity of character, and a love of history, politics, diplomacy and foreign travel. It is sometimes speculated that the massacre in Sicily turned the son against the father and caused Morra to pursue left-wing ideals. There is perhaps some truth to this, though on balance it is unlikely to have been a major cause, as Morra was devoted to his parents; they were a close-knit family and he later preserved his parents’ house as a shrine to them and his godparents. Rather, we suggest that he inherited from his father an intense patriotism and love of country which, in his father’s case, following the Risorgimento, manifested itself in a deep loyalty to the monarchy; in Umberto, it manifested itself, following the turmoil of the First World War and the rise of fascism, in an equally deep loyalty to constitutional democracy and modern liberty. From his mother Morra inherited his much-loved country house outside Cortona at Metelliano, an abiding attachment to the landscape of the Province of Arezzo, an unpredictable sense of humour, a Tuscan passion for debate and independent thought, and a curiosity about the unknown. In spite of the advantages bestowed on Morra at birth, the years before he met Berenson were not without their difficulties. He was struck down with tuberculosis at the age of five and this left him permanently crippled. His mother died when he was twelve and his father when he was twenty. His early education was interrupted by his illness and the search for cures. Morra’s ambitions to study law at university were frustrated by the First World War and he abandoned them without taking a degree in 1919. His desire to establish himself as a political writer and to be part of the shaping of a new liberal framework for a modern Italian state was crushed by the rise of fascism. The formal facts about Morra’s life are well documented and accurately set out in the celebratory volume of Morra’s life and writings that was published in 1967 when the citizens of Cortona honored him with the title of Castellano, in succession to the painter Gino Severini. Yet, in all that has been documented of Morra’s life, and of what has been written about him, the least explored aspect is that of his relationship with Berenson and the circle of I Tatti.

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Morra at I Tatti After the death of Gobetti in February 1926, Morra went underground, like many antifascist intellectuals, and based himself principally in his villa at Cortona. It became a place of refuge for anti-fascist thinkers and writers, a sort of sanctuary. A near neighbour was the fellow journalist and sympathiser Pietro Pancrazi, so Morra’s retreat was not isolated. Although handsome and spacious, the villa was tucked away unobtrusively in the hamlet of Metelliano, behind high walls and invisible from the road – yet it was easily accessible by rail, being on the main line from Florence to Rome, and also not distant from I Tatti. Morra’s political views and friendships were known to the authorities and, although watched by them, he was left undisturbed. There is speculation that his royal connections gave him some protection, and perhaps this is true. Also, he did not promote protest and agitation, realising their futility at the time. His aim was simply ‘to keep the flame of liberty alight’ in readiness for the time when its illumination would be able to shine again. Away from Metelliano, Morra spent time in Rome, where the Bracci family allowed him use of a room in their property on via 10 Novembre, and of course at I Tatti and La Consuma. He regularly stayed at both of the Berenson places – four to six times a year – and could be in residence for a total of two to four months or even more. In 1937, for example, he seems to have been with the Berenson entourage for most of January, the first half of April, for two weeks in mid-June, in early July, for two to three weeks in August and for a good three weeks in December. In addition, there were the times when he accompanied Berenson on his travels: for example, he travelled with Berenson, Mary and Nicky Mariano to Spain in the early autumn of 1929 on a long expedition which lasted until early December. We hope we have sketched enough detail, and with sufficient evidence, to give the outlines of Morra’s formative and inter-war years and of how he became part of the life of the Berenson circle. After the war, Morra had a busy life of his own but, even so, the connections with the Berenson circle remained strong and important. What, though, of the subtle tones and shades that lend substance and interest to the outline? Our own memories of Morra in the early 1970s are of a tall, gaunt, elderly, angular figure, at first sight potentially intimidating, but softened by a welcoming smile which signalled approval. Not everyone was approved, and those who came under his wing were treated with respect in the local community. He was energetic, kindly, humorous, gentle, gregarious and sometimes endearingly childlike in what amused him; yet at the same time, he could be acerbic, melancholic and aloof. He admitted to an ingrained pessimism. He never married but had a wide circle of friends, was respected by men and women of all classes and backgrounds and was much loved. Morra set high standards for himself and expected them in others. He was uncomplaining, completely without vanity and social snobbery, though he would not tolerate fools. He was frugal and indifferent to material comfort, personal adornment and material possessions. Above all, he was unswervingly loyal to the people and causes that mattered to him. In pursuing our recent researches we have found no cause to change one syllable of this personal view and we have been delighted to find it so often reciprocated in the mouths of others. Yet, it also emerges that many of his fellow Italians found him baffling and enigmatic, whereas his Anglo-Saxon friends seem to have found in him a kindred spirit which required no explanation or unravelling. [Clark wrote of his own first visit to I Tatti:‘I did however make one friend whose sweet character, intelligence and absolute sincerity have been a joy to me ever since, Umberto Morra. . . .The thought of meeting Umberto again was one of the factors which made me look forward to returning to the world of i Tatti in the following autumn’ (Clark APW p. 157)]. Indeed, several commentators have noted the Anglo-Saxon character in Morra and, with Berenson’s own self-confessed admiration for Anglo-Saxon culture and

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people, this must have been one of the things that drew them and kept them together. Not everyone was allowed, in Berenson’s own words, to become unsereiner – one of us – and Morra was certainly well aware of the rareness of that blessing. It was an acknowledgement that enabled him to become part of something, an intimate entrée into an intellectual and familial group which arrived fortuitously, just at the moment – after the death of Gobetti – when he most needed it; and we think it also filled a void that his own early life had left in him. Capable of affection and warmth himself, he also needed to receive it in return. As we explored further Morra’s own character and that of Berenson, we started to keep a checklist of those aspects of character that they held in common, and those they did not.There was of course a difference in age of more than three decades but Berenson and Morra came together just at that mutual moment, which occurs not infrequently in men’s lives, when there is a desire to find and develop a paternal rather than fraternal relationship. What were the differences? Morra was a perfectionist, capable of strict self-denial, and committed to an ideal of public service; we are not convinced that these were qualities that were natural to Berenson. Although not devoid of aesthetic sensibility, Morra lacked confidence when it came to the visual arts. His first love was literature – he was well-read and learned and a significant part of his day was set aside for reading literature and newspapers. He also enjoyed reading aloud, giving particular pleasure to his audiences at Cortona and I Tatti. The resonances between Berenson and Morra were deep and strong. Both had had obstacles to overcome in finding and establishing themselves in early life; both had an insatiable curiosity, both were indefatigable sightseers, both enjoyed walking in the countryside and had a deep love of Italian landscape. Above all, both of them enjoyed conversation and clearly indulged in it together to the full. Each was given to self-analysis and introspection; each could be, and at times clearly wished to be, aloof. In spite of this, it seems that each had a great fear of loneliness, although each addressed it in a different way. Berenson hid from his demon by surrounding himself with distractions and acquaintances; Morra faced his demon alone in the dark hours of the night, determined to outstare it and conquer it unaided. Each found writing necessary but difficult, and each failed to bring much-hoped-for writing projects to completion. And each was fascinated by politics and contemporary events, both united in their absolute determination to oppose all forms of totalitarianism in whatever guise it chose to raise its ugly head. Morra also gave Berenson what he craved for and most needed: an active and engaged listener. An ability to listen was perhaps one of Morra’s most valuable and typically selfless qualities, and one that he shared with many. Many also were those who acknowledged the value of it but perhaps nobody summed it up as well as Alessandro d’Entrèves: I think it was in Morra exactly that singular gift of sympathy, that interest, that inexhaustible curiosity about things and for people that captured the affection and the estimation of the old sage of Settignano, [who was] sometimes stern and sometimes even merciless in his judgement of the young. A good judge of Italy and the Italians, I think that Berenson might have seen and cherished in Umberto that quality which has become so rare in our compatriots of today: an acuteness of judgement, an absence of servility, with a mistrust of rhetoric and above all (and this was a quality which Morra possessed in the highest degree) the art of listening . . . (Umberto Morra, Vita di Piero Gobetti: Con una testimonianza di Alessandro Passerin d’Entrèves, Turin, 1984)

Appendix 2

On the Future of I Tatti Bernard Berenson’s wishes for I Tatti, written c. March 1956

I want to put down in writing my ideas for the future of the institution that is to use I Tatti and my entire estate after my demise. Our present western world is harassed, hustled and driven. It excludes leisure, tranquillity, permits no unexciting pursuits, no contemplation, no slow maturing of ideas, no perfectioning of individual style. Therefore my first and foremost wish is to establish fellowships that will provide leisure and tranquillity to sixteen or more promising students. I would like them to have yearly stipends of 5000 dollars each, at present purchasing value which would be twice the amount stated in my will. When the fellowship fund is assured and the institute fully organised, the plan would be to begin with four or more fellows the first year, adding four or more the second year, again four or more the third year and once more four or more in the fourth. In the fifth year the first lot would go and the next one come in. From then on there would be a regular rotation: each year four or more fellows would leave and four or more would come in. I would like half of these fellows to be appointed from the United States and Canada, four or more from England and one or more each from Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Holland. I omit France and Germany because these countries already have institutions in Florence. With the approval of Harvard University, the Advisory Committee hereafter referred to should make recommendations about making exceptions when needed to my suggestions as to the composition of the fellows. It might happen that particularly gifted individuals from other countries, including the Soviet Block and the Far East, would seem more promising than Anglo-Saxons of the same year and more eligible as fellows. I would like these fellows to be no younger than 25 and no older than 35. Students who are still candidates to Ph.D’s should be excluded and the selection made from those whose attitude towards art and literature and thought and their history is not merely archaeological and, in the German sense of the word, ‘philological’ but psychological and empirical, founded on direct and loving contact with the work of art and not on book-learning. I should wish them to have complete leisure in these four years while maturing to be creative writers and teachers in the interpretation of art of every kind including the verbal as well as the visual arts and not excluding fiction and verse. Research for the lust of mere research is not to be encouraged. 494

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In a sense I venture to confess that I would like the fellows of I Tatti to continue what all my life long I have been trying to do but have only faintly succeeded in doing. I would like them to take as models Goethe and Winckelmann, Ruskin and Pater, Burckhardt and Wölfflin, rather than mere antiquarians or mere attributors of the type of Cavalcaselle, Bodmer and their likes. I would like them to write about the way artists and their works have been appreciated through the ages rather than to concentrate on the material history or the provenance of the given work of art. In short, I want this institute to promote aesthetical and humanistic rather than philological and antiquarian interests. If possible the fellows should live as an intellectual group at I Tatti and its dependencies or in Florence half the year. Nothing opens the mind and heart like free discussion of gifted maturing individuals coming together with their own national traditions and differing attitudes and approach. During the other six months they shall be free to travel and to get new impressions or revise previous ones. I would prefer their travels to be confined to what was the ancient Oecumene, not going farther East than the Euphrates and not farther South than Egypt and the great desert of North Africa. The best results may be expected from the most intimate possible acquaintance with our Hebrew, Greek, Roman, Mediaeval and Renaissance past as centred in the Mediterranean countries and their ‘Hinterland’. Italy holds the dominant position in that region, having absorbed all the influences of the historical past while radiating its own influence to the West and the North, to France, Spain, England and Germany. I have provided a library (which by the way could furnish the surest and completest biography of myself) covering nearly every field of art and literature as well as all the ancillary material, historical, philological and critical for rendering the arts intelligible, suggestive and inspiring. A person properly prepared who would use the I Tatti library for four years could not help coming out as a cultivated appreciator of all that art is and of what it has done to humanise mankind. The library should be accessible to serious students of whatever nationality who could profit by using it. I recommend that the serial publications should be continued or replaced by better ones (if any such appear) and that new books which promise to be of permanent value should be added to the extent that funds will permit. Dead books, by which I mean books of merely temporary interest gathered in a lifetime had better be given to any Italian libraries who may want them, rather than to attempt to sell them. I would prefer my works of art to remain distributed over the house and not dumped into a separate room as a museum or gallery. It is a great and earnest wish of mine that not a single square yard of the grounds now surrounding I Tatti from Ponte a Mensola up to the house and beyond should ever be alienated. I want them to serve as a protection against the invasion of the suburbs and to promote a feeling of free space and of distance. I should recommend that the permanent features of the garden, like trees and hedges, should be carefully kept up, reducing if necessary the expenditure on the cultivation of flowers. I have every hope that whatever government prevails in Italy in the near and not too remote future will respect I Tatti and what it offers to students of promise interested in the pursuits that have absorbed my own life. For the residing director I would prefer a person who was not a specialist of Florentine art but who had the whole world’s art always in his mind, whose interest was in styles rather than in illustration and did not reduce the work of art to a mere document for the history of its own period. For instance, I greatly admired the Warburg Institute for appointing as its director the late Professor Frankfurt, a student of Ancient Mesopotamian art.

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I would recommend that John Walker (at present Chief Curator at the Washington National Gallery) should be after my demise the first director of the Harvard Institute that I Tatti is to become. He knows intimately what my hopes and intentions are for such an institution as I want I Tatti to be. Ever since the idea of leaving I Tatti to Harvard took shape, John Walker and I have discussed what it should be and what could be done with it. I am convinced that he could give it at the start the direction and the quality that I have in mind. My second recommendation would be Philip Hofer. As members of an Advisory Committee for I Tatti I would suggest the following names: For the u.s.a:Walter Lippmann, John Walker, Philip Hofer, Robert Lehman, John Nicholas Brown, Charles Henry Coster, Francis Taylor, W. G. Contstable For England: Lord Crawford, Sir Kenneth Clark, Anthony Blunt, William Mostyn-Owen For the Scandinavian countries: Axel Boethius I further recommend that the Advisory Committee consult my cousin Lawrence Berenson and Miss Elizabeth Mariano before presenting any suggestions or proposals to Harvard. Both have full understanding of my views about the future of I Tatti. It is my hope that the President and the Corporation of Harvard University will consult with the Advisory Committee in the selection of the Director, in the choice of the fellows and in the determination of the general policies of the institution. Bernard Berenson

Appendix 3

The English text of the address that Kenneth Clark gave, in Italian, on 7 May 1960, in the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence, appeared in the Burlington Magazine, 102 (1960), pp. 381–6, and is reprinted here with kind permission of the editor. In the actual speech, Clark omitted one or two passages that seemed inappropriate to a non-specialist audience, and these he put back in the text of the article.

I can imagine no greater honour than the invitation to speak to you in this noble hall, which seems to stand at the centre of European civilisation, on the subject of one who became almost the embodiment of that civilisation, Bernard Berenson. Those of you who knew him will agree that he appears in our memories in many different guises – as a talker, a looker, an artist in life and a sage. But today it is surely appropriate that we should celebrate his memory as the unsurpassed student and critic of Italian art. How is it that a man born in Lithuania, and brought up in a poor quarter of Boston, achieved this position? There exists in the archives of Harvard University the application dated 30 March 1887, which Bernard Berenson made for a travelling fellowship in Europe. He claims that he has excelled in the field of Arabic, Assyrian, Hebrew and Sanskrit, and that his chief aim is to increase the appreciation of Arabic literature. As in Leonardo da Vinci’s letter to Ludovico il Moro, art is mentioned only incidentally. In fact Berenson says: ‘It is there that I feel weakest. One can study literature after a fashion here [in Harvard], but art not at all.’ It is a shock to recall that when Berenson was a young man there were practically no pictures by the great Italians in the United States, a situation which Berenson himself was to do so much – we may sometimes think almost too much – to alter. He did not get the fellowship, but in the same year friends who recognised his brilliance, financed a journey to Europe. He was extremely poor. Often he could not get enough to eat. But he stayed in Europe for the next seventy years. He went first to Paris, then London, and the pictures in the Louvre and the National Gallery made a deep impression on him. He did not immediately abandon his ambition to combine his learning and his sense of poetry in one compendious philosophy; indeed one may say that he never abandoned it, and that this is what gives quality to his latest writing. But in his first year in Europe the visual arts occupied his mind more and more, and all that was needed for him to fix his mind entirely on this study was a means of integrating it with a way of life and an intellectual method. Both of these were waiting for him in Italy. In Italy he found that works of art are not all imprisoned in galleries, but are, so to say, an extension of the surrounding life and landscape; and in Italy he found a scholar who had, as he supposed, elevated the study of art to an intellectual discipline – I refer, of course, to Giovanni Morelli. 497

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Readers of Berenson’s Sketch for a Self-Portrait will remember the moment when his vocation first presented itself to him. Sitting at a rickety table outside a café in the lower town of Bergamo, he suddenly said to his companion that they should devote their entire lives to connoisseurship. ‘We are the first to have before us no ambition, no expectation, no thought of reward. We shall give ourselves up to learning, to distinguishing between the authentic works of an Italian painter of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and those commonly ascribed to him. Here at Bergamo, and in all the fragrant and romantic valleys that branch out northward, we must not stop till we are sure that every Lotto is a Lotto, every Cariani a Cariani, every Previtali a Previtali.’ ‘To this’, he adds, ‘had vaulting ambition or at least dazzling hopes shrunk.’ And indeed it must strike us now as a strange ambition for a brilliant young student of oriental languages. Now that there is substantial agreement about the outline of most of the great Italian painters we forget the confused and misleading picture of their work which in the 1880s was available to even the most diligent and perceptive student. But think of Walter Pater, the writer from whom Berenson, to a large extent, derived his critical standards, and whom he revered all his life. Pater’s famous essay on Leonardo da Vinci not only includes the Medusa of the Uffizi as one of the most famous and certain of Leonardo’s works; but in a long paragraph devoted to his drawings contrives not to mention a single one which is by Leonardo himself. And do not let it be thought that this is because Pater was a dilettante. His Leonardo essay was written in 1868. Thirty years later the critic Muntz published a heavy volume which was supposed to be the authoritative study of Leonardo, and of the drawings illustrated not a single one was authentic. And in this very same year – 1898 – Mr Berenson was writing the Drawings of the Florentine Painters, in which the list of Leonardo’s drawings is absolutely accurate and almost complete. Well, if that was the predicament of so fine a critic as Pater, it certainly was worth someone’s while to bring a little more critical acumen to bear on problems of attribution. But, you may ask, was this not being done already by less volatile spirits than the youthful Berenson – in fact by Cavalcaselle? Many of us would consider his History of Italian Painting the foundation of all our knowledge. Nevertheless one can understand why Berenson reacted against that famous work and sometimes spoke of it with distaste. It was entirely without a sense of method, it showed no distinction of mind and, owing to the collaboration of Mr Crowe, it was written in a style worthy of the Great Exhibition. The intelligence and the sense of method which were so painfully lacking in Crowe and Cavalcaselle were exactly what characterised Giovanni Morelli; and it was, therefore, natural that the young Berenson, who was brimming over with intelligence, and who had derived from William James the notion that a physiological method could be applied to things of the mind, should have taken him as his master. Moreover, Morelli’s whole approach – his aristocratic independence, his love of teasing museum directors, his Socratic professions of ignorance – were all entirely sympathetic to Berenson and had I think a permanent influence on his conversational style. I may add that Mr Berenson never knew him, and only set eyes on him two or three times. The method with which Berenson determined to winnow the rustic churches of the Veneto and the upper Adige is described in a paper on the rudiments of connoisseurship written in 1894 – that is to say at the same same that he was compiling the lists of the Venetian painters and preparing the Lorenzo Lotto. The first point he makes is that the only real evidence of who painted a picture lies in the picture itself. Documents, traditions, signatures can be shown over and over again to be completely misleading. Nothing is certain except quality and style. As Berenson says: ‘All that remains of an event in general history is the account of it in a document or a tradition; but in the history of art, the work of art is the event.’ The other conclusion of his essay on method is that it is in those parts of a picture where the

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artist works unthinkingly or relies on his own formulation that he is most likely to reveal his personality.Thus the best tests of authenticity are the ears, the hands, the folds of drapery.This, of course, was the Morellian method, and Morelli, who had been trained as a physiologist, carried it to great lengths. To many of you these two propositions will be very familiar, but I repeat them now because the so-called science of connoisseurship has receded so far into the distance that it is hard to imagine a time when it seemed a new and invigorating mental exercise. Yet such it undoubtedly was, and appearing in the form of Berenson’s confident, destructive articles, produced in the 1890’s a complete revolution. In particular his lists of authentic pictures, by their laconic finality, attained an air of almost magical prestige. No argument; no explanation or apology; just a name. Mr Berenson’s own procedure when considering a picture rather added to this feeling of magic. He used to tap the front of the picture with a delicate finger and then listen intently as if expecting an almost inaudible voice to speak to him. Then after a long pause he would pronounce a name. I hardly ever knew him explain or give his reasons – quite rightly, because they would have been full of complexities and imponderables. And of course he tapped the picture in order to find out if the panel was in good condition or if the canvas had been relined. All the same I can well understand why people without his visual memory and rapid processes of deduction thought there must be some trick. ‘I soon discovered’, he said, ‘that I ranked with fortune tellers, chiromantists, astrologers – and not even with the self-deluded of these, but with the deliberate charlatans.’ That, of course, was written in a moment of depression. In fact the prestige of the early lists, and of Berensonian connoisseurship in general, was overwhelming. For almost thirty years this particular branch of scholarship – the giving of names – had a prestige similar to that of textual criticism in philological studies. And just as the greatness of a Bentley or a Housman does not reside in the correctness of their textual emendations, but rather in some combination of elegance of mind and far-reaching scholarship, so the value of Berenson’s early lists is not invalidated by the fact that a very large number of his hypotheses have proved to be incorrect – often by Berenson himself. I said that there was a flaw in the doctrine that the work of art in itself should be the sole basis of connoisseurship. It is, of course, that there must be some fixed points to which a name is attached, and this name can only be provided by documents and signatures. To ignore such signposts and proceed entirely on internal evidence may sometimes succeed – as it did for example, in the case of Alunno di Domenico, whose name, Bartolomeo di Giovanni, was afterwards discovered; but more often it ends badly, as in the outstanding example of Amico di Sandro. This was the most ambitious of all Berenson’s ‘artistic personalities’, and as you will remember he ended by disintegrating into Botticelli of the ’80s and early Filippino. A similar fate overtook Alvise Vivarini, Polidoro Lanziani and several others. And yet the creation of these Pirandellian figures performed a useful function in criticism; in fact certain phases of art history, for example the relationship of Filippino to Botticelli, could hardly have been clarified without them. And how often those of us who still privately practise the art of connoisseurship (for there has long ceased to be a public demand for it), lament the loss of these convenient cards of identity. How useful Alvise was for those Bellinesque portraits now transferred to Jacometto; how satisfactory when we could pronounce the name of Polidoro Lanziani before a whole group of Venetian paintings done in the 1530s. To embark on a long inconclusive explanation is far less satisfactory. The early lists were the production of idealistic youth.They were, as Berenson later pointed out, too exclusive: dandaical aestheticism, he called it. They did not allow for an off-day. They took no cognizance of studio practice. Actually the most serious result of this idealism was one which the author never quite admitted, his lack of interest in the physical condition of

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pictures. If there was one thing that bored the young Berenson more than documents it was technique; and although he learnt to be much more careful in these matters, to the end of his days he never had quite enough respect for the skill of restorers. Perhaps nobody who hasn’t worked in a gallery can realise how much that one sees exhibited is the work of these gifted and self-effacing craftsmen. The young student from Harvard had never visited a restorer’s workshop, and so he could put as the only illustration to his Venetian Painters the Hampton Court Shepherd, which, if all later repaint were removed, would be a very faint shadow indeed. I may add that I was with him when he came to look at it again for the later lists. A long silence was broken by Mrs Berenson saying to him ‘Bernard, we must have been in love.’ As everybody knows, the success of the lists, and of the accompanying essays in the science of connoisseurship, especially that on the New Gallery Exhibition of 1894, led to a great change in Berenson’s material circumstances. His destructive comments on famous and valuable old masters had so greatly alarmed collectors and dealers alike that there was nothing for it but to persuade this terrible poacher to turn game-keeper. People sometimes say that his decision to work for dealers had a crucial effect on his intellectual development. Berenson himself placed the crisis of his life in these years, but related it to a different event, the decision to write The Drawings of the Florentine Painters. There may be an element of what (I believe) psychologists call substitution in the tone of regret in which he always referred to that great work; but no doubt he was right, looking back on his life, in seeing this as the moment when he might have followed one of two paths: the path opened up by the introductions to the Florentine and Central Italian volumes, the path, that is to say, of philosophic criticism and appreciation; or the path opened up by the lists. And it is important to notice that Berenson’s reason for choosing the latter was not material gain (for the choice preceded, by some years, his decision to work for dealers) but the feeling that scholarship was a more respectable and serious-looking occupation than criticism. ‘I dared not resist the chance offered me of proving that I could toil and plod and pedantise and bore with the best of them.’ I have called the Florentine Drawings a ‘great work’, and it deserves that epithet on many counts: for its sheer bulk, for its originality, for the quantity of penetrating criticism which it contains and for the way in which its judgements have stood up to sixty years of scrutiny. No large systematic study of old master drawings had ever been written before, and no one had thought, in the words of the title, of criticising and studying them as ‘documents in The History and Appreciation of Tuscan Art’. Consider the mere physical difficulties of coping with this mass of material, and persuading the custodian of the freezing print room of the Uffizi to leave his scaldino and rummage in the dark for another portfolio. Mr Berenson often said that it was those winters in the Gabinetto di Disegni which accounted for the row of shawls and coats which struck every visitor to I Tatti. But through it all his eye never lost its sharpness and really the only judgements which required revision were those in the section on Michelangelo which, paradoxically enough, contains the best criticism in the book. The Florentine Drawings was finished in 1897, but did not appear till 1903, owing to the machinations of Dr Bode, who would not allow the illustrations printed by the German state printing press to be released. I may add in parenthesis that the relations of Berenson and Bode continued for about thirty years to be that of Pope and Emperor in the thirteenth century: on the whole the Pope had the best of it, and ended by giving the Emperor absolution. There followed fifteen years during which Berenson greatly enlarged his range of knowledge – how greatly can be judged by a single fact, that the original Central Italian lists do not contain the name of Sassetta, and such of his works as are included appear under the name of Sano di Pietro. He began to pay far more attention to chronology, as one can see, for example, in his Venetian Paintings in America. The original method was less rigorously applied, but the word

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still held some magic for him and appears in the title of a work, Three Essays in Method, which, personally, I think the least satisfactory of his books. During these years collectors, dealers and students of art history were all clamouring for revised lists, and I don’t see how Mr Berenson could have refused them. It must have been galling for him to see the old ones, with all their mistakes and omissions, quoted as his opinions. Almost every day he would receive corrections which he himself had made twenty years earlier. The revised lists were inevitable. But of course they were much less fun than the old ones. Instead of being a touchstone of quality they had to be all inclusive. Instead of being a sharp weapon used to assault an inert mass of tradition, they themselves became the mass, the canon, the object of assault. And then instead of the fragrant valleys north of Bergamo the work had to be done from photographs. Those photographs! They were like a plague of flies which descended on I Tatti, driving everybody mad. You will remember that the old brown silver prints were on very thin paper which curl up at sight. Mrs Berenson stuck them down with paste onto pieces of cardboard, but the paste fermented and the photographs got a disease, which infected all the other photographs, and they had all to be put in the sun to cure them, and then of course they all curled up again – and so it went on. When I first stayed at I Tatti in the early 1920s, the revision of the lists was in full swing, and I must say that the atmosphere was very far from the tranquil, frugal, hopeful aestheticism which must have prevailed in Fiesole when the first edition of the Italian Painters was being prepared. Young ladies ran hysterically from room to room, and every few minutes Mr Berenson would emerge like Jehovah from his study and ask for a photograph which was invariably missing. I was often reminded of Yeats’s lines: ‘I saw a staring Virgin stand Where holy Dionysus died.’ The lists were done in the end: but alas, it was too late. By 1932 the prestige of connoisseurship had declined. The new fashion for iconographical studies was already in the ascendant. And although it is a vulgar error to associate the science of connoisseurship with the art market, the fact remains that it derived some of its force, as all forms of art and scholarship do, from the fact that it was needed: needed, I mean, by the big, wicked world. It is difficult for anyone who was not concerned to imagine the mania for ‘attributions’ which flourished in the inflationary 20s. It was like the railway mania of the 1840s – or, to take a closer parallel, it was like the trade in relics in the fourteenth century. Certificates of attribution were the means of keeping in affluence quite a large proportion of the priesthood of art. In this hierarchy Mr Berenson was, as I have said, the Pope. Like the Holy Father he was himself entirely above suspicion, and his pronouncements were accepted as infallible. All this collapsed with the 1930 slump. And by the time rich people were willing to pay high prices for pictures again, their eyes fell on the brighter, more accessible and, by and large, more authentic works of the Impressionists. This meant that by the time the revised lists appeared, everyone (and scholars are not immune from social change) had lost just that extra eagerness which we bring to a subject which offers great material rewards. But this does not affect their permanent value. It takes, I think, a little imagination to realise what an extraordinary achievement the small volume of the Italian Pictures of the Renaissance is. Open it at random.You will probably find yourself confronted with the name of a painter – let us say Paolo Farinati – which suggests a fairly vague mental picture. You will find a list of about 100 works in village churches, in galleries, in private collections all over the world. Every one of those works Berenson had seen, and they had formed a clear image of Farinati in his mind, so that he could apply it instantly in going round a collection. Now multiply this by 300, for that is the number of painters listed in the volume, and remember that all these images had to be clear and usable. And each judgement not only involved a feat of memory, but was often a piece of condensed criticism. It meant saying ‘given the character and capacities of this

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particular artist, this is the kind of picture he might have painted.’ All this must be kept in mind when we find ourselves questioning, as we inevitably do, certain of the judgements; or when specialists in one particular artist point to occasional mistakes. This remarkable achievement was to some extent the result of an unusually good memory, not only for visual impressions, but for facts and dates. But one remembers most vividly, and so to say, creatively, things which have moved one: and the first reason why Berenson’s lists have a quality which no other compilation of the kind has achieved (I am thinking for example of van Marle’s volumes) is that pictures moved him. The lists are a record of his responses to the quality of the pictures he had seen, and ultimately it was this responsiveness which decided all his judgements. He came more and more to distrust arguments in favour of an attribution, and maintained that real conclusions were always arrived at instinctively. ‘In the beginning was the guess.’ On the other hand, he didn’t like it when other people did this (what he called the basta vedersi school) and, to be fair, his own conclusions were always examined methodically after they had been reached. In the 1932 edition the essays on Renaissance painting were, for the first time, issued in a volume separate from the lists of authentic pictures. This was obviously a convenience to the student and the tourist, but it diminished and even falsified Berenson’s achievement. The point of the first lists was that they were an index of quality, an evaluation: and this was supplemented by the evaluations in the essays. These remain, after sixty-five years, remarkably convincing – and I do not think this means simply that we still agree with them. There are points of disagreement. I think we should all be disposed to rate Uccello and Pietro Lorenzetti higher than he does. But the reasons for his low opinion of these painters are in themselves interesting. He under-rated Uccello because, influenced by Vasarian tradition, he associated him with science and naturalism. To condemn a Renaissance painter in the 1890s for his naturalism is surprising and impressive. And after perceptive praise of the Lorenzetti, he writes that ‘Pietro could sink to the rubbish of his Passion scenes at Assisi, when he carries Duccio’s themes to the utmost pitch of frantic feeling. Form, movement, composition – even depth and significance – have been sacrificed to the most obvious and easy emotion. A like anarchy has seldom again overtaken an Italian master, even of the Bolognese school. To find its parallel you must go to Spain and to certain Germans.’ Well, one may not agree with this judgement (although I think there is much truth in it), but one must admit that to keep one’s critical faculties so rebelliously alive in spite of the holy hypnotism of Assisi, was a remarkable feat. But such sudden shocks of disagreement are rare. In general we find ourselves assenting almost too easily. We take his evaluations for granted until we remember the accepted values of the 90s. For example the unquestioned supremacy of Ghirlandajo — thought to be Sophoclean climax of the Quattrocento – an evaluation which you will find not only in Crowe and Cavalcaselle, but in the ordinary encyclopaedia article right up to 1910. That is firmly put on one side. ‘Not a spark of genius.’ ‘The painter for the superior philistine.’ And in contrast, Botticelli, whom Pater had included so diffidently, so apologetically, in the Renaissance, Botticelli is rated by Mr Berenson as ‘the greatest artist of linear design that Europe has ever had.’ Even more remarkable than his evaluation of Botticelli, who had, after all, been highly praised by Ruskin, was the place he gave to Piero della Francesca, whose work is never mentioned by Ruskin at all. Piero plays no more than an historical role in Crowe and Cavalcaselle, yet Berenson puts him with Giotto and Masaccio as one of the three or four greatest artist of the Quattrocento, and recognizes his affinities with early Greek sculpture and Velázquez. This comparison suggests one of the ways in which Berenson’s approach to the old masters differs so markedly from that of his contemporaries, not only Crowe and Cavalcaselle, but

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Bode, Muntz or Frizzoni. He had far wider terms of reference. He was not confined to the groove of his own period. Already his mind was ranging back to Egyptian art, and dwelling with fascination on the problem which was to absorb his last thirty years, the declining art of Hellenism; and most striking of all when viewed historically, his pages are full of references to contemporary French painting. Signorelli is compared to Daumier, the early drawings of Leonardo, most justly, to those of Degas; and in the middle of a passage on Umbrian landscape is this sentence: ‘In spite of the exquisite modelling of Cézanne, who gives the sky its tactile values as Michelangelo has given them to the human figure, in spite of Monet’s communication of the very pulse beat of the sun’s warmth over fields and trees, we are still waiting for a real art of landscape.’ That was written in 1896, and you see that Berenson has recognised what we have only recognised quite recently, the two decisive figures in late nineteenth-century painting. The other factor that gives the lists their exceptional authority is, as I have said, that they were accompanied by a fresh and vigorous aesthetic philosophy. Re-reading the introductions to the Florentine and Central Italian Painters it is surprising how much space is taken up with the statement of aesthetic principles. Most of us remember the pages on tactile values, but forget that there are similar disquisitions on naturalism, on movement, on the visual image, on illustration, on the impersonality of art, on space-composition. Even in the North Italian Painters, which sometimes has the weary and distracted tone of an afterthought, there are admirable disquisitions on the influence of the antique, and on prettiness in art. There is no doubt that Berenson attached great importance to these statements of critical principles, and he often lamented, both in his conversation and in the Sketch for a Self-Portrait, that he had not carried this sort of criticism far further. ‘I cannot rid myself ’ he says, ‘of the insistent inner voice that keeps whispering and at times hissing “you should not have competed with the learned nor let yourself become that equivocal thing, an ‘expert’.You should have developed and clarified your notions about the enjoyment of the work of art. These notions were your own. They were exhalations of your vital experience.”’ How far was this inner voice justified? How valuable were those ‘notions’, as he calls them, and how fruitfully could they have been applied? I believe that as they stand in the prefaces, they have great value. Like so much of Berenson’s thought they go back to Goethe, to whom I believe the term ‘life enhancing’ is due; and although he says that they contain no echo of what he had heard or what he had read, I think they must owe something to Hildebrand’s Problem of Form (1893), which in turn was inspired by the correspondence of Conrad Fiedler and Hans von Marées. But where Berenson was strikingly original was in developing the theory that the life-enhancing effect of works of art is due to what he called ‘ideated sensations’ experienced through an unconscious self-identification. It was the first, and remains the only, de-mysticised aesthetic to command respect (because a sexual aesthetic is really too incomplete to be worth considering). Compared to it the ‘plastic sequences’ of Roger Fry and the ‘significant form’ of Mr Clive Bell are pure mysticism – not to say incantation. And even the more respectable aesthetic theories of the past – for example, those based on laws of proportion – end up in magic, although we may agree that the magic of numbers is a very ancient and honourable one. In three of its applications, tactile values, movement and space-composition, I find that the aesthetic of the ideated sensation really works, and is a most valuable basis for criticism. And if we feel that Berenson under-rates the value of illustration (as, for example, in his slighting references to Bruegel), we must remember the popular instinct, especially in England, is to think of art solely in those terms. As he pointed out forty years later, he was writing for ‘a public accustomed under the influence of Rio, Ruskin, Lindsay and the pre-Raphaelites, to see little in painting but illustration’. His contention that changes of taste are changes of visual imagery,

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because this reflects the objects of our daily interest or desire; whereas the non-illustrative element in art, being dependent on our bodily responses, is far more stable, is I think true and valuable; but in 1895 it was a shock, and it is not surprising that, as he said, ‘the public took no notice of reservations or attenuations, and remember only that part of my theory which was startling’. Incidentally, one of the great drawbacks of this passage in the Central Italian Painters is that he could not find a satisfactory name for the non-illustrational element. He called it, you may remember, ‘decoration’: a most unhappy piece of terminology, because that word has different and precise associations from which it cannot now be separated. Berenson’s theory was, as I say, a revolutionary doctrine in 1895, and strangely enough it can be applied to the revolutionary art of today which Mr Berenson himself disliked. For example, Mr Henry Moore’s statements about sculpture are in fact amplifications of the doctrines of tactile values and space composition, although they are related to organic life in general, rather than to the human figure alone. And what other justification for tachist art can there be except that of the ideated sensation? No doubt Berenson was right in thinking that his theories would stretch far further than the application he had given them in the Florentine and Central Italian Painters. Should he then have spent his life, as he himself several times suggests, in extending and applying these principles? I think it was a wise instinct which prevented him from doing so. Berenson was not a philosopher in the limited or professional sense of the word. His thoughts were not controlled by logic; his mind, which could accommodate such a multitude of concrete impressions, was hostile to abstractions; and he had a corresponding mistrust of systems. ‘Every attempt at a system’, he said, ‘is made at the expense of facts, fancies, suggestions and ideas that clamour for notice like the denizens of Dante’s Inferno. I can never get their cries out of my ears.’ Could he have continued with the same kind of intensive critical examination of Italian art? Here the difficulty was, I think, that the prefaces had said too much in too small a space. In a way it is their strength: it is this which has kept them alive for sixty-five years. But the price of such concentration was that he could not go back over the same ground. He could not undertake a fuller and more leisurely critical survey of Italian art without feeling that he was repeating himself. The lists, on the other hand, were continually expanding; and so the essays published between 1903 and 1940 are not criticism, but connoisseurship – footnotes to the lists. And yet the lists bored him. Indeed I doubt if he would have stuck to them had it not been for Mrs Berenson, whose mind had not evolved at the same rate as her husband’s, and whose strong, pragmatic common sense saw them as a job that had to be done. How often have I seen them in a gallery together, he delighting in the azure distance in some Bellinesque Madonna, she insisting on a conclusion as to its authorship. All the time he cherished certain dreams of escape. The one which took most concrete form in his mind was a critical and philosophical survey of one of the great crises of art history, the decline of classical and rise of mediaeval art. He collected material for this book from about 1910 to 1940. It was to this end that he undertook his journeys and accumulated his library, and in many ways it seemed a subject ideally suited to his genius. His learning, his memory, his unrivalled power of relating incidents remote from one another and of drawing analogies – in a word his historical wisdom – could all have been united and controlled by his aesthetic principles. But the book was never written. All that remains is the fragment on the arch of Constantine, and the brilliant suggestions in the last chapters on Aesthetics and History. And what, we may ask, prevented it? One answer, frequently given, is that he could not write. I have often heard it suggested that this was because English was not his native language. But this, I am sure, is a mistake. He could not remember a time when he did not speak English, and although a formidable

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linguist, he did not know a word of Yiddish – the language of his parents. It is true, however, that he never had a sure grasp of English idiom or of the rhythm of an English sentence. His style was peculiar. And he had the misfortune to be surrounded by stylists. His closest friend, R. C. Trevelyan, wrote an admirable classic English; his brother-in-law, Logan Pearsall Smith, was a master of fine writing. Mrs Berenson wrote a normal straightforward English prose.The young Berenson with his flowing locks and drooping eyelashes, wrote in a sort of Disraelian style, which offended the pure taste of his three closest associates. ‘You have no idea what Bernard’s style was like’, Mrs Berenson used to say, ‘Logan had to take him in hand. Trevy had to rewrite practically the whole book.’ Can it be wondered that when Mr Berenson took up his pen he felt somewhat inhibited by the thought of these eager critics breathing down his neck; or that certain pages, for example the section at the end of the North Italian Painters, called the Decline of Art, read as if they had been put through a mangle and starched by a very severe laundry. And the proof of this is, that when this formidable trio were no longer behind him, his natural style appeared; and was by no means a bad one. The Self-Portrait is, in a way, a well written book, with a fresh, vivid, idiosyncratic use of language. The miniature portrait of Carlo Placci in Rumour and Reflection is a masterpiece. It is revealing, and rather touching, that he wrote most naturally when he knew that his work wasn’t going to appear in English, but in the admirable Italian of his friend Loria. The reason why Berenson never wrote the great book that was in him is that his powers came more and more to be controlled by his immediate responses. He became a sort of sublime improvisatore, playing with his vast learning according to the happy chance of the moment. He treated knowledge and ideas as the bards treated legend and poetic imagery, as part of an inexhaustible reservoir to be drawn upon for the delight of his audience; and he had a half-conscious feeling that to fix facts and ideas on a printed page was to deprive them of their life. At most they could be allowed to show themselves in those marvellous digressions and asides which illuminate so many pages of Aesthetics and History and Rumour and Reflection. Such a procedure is rare in the modern world; it is hard for us to believe that the Iliad or the Bagavad Gita was originally spoken from memory. But in the history of man, this has been the classic form of teaching, especially in those teachings of the East, where Berenson’s first interests lay. But he differed from Homer and the author of the Bagavad Gita in one important respect, and that was his response to his surroundings. The bardic recitals take place on a stage as bare of scenery as that of antique sculpture; but Berenson was the child of Rousseau – the Rousseau of the Réveries d’un Promeneur Solitaire. Only his walks, fortunately for many of us, were not solitary. Anyone who has had the privilege of accompanying Mr Berenson on his walks in the garden of I Tatti or in the hills behind Vincigliata, will, I believe, agree that it was then that he was most entirely himself, because it was then that his powers of perception, of memory and of co-ordinating intelligence were all brought into harmony. His mind was continually enriched by what he saw and not distracted by what he heard. And what he saw was the countryside and the country people of Italy. I began by saying that he was drawn to Italian art because he felt it to be an extension of Italian life. In his first resolution to devote his life to connoisseurship, the fragrant valleys north of Bergamo are as important to him as the Lotto’s and Cariani’s he will find hidden there; and in the course of life they became more so. Italy, which at first had charmed him by its beauty and the abundance of its art, came in the end to be the centre of his moral being as well, and so in the truest sense his own country. Paradoxically, the realisation of this only came to him clearly in 1942 when Italy declared war on the United States; and those of you who have read his Rumour and Reflection will remember the moving pages in which he decides to stay on in this country, despite all the possible risks and hardships involved. He gives three reasons, that he felt so identified with the deeply humanised people of Italy that he could

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not face deserting them; that if he left he could not avoid ‘serving against this Italy which I love so much’; and finally he wanted to round off his acquaintance with the Italian people by seeing how well he would be treated. He was not mistaken. When the war was over he felt himself even more closely linked with the Italian people, and the town which he had loved for so many years showed in return its admiration for him. This citizen of the world became a Citizen of Florence. It was the one honour ever bestowed upon him which really touched his heart.

Dramatis Personae

Part 1 The biographical details of Berenson’s and Clark’s lives between 1925 and 1959 are covered in detail in the introductions to the chapters. This section gives a summary of their lives before 1925 and after 1959 as appropriate, with brief biographical information on their spouses, and those blood relations and members of their households mentioned in the letters. Bernard Berenson (1865–1959) Bernard Berenson was born on 26 June 1865, in Lithuania, at Butrimonys, in the province of Vilna, in the Pale of Settlement, an area set aside by the Russian Tsars in which the Jews were allowed to reside. His father, Alter Valvrojenski, was a logger who married Eudice Mickelshanski. He was the eldest of five children. He was brought up in the Jewish faith.With a precocity for languages, he learned Hebrew and German and he was also taught to admire German culture. In 1874 or 1875, with increasing anti-semitic pogroms in Lithuania, his father emigrated to Boston in the usa and the family joined him soon afterwards. On arrival in America, the family changed their name to Berenson. At that time, Berenson spelt his first name Bernhard (he adopted the Anglicised spelling Bernard in the First World War). In America, his parents changed their first names to Albert and Julia. With no money and few worldly possessions, the family lived in considerable hardship in the poorer parts of Boston. Albert, a somewhat feckless individual who did not make friends and relationships easily, struggled to make a living as a pedlar. His eldest son, Bernhard, however, flourished. Good-looking, charming and with noticeable intellectual abilities which he nourished by voracious reading in the Boston Public Library, he secured a place at the Boston Grammar School and from there, in 1883, a place at the recently established Boston University, then recovering from the great Boston Fire of 1872 which had destroyed many of its buildings. In 1884, sponsored by Edward (‘Ned’) Perry Warren, a young aesthete and collector who had just graduated from Harvard University, and who came from a rich Massachusetts family, Berenson was admitted to Harvard. He majored in literature, pursued linguistic studies (including Sanskrit) and began to take an interest in the fine arts. At Harvard, the subject was taught by Charles Eliot Norton who did not take to Berenson (the sentiment was reciprocal). The person with the most significant influence on the young Berenson was the philosopher William James, from whose teachings Berenson developed his ideas of ‘tactile values’ and ‘ideated sensations’. 507

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Boston and Harvard Universities had a profound, formative influence on Berenson and at Harvard he made a favourable impression on his contemporaries, noticeably as editor-in-chief of the Harvard Monthly. On graduation in 1887, his idea was to travel to Europe and become ‘a critic or historian of literature’. He applied for a travelling fellowship but this was blocked by Norton. However, a number of his admirers (including Warren and Isabella Stewart Gardner, the immensely rich collector, patron and philanthropist who created the eponymous Museum in Boston) offered to support him financially in his venture. He travelled to Paris and to Oxford where he joined Ned Warren. What had been intended as a one-year visit in pursuit of literature was a watershed: Berenson discovered a passion for paintings and the visual arts, and he did not return to the usa for many years. He studied Italian Renaissance paintings in the museums, galleries and churches of Europe and started his collection of photographs. He met the pioneer scholars of Italian Renaissance studies, Giovanni Cavalcaselle and Jean-Paul Richter, and through the latter became a disciple of Giovanni Morelli, whose pioneering methods of analysing the way in which individual artists treat detail opened the path to a new level of accurate attributions and authentications. However, Berenson’s most significant meeting came in 1888, in London, when he was introduced to Mary Costelloe, née Pearsall Smith. The initiator of the introduction was a close friend of both Mary’s and Berenson’s, Gertrude Burton. She was the young wife of a professor in Boston, and Berenson corresponded with her about his travels in Europe; she also corresponded with Mary, telling her about Berenson and praising his ‘genius’, the tenderness of their friendship and details of his travel plans. Gertrude had been one of the Boston University group of girls on whom Berenson’s eye had fallen.Thus, Mary, having been briefed by Gertrude that Berenson was in England in 1888, invited him to dinner with her husband, Frank Costelloe, at their house.Their second encounter took place at Mary’s parents’ house in Surrey in 1890; having been briefed regularly by Gertrude, Mary prepared for it carefully so as to make the best impression. They fell deeply in love and, although they always lived apart formally before they eventually married, they were at once inseparable as lovers, travelling companions and business partners. In 1885, Berenson had been baptised into the Episcopalian Church in Boston and, in February 1891, he was received into the Catholic Church at Monte Oliveto Maggiore in Italy. The following decade, between this second encounter and their marriage in 1900 after the death of Frank Costelloe, witnessed the laying of the foundation stones on which all Berenson’s subsequent career and achievements would be built. Berenson published his first books, notably three volumes of the Italian Painters of the Renaissance (the fourth was published in 1907) and his monograph Lorenzo Lotto; a volume of essays, The Study and Criticism of Italian Art, was published in 1901. He was also carrying out the laborious spadework for his groundbreaking scholarly achievement which was published in 1903, The Drawings of the Florentine Painters. The extensive travels that he and Mary made throughout Italy to look at works of art at first hand during this time laid the cornerstone of knowledge on which his reputation and expertise came to depend. He started to earn fees by advising American collectors and receiving commission on their purchases, his most important client being Isabella Stewart Gardner. In the spring of 1900, in preparation for marriage, they took a lease on the Villa I Tatti, a relatively humble farmhouse in the hills above Florence. On 27 December 1900, Berenson and Mary took a horse and carriage from I Tatti to the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence and were married in a civil ceremony. The majority of the paintings in their collection was acquired soon afterwards. From 1900 to 1945, Berenson’s writings consisted principally of revisions to, and new editions of, works already published, and the constant revision of the ‘Lists’. Much time was spent on travelling and creating the extensive library and on entertaining: the young and unknown who showed promise were as much welcome as the rich and famous. In 1907,

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Berenson entered into a contract with the art dealer Joseph Duveen and this provided the income with which to sustain the expensive way of life that he and Mary required and enjoyed. I Tatti was purchased in 1907 but the lifestyle and routines, including the stormy personal relationship, were much the same in all their essentials in 1925 as they were at the time of their marriage. The only notable variation occurred during the First World War when Berenson, on the recommendation of Edith Wharton, was employed by the us government as a translator and negotiator for the American Army Intelligence Section and, as a consequence, attended the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. Contemporary politics always held a strong fascination for Berenson. Berenson spent only twelve years of his life – from ten to twenty-two – in the usa but he always considered himself first and foremost to be an American and a Bostonian. He last went there in 1903–4 when he and Mary were on a business trip lasting six months. His parents and siblings remained in America and he kept in contact with them, giving them substantial financial support. His parents never escaped their straitened circumstances: his father died in 1928 aged eighty-three; his mother, in 1938 aged ninety-one. Berenson was closest in age to and most intimate with his sister Senda (see Senda Berenson Abbott) who was a pioneer in promoting women’s basketball and an instructor in gymnastics at Smith College, where she married the professor of English, Herbert Vaughan Abbott. His youngest sister, Rachel, vivacious, amusing and self-centred, married Ralph Barton Perry who became professor of philosophy at Princeton University; she died suddenly in 1933. The only sibling to outlive him was his second sister, Elizabeth (‘Bessie’), who was solitary and melancholic, with some talent as a sculptor; she never married. His brother, Abraham (‘Abie’), was a drifter, and feckless like his father, constantly in need of money for some unpromising venture; he died after an operation in 1936. Senda Berenson Abbott (1868–1954) Senda Berenson Abbott was the most beautiful of Berenson’s sisters and the one nearest to him in age. She rose to prominence as a pioneer of women’s basketball, writing the first Basketball Guide for Women (1901–7). She did not have much interest in athletics as a child, preferring music, literature and art, but when back problems forced her to give up the piano in 1890, she entered the Boston Normal School of Gymnastics. At first, she hated the exercise but as her back improved she grew to enjoy it, and she was recommended for a physical education job at Smith College. She remained at Smith for twenty-one years, introducing fencing in 1895. In 1911, she married a professor of English at Smith, Herbert Vaughan Abbott. Alda, Bertie and Cecil von Anrep Alda Anrep (1883–1974) was Nicky Mariano’s elder sister. She married, in 1909, Baron Egbert (‘Bertie’) von Anrep (1873–1955), also from the Baltic aristocracy. In early 1920, Alda and Bertie, both impoverished, with their young son Cecil, left Germany for Italy and came to live with Nicky at the Villino at I Tatti; they later moved to a rented apartment in the Borgo san Jacopo, Florence. In time, they became an integral and indispensable part of the I Tatti household: by 1924, Bertie was helping to run the I Tatti estate, eventually being given a salaried job as the general manager; in 1930 Alda took over the running of the Library. Mary Berenson (1864–1945) Mary Berenson (née Pearsall Smith) was one of seven children but only she, her sister Alys and her brother Logan, survived into adulthood. She was brought up in Pennsylvania in an ardent Quaker community. Her mother, Hannah Whitall Smith (1832–1911), was active in the women’s suffrage and temperance movements, a lay speaker and author in the Holiness movement in the United States and in the Higher Life movement in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Her father, Robert Pearsall Smith (1827–1999) shared his wife’s social and spiritual beliefs and was also a successful businessman, publishing maps

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and managing a glass factory, thus enabling the family to enjoy a substantial income. Mary was educated at Harvard Annex where she met Frank Costelloe (1855–1999), a Catholic of Scottish Irish descent, whom she married in 1885. She was also received into the Catholic Church. Costelloe qualified in England as a barrister and was an active political reformer. They settled in England and had two daughters, Rachel (‘Ray’) who was born in 1887 and Karin who was born in 1889. In 1888, Mary’s parents settled in England in order, in part, to be near their daughter and grand-daughters, and in part to spread their evangelical messages. Logan and Alys also settled in England. Mary’s relationship with Frank Costelloe was not particularly happy and, in England in 1890, she met Berenson. She was captivated by him, his interest in art and his abilities, which she determined to see him develop to the full. Leaving her husband and children behind, she followed Berenson to Italy and worked with him as a partner to develop their skills as connoisseurs, writers, art advisers and collectors. When Frank Costelloe died in 1899, she married Berenson shortly thereafter and together they purchased I Tatti and made it the centre of their lives and careers. She was a woman with a powerful physical presence and personality, and she had a strong appetite for physical fulfilment, travel, material possessions and stimulating company. In many respects she was the driving force in establishing Berenson’s early reputation as the leading authority on Italian art, and ensuring that his skills and expertise were noticed and well remunerated. She and Berenson had no children by choice. Their relationship was stormy yet passionate, although they both accepted that each was free to pursue love affairs with others. Mary had a particular penchant for men younger than herself who needed looking after. However, Mary proved, in the end, to be less robust than her husband and from the mid-1920s began to suffer increasingly from nervous collapses and debilitating physical conditions. Richard Arthur Berenson (1908–1990) Richard Arthur Berenson was a second cousin once removed. Berenson had no nephews as such but was inclined to describe male Berenson relations of the appropriate age as ‘nephew’. When Berenson’s father moved to Boston, he joined cousins on both his and his wife’s sides who had already moved there and adopted the name of Berenson. Richard Arthur was a Harvard graduate and completed his studies at the Harvard Business School under Georges Doriot. He became a successful businessman in Boston and supported many charitable causes. In 1983, he gave a substantial amount of documentary material relating to Berenson family history to Harvard University. Barbara Halpern (1912–1999) Barbara Halpern was the daughter of Mary Berenson’s daughter, Ray Strachey (who had married a younger brother of Lytton Strachey, Oliver). After studying history at Oxford University in 1930–33, Barbara Halpern sailed on a windjammer to Cape Horn, marrying the Finnish purser when they reached Australia. A son, Roger, was born in March 1935 but the marriage soon broke down and they were divorced. She met and married Wolf Halpern in 1937 (he was killed in an air crash in 1943) and then wished to be reunited with Roger. At the start of the war, Barbara Halpern joined the North American Service of the bbc, and in a career there which lasted four decades she became the chief producer for the forerunner of the World Service. She was notably clear-headed, with a reputation for formidability, strong organising powers and grasp of detail. Roger spent his first three winters, 1935–8, in Florence with Mary Berenson and brought her much consolation. Nicky Mariano (1887–1968) Nicky Mariano was born in Naples. Her mother’s family were of aristocratic, landed German descent, from Livonia, a historic region on the eastern shores of the Baltic Sea which is now part of both Estonia and Latvia. Her father, the son of an Italian lawyer from Capua, was deeply interested in philosophy and church history. He taught at the University of Rome

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where Nicky’s mother’s family spent their winters. They married, in spite of opposition, in 1879. In 1885, Nicky’s father was awarded a chair in church history at the University of Naples. Later, they settled in Florence where her mother died in 1898. Her father then married her mother’s younger sister. In the spring of 1914, Nicky met Mary Berenson who took a liking to her. She was with her family and friends in Livonia and Russia from 1914 onwards and then, in 1918, because of war, revolutions and political upheaval, she and her relations lost all their possessions and land and were forced to flee, at first to Berlin and then to Switzerland. While in Lausanne, she heard from Mary Berenson, proposing that she join the I Tatti household as the Librarian. Penniless and in need of employment, she accepted the post and so came to spend the rest of her life there, eventually to become Berenson’s closest and most intimate confidante and the organiser of his life and work. Fine-looking, petite, with fair hair, blue eyes and something of a Slavonic look, she exuded spontaneous warmth, cheerfulness and patience. Umberto Morra (1897–1981) Count Umberto Morra (see Appendix 1) was one of the key figures in the I Tatti household and one of Berenson’s closest confidants. Berenson treated him, a regular visitor, almost as a son. Morra’s interests were in literature and politics, not the visual arts, and he introduced Berenson to a safe and secure network of anti-fascist intellectuals in Italy. Of the same generation as Clark, they became close friends. In Another Part of the Wood, Clark wrote about his stay at I Tatti in January 1926: ‘I did, however, make one friend whose sweet character, intelligence and absolute sincerity have been a joy to me ever since, Umberto Morra. . . . The thought of meeting Umberto again was one of the factors which made me look forward to returning to the world of i Tatti’. Logan Pearsall Smith (1865–1946) Logan Pearsall Smith, Mary Berenson’s brother (and the same age as Berenson), was an essayist and writer of epigrams and aphorisms. A large man with a pronounced stoop, he wrote with agonising slowness. He was extremely well read and an authority on seventeenth-century divines. His magnum opus was a two-volume biography of the seventeenth-century diplomat, politician and poet, Sir Henry Wotton, published in 1907. Educated at Harvard and the University of Berlin, he also studied at Balliol College, Oxford, graduating in 1891. As a boy, he lived briefly in England, where he eventually settled, dividing his time between London and a Tudor farmhouse near the Solent in Hampshire called Big Chilling. He became a British citizen in 1913. He was a friend of Walt Whitman in the poet’s latter years. Unmarried, he employed a regular succession of young male secretary-companions. His literary followers included Desmond MacCarthy, John Russell, Robert Trevelyan and Hugh TrevorRoper. Endowed with exquisite taste and sensibility, and a love of sailing, he for a while ran an elegant antique shop in Pimlico, London, called Miss Toplady, but it was not a financial success. Mary Berenson referred to it as the ‘iniquity shop’ and supplied him with things for sale from Italy, making money on the transactions. Alys Russell (1867–1951) Alyssa Whitall Pearsall Smith was Mary Berenson’s sole surviving sister. She married the distinguished philosopher Bertrand Russell in 1894. They separated in 1911 and divorced in 1921. In 1907, she helped to set up a School for Mothers in north-west London and in the 1930s she chaired the Italian Refugees’ Relief Committee to help those fleeing from the fascist regime. Karin Stephen (1889–1953) Karin Stephen was Mary’s younger daughter. In 1914, she married Adrian Stephen (1883– 1948), the brother of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell. He and Karin became interested in the work of Sigmund Freud and were among the first British psychoanalysts. Karin inherited the

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Smith family tendency to manic depression and died from an overdose of morphine in 1953. Martha Carey Thomas (1857–1935) Martha Carey Thomas was Mary Berenson’s cousin (their mothers were sisters). Preferring to be known as Carey Thomas, she went, as did Mary, to the Howland Institute, a Quaker boarding school near Ithaca, New York, and then to Cornell University. After travel and study in Europe, she became, in 1884, the Dean of the College and chair of English at the newly founded Bryn Mawr College, of which her father, a surgeon, was a trustee. In 1894, she was elected the president of the College, a post she held until 1922. Carey Thomas was prominent in the women’s suffrage movement and had two long-standing same-sex relationships: with Mamie Gwinn and, after 1904, with Mary Garrett who died in 1915 leaving her a fortune, after which she forsook the rigid disciplines that had driven her hitherto and embarked on a life of luxurious worldwide travel. Kenneth Clark (1903–1983) ‘I was born on July 13th, 1903, at 32 Grosvenor Square, a space now occupied by the American Embassy. My parents belonged to a section of society known as “the idle rich”, and although, in that golden age, many people were richer, there can have been few who were idler.’ So Clark memorably wrote in the opening paragraph of the opening chapter, ‘An Edwardian Childhood’, in his autobiography Another Part of the Wood. Clark’s father, Kenneth MacKenzie Clark, came from a rich Scottish industrial family, whose enormous fortune was established in the first half of the nineteenth century by two brothers who perfected a smooth, fine cotton thread as an inexpensive and readily available substitute for silk thread, and which they made conveniently available on small wooden bobbins. The company expanded rapidly through constant innovation and the introduction of new products, including the first-ever thread suitable for machine use.Their trade was international and particularly successful in the United States where they established factories. Clark’s father, who never worked, nor ever needed to, and whose siblings all died early, spent his inherited fortune on yachting (Clyde yacht racing was his passion), shooting and gambling. Like many men of his generation and background, he over-indulged in food and drink, yet he was not without a social conscience. Clark’s mother was Margaret (known as Alice) MacArthur, from a Manchester Quaker family and a cousin of her husband. She was shy and inhibited, whereas his father was ebullient with an unselfconscious naturalness. They were intelligent but not much interested in intellectual pursuits, and without snobbery. As an only child, Clark wanted for nothing materially and when his parents died he himself inherited a substantial fortune, although smaller than his father’s. He lived with his parents who migrated between their ocean-going yachts, their estates in Scotland and Suffolk, their house in London, their house in Bournemouth, and their property in the South of France (gambling at Monte Carlo). His parents were not collectors or inheritors of a collection. Their taste was for solid and undemanding, but showy and expensive, Edwardian art and architecture. Clark was born with a natural aesthetic sensibility, aware of his surroundings and the feelings of other people, and had a liking for painting and drawing, at which he himself was more than averagely competent. His upbringing followed the pattern familiar to the children of rich Edwardian families: more contact with nannies and servants than with parents; from the age of eight, most of the year was spent away from parents at boarding school – in Clark’s case to reputable establishments where he fitted in and was well taught, firstly at Wixenford Preparatory School, near Guildford, Surrey, until he was thirteen, followed by Winchester College, one of the most distinguished boys’ schools in the country, with six centuries of history and an impeccable record of scholarship. From there, Clark won a scholarship to Trinity College, Oxford, to read history. It was just after the completion of his third year at Oxford that he went out to Italy and met Berenson.

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When Berenson died in 1959, Clark was less than four years away from his sixtieth birthday. His reputation as a writer, broadcaster and administrator on anything concerning the visual arts, and as the authority to whom the British establishment and successive governments looked for advice and reassurance about the arts in general, was unassailable. However, during the decade from 1959 to 1969 much of Clark’s attention and creative talent was directed towards the making of television programmes.When he stepped down from the chairmanship of itv in 1956, he signed a ten-year contract with Lew Grade’s Associated Television, making more than forty television programmes for them, covering a wide range of topics from general subjects such as the place of art in society, temples, landscape, and Japanese art, to programmes on individual artists such as Michelangelo, Rembrandt and Picasso. They were pioneering programmes in the early days of television and he enjoyed responding to the challenges and innovative demands that they presented: his skills and his approachable manner as a presenter of the arts to the general public were much commented on. This regular exposure to a public audience, together with his reputation, also made him in demand for lectures and speeches, exhibition openings, contributions to exhibitions and catalogues and as a trustee, chairman or committee member: as such he participated in the activities of, for example, the National Theatre Board, the British Museum and the Granada History Trust Archive. He was appointed the Slade Professor at Oxford, for a second term, for 1961–2. Honours both at home and from overseas also began to accumulate: among the early ones were the Austrian Order of Merit in 1959, an honorary doctorate from Liverpool University in 1960 and Membership of the us Academy in 1964. Clark himself, when not travelling, spent his weekdays in London, residing in his rooms in the Albany. Weekends were spent at Saltwood, often with family and friends. His wife Jane spent most of her time at Saltwood. The separation from her, which Clark’s busy life demanded, put a strain on their relationship but, in spite of it and Jane’s alcoholism, his loyalty to her never wavered, although it roused both embarrassment and admiration in his friends. In 1966, soon after his contract with Associated Television concluded, Clark entered a commitment with the bbc to make a thirteen-part series of television programmes: Civilisation: A Personal View by Kenneth Clark. Their success made him a household name in the Englishspeaking world and are the peg on which most of his subsequent popular recognition hangs. The bbc wanted to show off its proposed high-definition colour signal and decided that the best expression of this would be a series of programmes about the arts with a strong visual content. Initially, Clark was consulted about what the programmes might contain and who should present them. He sketched an outline of thirteen episodes and suggested that he could narrate them. After a certain amount of hesitation on both sides, the project went ahead. It was an expensive gamble that took three years to make and required visiting eleven countries, travelling 80,000 miles across Europe and North America and shooting enough celluloid to make six fulllength feature films. Jane accompanied Clark and the production team on their travels and was both supportive and participative behind the scenes. First broadcast from February to May 1969, Civilisation was an instant hit with British audiences and was even more enthusiastically received in the usa when it was first shown there in November 1969. Even before Civilisation, Clark had become the standard by which all other television presenters on the arts were judged. After Civilisation, he was frequently compared to Ruskin – not because of his style and content, which could scarcely be more different, but because of his manifest aspiration to preach the gospel of art to a wide audience, and his ability to get the message over to that audience. Nonetheless, Civilisation, and its success, provoked a fierce reaction from some younger critics and would-be presenters, who regarded Clark’s approach and style as haughty, patronising and elitist, and so provoked them into establishing an alternative way of presenting the arts, and with a different yardstick. Invitations to make public appearances, to accept honours and awards, to write books and catalogues and generally to be seen to give his blessing to almost any artistic enterprise,

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were abundant.Within weeks of the showing of the last episode of Civilisation, he was appointed Chancellor of the University of York and became a life peer, taking the title of Baron Clark of Saltwood. He was awarded the Order of Merit in 1976. The series also became a best-selling book. Numerically, Clark published more books after 1959 than before, although none achieved the scholarly and literary heights of Landscape into Art and The Nude. Many are re-workings of earlier writings. Most notable among them are Ruskin Today (1964) and Rembrandt and the Italian Renaissance (1966). The literary enterprise that most engaged him after 1969 was his two-volume autobiography, Another Part of the Wood (1974) and The Other Half (1977) which he subtitled A Self-Portrait. He continued to make television appearances and films, including one on Berenson in 1970, and several in collaboration with his younger son, Colin, who had become a film director. In 1971, the Clarks gave Saltwood to their elder son Alan and moved into a large, modern, architect-designed, bungalow in the kitchen garden of Saltwood. Jane’s physical and emotional health continued to deteriorate, exacerbated by injuries from falls, and much of Clark’s attention, time and energy, were focused on supporting her. Twelve months after Jane’s death in 1976, Clark married the French-born Nolwen Rice, the daughter of the Comte de Janzé and the widow of a neighbouring landowner in Kent, who owned an estate in Normandy. Clark’s own health had already begun to deteriorate, with infirmities resulting from arteriosclerosis and digestive problems, and from the early stages of Parkinson’s disease. He died in a nursing home in Kent on 21 May 1983. That autumn, at a packed memorial service at St James’s, Piccadilly, it was claimed that a few days before his death he had been received into the Roman Catholic Church. Alan Clark (1928–1999) Alan Clark first established himself as a military historian, later becoming a Conservative MP. He served as a junior minister in Margaret Thatcher’s government, at the Departments of Employment, Trade and Defence, and became a Privy Counsellor in 1991. Opinionated and never afraid of publicity, an inveterate iconoclast, he gained popular notoriety with the publication of his three-volume diary which candidly chronicled a political life under Thatcher, and his private affairs and opinions. His widow, Jane, continues to live at Saltwood. There are two sons. Colette Clark (born 1932) Colette Clark survives her twin brother. She lives in London. Colin Clark (1932–2002) Colin Clark established himself as a film-maker for the arts in both cinema and television in the uk and the usa. He retired from film-making in 1987 to write. Colin died in December 2002. He was three times married but had no children. Jane Clark (1902–1976) Always known as Jane by her friends and married relations, Jane Clark (née Martin) was christened by her parents Elizabeth Winifred (called Betty by her family, it was at university that she renamed herself Jane.) Her father, Robert Martin, of Scottish descent, was a businessman in the linen and lace trades, based in Ireland, and her mother, Emily, was a doctor who qualified in Dublin. She gave up practising medicine when she married aged thirty-three in 1899, although she went back into practice in the First World War. Robert Martin was her junior by ten years and was a lazy spendthrift who was supported financially by his wife and in his later years (in South Africa) by the Clarks. Jane had one elder brother and three younger brothers who were named Kenneth, Alan and Colin. Initially brought up in Ireland, she was educated in England at boarding school – Malvern College for Ladies. She went on to Somerville College, Oxford, where her beauty and stylish dress sense, together with her vivaciousness and warmth, ensured social success and a string of male admirers. She graduated

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in history and then took a teaching job at Downe House, a girl’s private school near Newbury. Jane died on 14 November 1976, after years of ill health (including a stroke which left her left side paralysed) and constant nursing.

Part 2 Ashton, Leigh Sir Leigh Ashton (1897–1983) was a student of Chinese art and the Director of the Victoria & Albert Museum, London (1945–55). His interest and influence were in promoting museums and displaying objects to appeal to the public, rather than in scholarship. Although homosexual, Ashton married the divorcée and Vogue Fashion Editor, Madge McHarg Garland, in a marriage of convenience in 1952. Several years older than Clark, he had also been educated at Winchester. Clark called him ‘my first link with the art world in London’. They travelled in Europe together and Ashton introduced Clark to important collectors. He was best man at the Clarks’ wedding. Baker, Collins Collins Baker (1880–1959) was the Surveyor of the King’s Pictures, a post to which he was appointed in 1928. At the same time, he was the Keeper of the National Gallery, a position he held from 1914 until 1933. He was one of the driving forces in the National Gallery and was instrumental in moving the pictures to safety in the First World War (they were stored in the London Underground). Baker was a self-taught scholar, having first studied painting at the Royal Academy Schools, who then wrote art criticism for weekly magazines. His entry to the museum world came initially through the Director of the National Gallery (Sir Charles Holroyd) who hired him as his assistant. After leaving the National Gallery, he moved to California to work at the Huntington Library and Art Gallery. Baldass, Ludwig von Ludwig von Baldass (1887–1963) was an Austrian art historian who specialised in Early Netherlandish painting. He studied under Max Dvořák at the University of Vienna and began to lecture there in 1926, gaining the position of professor in 1934. During the Nazi occupation of Austria he adhered to their policy on the arts. When the Nazis began plundering works from Jewish collectors, Baldass successfully frustrated attempts by the Rothschilds to get works in their collection out of Austria. In 1949 he retired and devoted himself to writing. He married Paula Wagner, a granddaughter of the architect Otto Wagner. Balniel, David David Alexander Robert Lindsay (Lord Balniel; 1900–1975), known as David Balniel, later 28th Earl of Crawford and 11th Earl of Balcarres, came from a Scottish family with a long history of interest in the arts as inheritors, scholars and public servants. He was the eldest son of the 27th Earl of Crawford (d. 1940), who was, among other things, an art historian with a particular interest in Renaissance sculpture and took an active interest in arts administration. David Balniel was educated at Oxford just before Clark. He became an mp at the 1924 General Election. Balniel held many trusteeships including the Tate Gallery (1932–7), the National Gallery (1935–41, 1945–52 and 1953–60), the British Museum (1940–73) and the National Galleries of Scotland (1952–72). He was a member of the Italian Exhibition selection committee. In 1925, he married Mary Katherine Cavendish, the third daughter of Lord Richard Frederick Cavendish. Béhague, Martine-Marie-Pol, de Martine-Marie-Pol de Béhague (1869–1939), Comtesse de Béarn, was the daughter of Count Octave de Béhague and Laure de Haber, the daughter of a Berlin banker. She was briefly

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married to a French cavalry officer but they soon separated without children. Rich and single, she travelled the world looking for rare and beautiful works of art. She amassed collections of paintings, sculptures, manuscripts, antiquities, porcelain and oriental works of art, which she installed in a lavishly restored and decorated hôtel particulier in Paris. Among her other properties was a house near Edith Wharton’s at Hyères. She was a close friend of Robert Norton. Bell, Charles Charles ‘Charlie’ Bell (1871–1966) was educated privately and joined the Ashmolean as the Assistant Keeper in 1896. Acerbic and with impossibly high standards, he declined an offer of the Directorship of the National Portrait Gallery in 1909, choosing to remain at the Ashmolean, where he re-hung the collection and took a particular interest in portraiture. Clark wrote: ‘in 1922 I believed him to be an old man. . . . He was descended from one of the famous Macdonald sisters, and so was a cousin of Baldwin, Burne Jones and Rudyard Kipling, whom I never heard him mention, although his grandfather, Ambrose Poynter, had been one of Kipling’s dearest friends. He had entrée into every great collection and intellectually distinguished milieu in England and Italy. But he had no wish to shine in the great world, only to excel in certain precise and narrow branches of art history’ (Clark APW). In fact, Bell was not a blood relation of the Macdonald sisters. His uncle Edward Poynter had married Agnes Macdonald). Bell, Clive Clive Bell (1881–1964) was a prominent art critic and theorist, a member of the Bloomsbury Group. He married Vanessa Stephen in 1907. With Roger Fry, he organised the Second PostImpressionist Exhibition in London in 1912. Bell adopted many of Fry’s aesthetic ideas and published them in 1914 in an influential book, Art. It established the Bloomsbury art-for-art’s sake aesthetic, coining the phrase ‘significant form’ and arguing that form, rather than content, is the most significant aspect of a work of art. Berlin, Isaiah Isaiah Berlin (1909–1997) was the Russian-born son of a rich Jewish family, who spent much of his childhood in Riga, Latvia, to escape persecution. In 1921, the family settled in Britain. A historian of ideas, political theorist, educator and essayist, Berlin spent his life in academe and was a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. He was one of the most eminent philosophers of his generation, renowned for his conversational brilliance, his defence of liberalism and his attacks on political extremism and intellectual fanaticism. He visited Berenson in the 1950s and corresponded with him. Binyon, Laurence Laurence Binyon (1869–1943) read classics at Trinity College, Oxford, where he won a prestigious prize for poetry in 1891. Immediately after graduating, he began working in the Department of Printed Books of the British Museum, later joining the Department of Prints and Drawings. In 1913, he was appointed as Keeper of Oriental Prints and Drawings. He was a friend of Ezra Pound, William Rothenstein, Walter Sickert and Charles Ricketts. Binyon married the historian Cicely Margaret Powell. His most famous poem, For the Fallen, is often spoken in Remembrance Day services. Bliss, Robert and Mildred Robert Woods Bliss (1875–1962) and Mildred Bliss (1879–1969) were step-brother and sister. Robert’s father married, secondly, Anna Barnes, the widow of Demas Barnes who had made a fortune in patent medicine, Mildred being their only child. Together, Robert and Mildred created Dumbarton Oaks, one of Washington’s most famous residences: in 1920, they

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purchased an early nineteenth-century, red-brick federalist building, which they substantially altered and expanded to provide a setting for their outstanding collections of European, Byzantine and pre-Columbian art. Robert had a distinguished career as a diplomat, serving as the us ambassador to Argentina in 1927–33. In 1912, he and his young wife were posted to Paris, where they became friendly with Edith Wharton and Royall Tyler, who encouraged their interest in art and collecting. Robert Bliss retired fully from government work in 1945. It was at meetings at Dumbarton Oaks, in 1944, that the United Nations Charter was drafted. The Blisses gave Dumbarton Oaks and its collections to Harvard University, with a substantial endowment. Bode, Wilhelm von Dr Wilhelm von Bode (1845–1929) was a German art historian and curator who founded the Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin in 1904 (now called the Bode Museum), having rebuilt the Strasbourg Museums which had been destroyed in the Franco-PrussianWar of 1870. A commanding figure in the international art world, he initially trained as a lawyer and then studied art history at the universities of Berlin, Vienna and Leipzig, becoming an expert on sculpture and Italian Renaissance art, about which he wrote widely and influentially.With the support of Wilhelm ii he was active in the art market, acquiring a wide-ranging and major collection for the museum in Berlin. Bodkin, Thomas Thomas Bodkin (1887–1961) was an Irish lawyer turned art historian, art collector and curator. He became the Director of the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin (1927–35) and then the founding Director of the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham (1935–52), where, by judicious purchases in a depressed market, he built up a collection notable for its quality. He was an active broadcaster and author, publishing personal reminiscences and translations of modern French poetry, as well as works of art history and criticism. Borenius, Tancred Tancred Borenius (1885–1948) was a Renaissance scholar, dealer, editor and, from 1924, an advisor to Sotheby’s on ‘Old Master’ pictures. Finnish-born, he settled in London and held academic posts including a lectureship at University College, London. It was said, even if not proven, that he accepted payment on the side for certificates of authenticity. Bos, Charles du Charles du Bos (1882–1939) was a French critic of English literature whose mother was English and who had studied at Oxford University. His particular interests were Shakespeare, Shelley and Byron. His approach and interest tended towards the spiritual and he sought to investigate the ‘soul’ of a work and its emotional impact on the reader. His six-volume Journal intime (1946–55) is an account of the spiritual evolution that brought him into the Roman Catholic Church in 1927. Bowra, Maurice Cecil Maurice Bowra (1898–1971) was one of Clark’s most important lifelong friends. A few years older than Clark, he was a young don at Wadham College, Oxford, when Clark was an undergraduate at Trinity and he became, in Clark’s words, ‘without question the strongest influence in my life’ (Clark APW p. 99). A classical scholar, and famous for his audacious wit, an overt homosexual, Bowra was warm-hearted and had little sympathy for armed conflict, pedants, bores, Americans, convention, frivolity and indifference. He was the Warden of Wadham College (1938–70), the Professor of Poetry (1946–51) and Vice-Chancellor of the University (1951–4). Bowra visited the Clarks (in the company of John Sparrow) when they were on their honeymoon at I Tatti in 1927 and was introduced to Berenson, but the meeting was not a success and Bowra was never invited back to I Tatti.

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Brinckmann, Albert Erich Albert Erich Brinckmann (1881–1958) was a German art historian and a disciple of Heinrich Wölfflin. He published a major book on Baroque sculpture in 1917 (Barockskulptur: Entwicklungsgeschichte der Skulptur in den Romanischen und germanischen Ländern seit Michelangelo bis zum 18. Jahrhundert) and a short book on Michelangelo drawings in 1925 (Michelangelo Zeichnungen). The son of an architect, architecture and space were his principal interests. Brown, John Nicholas and J. Carter John Nicholas Brown ii (1900–1979) was a member of the Brown family that had been active in American life since before the American Revolution.They were the major early benefactors of Brown University. Berenson nominated John as one of his wished-for appointments to an advisory committee for the governance of I Tatti after his death (see Appendix 2). Brown inherited a huge fortune based on real estate and textiles businesses, of which he took control after 1929. After the war, he was commissioned as a lieutenant colonel in the Army and travelled to Europe to supervise the restitution of art treasures stolen by the Nazis. Brown settled in Providence, Rhode Island, and was a senior fellow of Brown University. He was also a regent of the Smithsonian Institution and in 1975 was awarded the Smithsonian’s Joseph Henry Medal for his cultural leadership. His eldest son, John Carter Brown iii (1934–2002) became the Director of the National Gallery in Washington, dc (1969–92), and worked with Berenson at I Tatti in 1956. Brummer, Joseph Joseph Brummer (1883–1947) was a Hungarian-born art dealer who studied in Munich before starting on his own as an artist in Budapest.Together with his brothers Ernest (1891–1964) and Imre (died 1928), he moved to Paris in 1905 to study sculpture under Rodin and Matisse, and also attended the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. In 1906, he and his brothers opened the Brummer Gallery in Paris on the Boulevard Raspail, where they sold African art, Japanese prints and pre-Columbian, mainly Peruvian art, as well as contemporary paintings and sculptures. In 1914, Joseph moved to New York and opened a gallery specialising in medieval and Renaissance European art, and classical, ancient Egyptian, African and pre-Columbian objects, but also hosting some of the early exhibitions of modern European art in the United States. It stayed in business until 1949. A major part of Joseph’s private art collection was bought by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1947. A second part was sold in 1949 by ParkeBernet Galleries. The final part was sold in Zurich in October 1979. His collection included the Guennol Lioness, a Mesopotamian statue 5000 years old found near Baghdad, Iraq. Buschbeck, Ernst Ernst H. Buschbeck (1889–1963) was an Austrian art historian. From 1921 to 1924 he was entrusted with the reorganisation of the Austrian museums, and he successfully negotiated with the successor states of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy that Austria should keep the principal museum masterpieces. He was the director of the Picture Gallery at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, from 1922. In 1939, he emigrated to England where he lived until 1946. He died in Portugal in 1963, following an accident. Byron, Robert Robert Byron (1905–1941) was a writer, critic and historian who travelled widely in the Middle and Far East. An Etonian, he was ‘sent down’ from Merton College, Oxford, for licentious behaviour. He died in 1941, en route to Egypt, when the ship on which he was travelling was torpedoed by a U-boat off Cape Wrath, Scotland. In 1929, he published The Byzantine Achievement and reviewed the Byzantine Exhibition for the Burlington Magazine in July 1931. His best-known, and still widely revered, book, The Road to Oxiana (1937), is an account of his ten-month journey to Persia (Iran) and Afghanistan in 1933–4.

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Cain, Julien Julien Cain (1887–1974) was the son of Jewish printer from Lorraine. He studied at the École du Louvre. Seriously injured in the First World War, he became a civil servant, first in the office of the president of the Chamber of Deputies,then in 1930 as Administrateur Générale for the Bibliothèque Nationale, which became his lifelong passion and career. By 1935, he had set in train a complete reorganisation and rebuilding programme, and was credited with a national reorganisation of the administration of literature in France. He joined the Front Populaire in 1936. In the Second World War, he was arrested by the Nazis and deported to Buchenwald but survived, and in 1945 returned to his work at the Bibliothèque Nationale, from which he retired in 1964. Carandini, Nicolo Nicolo Carandini (1896–1972) was the Italian ambassador in London from November 1944 to autumn 1947. He was a politician who campaigned for democracy in the 1920s, retiring from politics when the fascists came to power. Keeping a low profile and turning his attention to the development of modern agriculture, he nevertheless kept contact with liberal groups, and in 1944 he became a minister in the anti-fascist Bonomi government. On his return from London in 1947, he became embroiled in the ever-changing pirouettes of post-war Italian party politics, finally retiring in 1962. From 1948 to 1968, he was the president of Alitalia. In 1926, he married Elena Albertini (1902–1990), the daughter of the director of the Corriere della Sera who had been removed from power by Mussolini in 1925. Chambrun, Jacques Aldebert de Jacques de Chambrun (1876–1951) was a descendant of General Lafayette. Brought up in the usa – his father was a member of the French diplomatic service and was posted to New York – he married Clara Eleanor Longworth (1873–1954) from a wealthy Ohio family in 1901. Her father became the Speaker of the House of Representatives (1925–31), and her brother Nicholas married Alice Roosevelt, the daughter of President Theodore Roosevelt. Clara was one of the founder members of the American Library in Paris and won the Bordin Prize of the Académie Française for a book on Shakespeare written in French. The Berensons met Count de Chambrun on their visit to North Africa in 1931 when he was the commanding general of the French garrison at Tunis. Clark, William William Andrews Clark (1839–1925) was an American politician and entrepreneur, who made his fortune in the gold rush in Montana. He then turned to banking and made a further fortune with smelters, electric power companies, newspapers, railways and other businesses. His long-standing dream of becoming a us Senator resulted in scandal in 1899, when it was revealed that he had bribed members of the Montana state legislature in return for their votes. Clark is reported to have said, ‘I never bought a man who wasn’t for sale.’ He died aged eighty-six in his Beaux-Arts mansion on Fifth Avenue in New York which had 121 rooms, four art galleries,Turkish baths, a vaulted rotunda 36 feet high and its own railway line to bring in coal. Clark’s art collection, which contained works by (or attributed to) Degas, Rubens, Rembrandt,Titian, van Dyck, Gainsborough and Corot, was donated to the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, dc (the Metropolitan in New York having declined it), with a proviso for the construction of a new wing to be named after him. Clarke, Ashley Sir Ashley Clarke (1903–1994) was descended from a family whose baronetcy was created in 1617. He was a professional and hard-working diplomat who was appointed the ambassador in Rome in 1953 (succeeding Sir Victor Mallet) at a time when the British were unpopular owing to their stance over the Trieste dispute. Good-looking and speaking Italian, he

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immediately told the Italians that they were ‘at the heart of Europe’ and he and his wife soon became the most popular and respected post-war occupants of the British Embassy. Clary-Aldringen, Alphonse Prince Alphonse (or Alfons) Clary-Aldringen (1887–1978) was descended from two families of the Holy Roman Empire. The von Clarys were lords of Riva del Garda in Upper Italy, and the von Aldringens were Catholics from the Spanish Netherlands. They intermarried in the early seventeenth century and were allowed by imperial decree to adopt the name and arms of both families. The Princes von Clary-Aldringen were a prominent family in the Austrian Empire. Their principal seat was at Teplitz in Bohemia (now Teplice, Czech Republic). In 1945, when the Czechoslovak communist regime confiscated their Bohemian estates, the family continued to live in Germany and Italy. Of Prince Alphonse Clary-Aldringen (who lived quietly in an apartment in Venice), Berenson wrote: ‘Nearly eighty years of reading have left in memory so many questions that I am eager to have answered or at least discussed that I pounce on anyone who can offer help. Thus the present Prince Clary turns out to be a repository of information on almost any event or partaker in events of the ex-Hapsburg Empire of the last hundred and fifty years. No problem, no personality, he cannot illuminate and penetrate with an intimacy and precision of almost personal experience’ (diary entry, 16 March 1952). Clutton-Brock, Alan Alan Francis Clutton-Brock (1904–1976) was the son of Arthur Clutton-Brock (1868–1924), who was a notable essayist and contributor to the Times Literary Supplement (TLS). Educated at Eton and King’s College, Cambridge, Alan first sought to establish himself as a painter of pastiches of Italian Renaissance artists, and landscapes influenced by Constable and the French Impressionists. He was more successful as a writer of popular art books, and as an art critic and reviewer for The Times and the TLS. He and his first wife (who died in a car accident in 1936) were given to a bohemian lifestyle. After the war, he held the Slade Professorship of Fine Art at Cambridge and was appointed a trustee of the National Gallery. In 1955, he inherited Chastleton House in Oxfordshire from a cousin. Cockerell, Sydney Sydney Cockerell (1867–1962) under whose directorship (1908–37) the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, was transformed from an untidy provincial museum into a pioneering international institution, was a man of consummate taste, shaped by the Arts and Crafts and Aesthetic Movements and a disciple of John Ruskin and William Morris. He was also a pragmatist and a shrewd businessman, cajoling collectors into giving, and playing the art market. He had boundless energy, infectious enthusiasm and a passionate belief in the role of museums as catalysts of social progress. Famously, he said of the Fitzwilliam, ‘I found it a pig sty; I turned it into a Palace.’ Colefax, Sibyl Sibyl Colefax (1874–1950) was a notable interior decorator and a sought-after London hostess with a particular talent for bringing people of all ages together. She was married to a patent lawyer, Arthur Colefax, who supported her activities and attended her dinner parties, but said very little. Born into a society family, Lady Colefax’s extensive contacts came into their own after she lost most of her fortune in the Wall Street Crash and thereafter had to earn a living. She purchased a Mayfair decorating business which she first ran with Peggy Ward, Countess of Munster, and after 1938 with John Fowler. She was a member of the British executive committee for the Italian Exhibition in 1930.

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Connolly, Cyril Cyril Connolly (1903–1974), the gifted literary critic and writer, was a lifelong rolling stone – professionally, politically, socially, intellectually and maritally – who remained a close friend of Clark from the time they were at Oxford together. Through Clark’s introduction he became, for a short while, a secretary to Logan Pearsall Smith and his company pleased Berenson, who invited him to stay at I Tatti on several occasions. Constable, W. G. William George Constable (known as ‘WG’; 1887–1976) was a distant relation of the famous landscape painter. He trained initially as a barrister, painter and later, without formal training, moved over to museum curatorship and art history. He joined the staff of the National Gallery in 1923 and rose to the post of Assistant Director. In 1932, he was appointed as the first director of the newly founded Courtauld Institute. Then he was a curator at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston from 1938 to 1957. He was on the selection committee of the Burlington House Italian Exhibition of 1930. A shy and retiring character, his principal scholarly work was a twovolume catalogue raisonné of Canaletto. Contini-Bonacossi, Alessandro Count Alessandro Contini-Bonacossi (1878–1955) was an Italian art dealer whose principal client between the wars was Samuel Kress and who, therefore, was instrumental in building up the collection that the Kress Foundation (established in 1929) later distributed to museums throughout the us. Contini-Bonacossi first began collecting and dealing in stamps while working for an American chemicals firm in Barcelona. Returning to his native Italy and settling in Rome in 1918, he expanded his dealing business to encompass works of art, furniture, antiquities and sculpture, as well as paintings. It was here that he met Roberto Longhi, who acted as his chief advisor and collaborator until the Second World War. He was awarded the title of Count on becoming a senator of the Kingdom of Italy in 1939. He continued to pursue his art dealing throughout the war, which led to an investigation as to the nature of his dealings with Goering’s agents in Italy. Berenson spoke in his favour and subsequently entered into a contract with Contini-Bonacossi on a similar basis to that which he had had with Duveen. As well as dealing, Contini-Bonacossi, with his wife, had amassed a large and fine personal collection, some of which was eventually bequeathed to the state in 1969. It now forms part of the Uffizi collection in Florence. Conway, Martin Martin Conway (1856–1937) was a complex individual who managed to practise as an art critic, politician, cartographer and mountaineer.The son of a vicar, he was educated at Repton School and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied mathematics. He was honoured by the French state and the Royal Geographical Society for his pioneering mountaineering expeditions in the Alps, Scandinavia and the Andes, and was knighted in 1895 for his efforts in mapping 5180 sq km of the Karakoram Range in the Himalayas. Conway was the Professor of Art at University College, Liverpool, and Slade Professor at Cambridge (1901–4). He represented the Combined English Universities in Parliament in 1918–31 (when the seat existed), for which services he was given a peerage as 1st Baron Conway of Allington, in 1931. He was the first director of the Imperial War Museum and a trustee of the National Portrait Gallery. His collection of photographs became the nucleus of the Conway Library at the Courtauld Institute. He married an American railway heiress in 1884. On her death he married, in 1934, the widow of Reginald Lawson, who lived at Saltwood Castle, which Clark later purchased.

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Cook, Herbert Sir Herbert Cook (1868–1939) was a neighbour of the Clarks in Richmond. He inherited the encyclopaedic collection of pictures that was formed by his grandfather, Sir Francis Cook (1817–1901). Sir Francis had been one of the richest men in England, his fortune deriving from a flourishing business of linen drapers which sold goods to the British Empire Stores. He had started to collect pictures with the able and shrewd advice of John Charles Robinson (1824–1913), who had been a curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures in 1880–1901. Herbert Cook was a founding member of the National Art Collections Fund and the Burlington Magazine. The Cooks lived at Doughty House on Richmond Hill, a fine eighteenth-century house with magnificent views to which was added a long gallery in 1885 to house the art collection. The house was damaged by bombs in the Second World War, as a result of which Cook’s son moved to Jersey with 30 paintings from the collection. Mary Costelloe (as she then was) introduced Berenson to Cook in 1890 and they became good friends. Cook introduced Berenson to a number of British country-house collections. Cook also paid for the publication of Berenson’s commentary on the exhibition of Venetian paintings at the New Gallery in London in 1895, in which Berenson denied and disproved the attributions given to many of the paintings – to the consternation of their owners and the dealers. Cooper, Douglas Douglas Cooper (1911–1984) was a colourful and extremely able art historian of substantial independent means derived from his Australian relations, who had made a fortune out of sheep-dip. An early encounter with Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in Monte Carlo enthused him with a lifelong passion for the art of Picasso (whom he came to know in the South of France) and for early modern, especially Cubist, art, of which he built up a notable collection. During the war, he was with Royal Air Force Intelligence in Egypt and his famously waspish and combative temperament gave him great success in extracting information from the enemy. He then became a skilled sleuth in tracking Nazi-looted art and in exposing the dealers and collectors who had collaborated and benefited. More skilled in making enemies than friends, and with a hatred of England and the English establishment (including Clark, with whom he had quarelled about Cubism in 1935), he settled in the South of France where his sexual tastes were more tolerated – although he only narrowly escaped being murdered in 1961 by a young Algerian whom he had picked up. Highly talented and with a good eye, his opinions always ran ahead of his discretion. Courtauld, Samuel Samuel Courtauld (1876–1947) was the general manager and chairman of the family business which became an international name and commercial success through the development and sales, after 1905, of cheap artificial silk (rayon). The Courtaulds were of Huguenot descent with expertise in silversmithing and silk, and it was Samuel’s father who developed the largescale industrial production of fine textiles. Samuel took on responsibility for the firm in 1921. Advised by Roger Fry, he started to collect French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist pictures in the 1920s, which he displayed in his eighteenth-century town-house in Portman Square, London. Shortly before his wife died in 1931 – she shared his passion for art – he founded the Courtauld Institute of Art (in 1930), giving to it both his house and his art collection. Croft-Murray, Edward Edward Croft-Murray (1907–1980) was one of the most spirited museum curators in England who became the Keeper of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum. His principal publication was a definitive two-volume catalogue, Decorative Painting in England, 1537–1837 (London: Country Life, 1962 and 1970). He was a keen musician, party-giver and man of taste.

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Dixon, John Pierson John Pierson Dixon (1904–1965) became one of Britain’s most distinguished post-war diplomats. He escaped a difficult upbringing and childhood via a scholarship to Pembroke College, Cambridge, and seemed destined for a life of scholarship. However, in 1929 he joined the Foreign Office and worked as Third Secretary at the British Embassy in Rome in 1938–40. During the war, he was the Principal Private Secretary to Anthony Eden and was present at many of the critical conferences between the Allies, including Yalta and Potsdam. He was Britain’s Permanent Representative at the United Nations at the time of the Suez Crisis of 1956, following which, with a knighthood, he was appointed the ambassador in Paris (1960) at the time of Britain’s overtures to join the Common Market – which were famously rejected by General de Gaulle. Douglas, Robert Langton Robert Langton Douglas (1864–1951) was born in Suffolk and educated at New College, Oxford. From 1895 to 1900 he lived in Italy and came to know the Berensons, becoming an authority on Fra Angelico and Sienese art. He claimed to be a co-equal discoverer, with the Berensons, of Sassetta as an artistic personality and in recognising the authorship of the panels from the San Sepolcro Altarpiece which the Berensons bought. In a varied and peripatetic career he was, in 1916–23, the director of the National Gallery of Ireland, and settled in New York in 1940. The Berensons and Douglas fell out early on and became bitter enemies, Mary describing him as ‘a scrubby little Professor’ (letter to her mother, 27 October 1900, quoted in Machtelt Israëls, ed., Sassetta: The Borgo San Sepolcro Altarpiece, Florence: Villa I Tatti, 2009, p. 11). Duveen, Joseph Joseph Duveen (1869–1937) was born above a shop in Hull, East Yorkshire, the son of a dealer. The House of Duveen was created by his father, Joseph Joel Duveen, and his uncle, Henry Duveen. The Duveens were a Dutch family who emigrated to England and made a living from selling blue and white Delft pottery. Duveen’s father married an English pawnbroker’s daughter, and from Delftware expanded into furniture and objets d’art, so successfully that they moved the firm to Oxford Street in London. His uncle Henry, after a brief apprenticeship in Hull, was sent to America where he too had success and moved from Boston to New York, becoming the friend and adviser to such men as Benjamin Altman, the elder J. P. Morgan, Widener and Huntington. In London, Joseph Joel caught the fashion for tapestries and through it came to the notice of the future Edward vii and some of the Prince’s closest friends. Joseph Joel arranged much of the decoration of Westminster Abbey for Edward’s coronation (it earned him a knighthood). Henry had a passion for stamp collecting which he shared with George v and thus became a friend of the king. At seventeen, Joseph Duveen joined the family firm in London and shortly afterwards was sent to America to gain experience from his uncle Henry. Shortly after arriving in New York, he had moved Henry out of his small premises to a fashionable location on 5th Avenue at 56th Street. Duveen realised that the real money was to be made, not in porcelain and tapestries, but in pictures and fine art, and he re-focused the family business with a sensational series of deals in 1906 and 1907, when he bought the Oskar Hainauer Collection in Berlin and the Rodolphe Kann and Maurice Kann Collections in Paris. Duveen possessed a charismatic personality and, with his hunger for a deal, established himself as the pivotal figure in the commercial fine art world, the pace-setter for deals between the European aristocracy (who were keen to sell their treasures) and the self-made American industrial millionaires who were keen to buy. However, he lacked expertise in art and so bought it from others such as Dr Wilhelm von Bode from Berlin and Berenson. He first met the Berensons in 1922 and Mary in particular was fascinated and attracted by what he offered. Duveen operated in a climate in which there was a plentiful supply of works

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of art, eager buyers with plenty of money and eager sellers; there were also many, such as Arthur Lee of Fareham, who speculated in works of art as investments, and many scholars who were willing to write certificates of authenticity for a fee. Duveen paid the Berensons substantial fees for advice and information, certificates of authenticity and the prestige of Berenson’s authority. Both went to great lengths to keep the nature of their commercial relationship secret, although many in the art world knew, or suspected, that Berenson was in Duveen’s pay.The Berensons’ lifestyle would not have been possible without the income from Duveen, and its continuation was a constant anxiety. Their commercial relationship ended in 1937 when Duveen requested an attribution to Giorgione on the Allendale Adoration and Berenson refused to give it. Duveen held many public appointments, including trusteeships of the National Gallery, the Tate Gallery, the British Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Finley, David David E. Finley (1890–1977) was the first director of the National Gallery in Washington, dc. From a prominent South Carolina family, he practised as a lawyer and in 1921 joined the us Treasury where he came to the attention of the Secretary to the Treasury, Andrew Mellon. He became a confidant of Mellon and advised him on his art collection and the building of the National Gallery. After Mellon died in 1937, Finley as the director oversaw the completion of its building and the opening in 1941. He was instrumental in persuading many prominent collectors to donate their collections to the Gallery. Quiet and softly spoken, with old-fashioned Southern courtesy, he had an iron resolve and was brilliant in the art of persuasion. He retired in 1956. In 1931, he had married Margaret Morton Eustis (1903–77), a Washington heiress, sculptor and architect. Forest Divonne, Philomène de la Philomène de la Forest Divonne (née Levis Mirepoix) (1887–1978) was a talented but undisciplined writer whom Edith Wharton attempted to re-train. They had lived next door to each other on the Rue de Varenne in Paris in 1912. In 1920 they met again and Wharton undertook to re-introduce her into intellectual society, but she felt thwarted by Philomène’s literary fads and wayward style of writing. However, it seems that between them Wharton and Berenson eventually succeeded in getting her to develop a style which turned her into one of the better-known writers and journalists in France under the nom de plume Claude Sylve. She wrote a prize-winning novel, Bénédiction (1935), which was translated into English by Robert Norton. Frankfurter, Felix Felix Frankfurter (1882–1965) was an Associate Justice of the us Supreme Court. He was born into a Jewish family in Vienna which emigrated to New York when he was twelve. A graduate of Harvard Law School, he served as a Zionist delegate to the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, was later a friend and adviser of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who appointed him to the Supreme Court in 1939. He was a noted advocate of restraint in judicial oversight as regards government departments and agencies. He and Berenson were both friends of the jurist Judge Learned Hand. Frey, Karl Karl Frey (1857–1917) was a German art historian specialising in the Florentine Renaissance and sixteenth-century historiography. His early publications on the writings of Vasari appeared in the 1880s. Later, Frey turned his attention to the letters of Michelangelo, beginning with Michelagniolos Jugendjahre in 1907. Further publications on Michaelangelo’s drawings appeared in 1909–11 but much of his work remained unpublished at his death in 1917.

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Frick, Henry Clay Henry Clay Frick (1849–1919) was a man of immense wealth and power who controlled coke and steel companies and played a major role in the formation of the u.s. Steel conglomerate. He also financed the construction of the Pennsylvania Railroad and owned extensive realestate holdings in Pittsburgh and Pennsylvania. He was noted for his ruthlessness, and lack of morality in business. At his death, he bequeathed the Frick Mansion in New York and his extensive collection of paintings and fine furniture, in trust, to create the celebrated Frick Collection and Art Museum. He bought shrewdly through dealers, mostly from Knoedler’s. Friedländer, Max Max Jacob Friedländer (1867–1958), Berlin-born, was an art expert and art historian, especially of Netherlandish art, who believed in connoisseurship and, like Berenson, that from a close visual examination of a work of art it would be possible to deduce the identity of its creator, and gain a deeper understanding of it.The son of a banker, he studied in Munich and Florence. He joined the paintings department of the newly opened Kaiser Friedrich Museum in Berlin, becoming the deputy director under Wilhelm von Bode in 1904 and the director in 1924. On his retirement in 1939 he settled in Amsterdam, his spiritual home, and became an art dealer. Although a Jew by birth, he evaded arrest due to the personal intervention of Goering, whom he had advised on acquisitions for his collection. Fry, Roger Roger Fry (1866–1934) was a painter, art critic and art historian who made his scholarly reputation in the field of Italian Renaissance painting. Principally remembered now as one of the leading lights in the Bloomsbury Group, he was the first to bring the more recent developments in French painting and modern art to the attention of the public in Britain. He developed his own philosophy of art which emphasised the formal properties of paintings, and was influenced by Berenson’s books on Italian art. Fry and Berenson were of the same age and they first met in 1899, forming a close working friendship and freely exchanging information and ideas. However, professional competitiveness soon set in and soured their relationship, notably in connection with articles for the Burlington Magazine, of which they were both founders. When the Berensons were in London in 1927, Bogey Harris organised a lunch party to which he invited, without prior knowledge on either side, both Berenson and Fry. The risky strategy paid off and resulted in a rapprochement after years of antagonism. Clark was an admirer of Fry and his writings, describing him as ‘incomparably the greatest influence on taste since Ruskin . . . in so far as taste can be changed by one man, it was changed by Roger Fry’ (Last Lectures of Roger Fry, with an Introduction by Kenneth Clark, Cambridge University Press and New York: Macmillan, 1939, p. ix). Goldschmidt, Adolph Adolph Goldschmidt (1863–1944) was a Jewish-German art historian, born in Hamburg. After a short business career he studied history of art at the universities of Jena, Kiel and Leipzig. His chief interest was the medieval art of north-east Germany and German thirteenth-century sculpture. He also had expertise in early Milanese art. He left Germany in 1934 for Switzerland. Goloubev, Victor Victor Goloubev (1878–1945) came from an aristocratic Russian family. Educated in St Petersburg and Heidelberg, he was a virtuoso violinist and collected Chinese and Persian miniatures, on which he was an expert. In 1910, he travelled to India and Ceylon. He met Berenson in Paris in 1914. Tragically, all of his seven sons were killed in the First World War.

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Gray, Basil Basil Gray (1904–1989), who joined the British Museum in 1929, was a leading Islamic scholars (although he spoke no oriental language) and was the head of the Oriental Department at the British Museum from 1946 to 1968, following which he became the principal librarian and acting director. His speciality was the relationship of the arts of Persia and China. In 1933, he married Nicolette Binyon (1911–1997), the daughter of his departmental head, Laurence Binyon. Nicolette was a medieval scholar and an exponent of the art of calligraphy. Greenlees, Ian Ian Greenlees (1913–1988) was an heir to a Scottish whisky fortune. A lifelong bachelor, he lived in Italy, where he became a friend of Benedetto Croce and taught in Rome before 1939. He served gallantly in the army in the war and was responsible for propaganda broadcasts to the Italians. After the Allied invasion of Italy, he ran a free radio station in Bari. From 1947 to 1954 he worked for the British Council in Rome and from 1958 to 1981 was the director of the British Institute in Florence. He bought the Villa Fraita on Anacapari from the writer Frances Brett Young. Gulbenkian, Calouste Calouste Sarkis Gulbenkian (1869–1955) was born in Constantinople. His father was an Armenian oil importer-exporter who sent him to King’s College, London to study petroleum engineering. He then worked in the Russian oil industry at Baku. In 1896, the Gulbenkian family fled the Ottoman Empire and found refuge in Egypt. Their new contacts in Cairo included Sir Evelyn Baring. Gulbenkian moved to London and, in 1907, helped arrange the merger of Royal Dutch Petroleum with Shell Transport and Trading, Gulbenkian being allocated 5 per cent of the shares. In 1912, Gulbenkian was instrumental in setting up Turkish Petroleum, which was a consortium of the largest European oil companies seeking exclusivity for oil exploration in Iraq. Gulbenkian acquired the entire Iraqi oil concession in 1929 but promptly sold it, becoming immensely wealthy. With this fortune, he built his art collection which he kept in his house on the Avenue d’Iéna in Paris. He was appointed the Iraqi minister in Paris and followed the French government when it fled to Vichy in 1940. As a consequence, despite having gained British citizenship in 1902, he was declared an enemy alien and his uk oil assets sequestered – although returned with compensation at the end of the War. He settled permanently in Lisbon in 1942. At his death, his art collection and a large part of his fortune were bequeathed to the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, which was established in Lisbon as a charity for educational, artistic and scientific purposes. Haig, Dawyck Dawyck Haig (1918–2009) was the son and heir of Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig (later Earl Haig), the charismatic and popular First World War commander who led the offensive at the Battle of the Somme. Baptised George Alexander Eugene Douglas, he was always known as Dawyck (pronounced ‘Doig’), his courtesy title being Viscount Dawick, until he assumed the earldom. He was a painter in a politely expressive figurative style. He was a friend of Derek Hill. Hugh Trevor-Roper introduced him to Berenson by letter in December 1948. His sister, Alexandra, married Trevor-Roper in 1954, after divorcing her first husband. Hamilton, Jamie Jamie Hamilton (1900–1988), often referred to as Hamish Hamilton, was half-American, halfScottish. He studied law and languages at Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge, and became a noted rower, representing Great Britain in the 1928 Summer Olympics. He founded the publishers Hamish Hamilton in London in 1931, publishing promising British and American writers, many of whom were personal friends. In 1940, he married Countess Yvonne Vicino Pallavicino.They lived in style in St John’s Wood, London, where they hosted elegant and well

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attended receptions and recitals. He sold his firm to the Thomson Organisation in 1965. From 1947 he was a frequent correspondent with Berenson. Harris, Bogey Clark recalled Henry ‘Bogey’ Harris (c. 1870–1950) with particular affection in his autobiography. Henry Harris ‘did nothing and said nothing’ but was a friend of all the socially and artistically great. His house in Bedford Square, London, was decorated by Roger Fry and Vanessa Bell. A rich and handsome Etonian, he became a friend of the Prince of Wales and a member of the Marlborough House set. He lost heavily at gambling and in 1914 took up residence in Italy where he had a villa in Florence. A Catholic, he made friends with Pope Pius x and was given a small sinecure at the Vatican (secretary to the British Legation). A melancholy, Proustian figure of exquisite taste and refined scholarship, in Florence he had made friends with the collector Henry Horne, under whose influence he put together a collection of modestly priced Italian pictures and objets d’art, which Clark said ‘gave one as much pleasure as any collection that I can remember’ (Clark APW p. 181). A friend of Ramsay McDonald (though not a political sympathiser), he was appointed a trustee of the National Gallery (1934–41) and Clark met him on the committee of the Italian Exhibition of 1930. When the Berensons were in London in 1927, Bogey organised a lunch party for Berenson and Roger Fry which resulted in a rapprochement after years of antagonism. His collection was sold at Sotheby’s shortly after his death in 1950. Hartt, Frederick Frederick Hartt (1914–1991), born in Boston, Massachusetts, was an art historian with a particular expertise in the Italian Renaissance. After studying with Erwin Panofsky, at Princeton, he took his masters at New York University. He served in the us Army Air Force during the war and was an officer in the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives Division of the us Army in Italy, helping to repatriate art and libraries looted by the Germans. These experiences he later published in book form in 1949, Florentine Art under Fire. He returned to academe after the war, teaching at the universities of Washington, dc, New York, Pennsylvania and Virginia. The author of numerous books, his History of Italian Renaissance Art: Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, published in 1969, remains the best-known among general readers. He was a regular visitor to I Tatti. When the River Arno flooded Florence in 1966, Hartt helped to evaluate and prioritise the restoration efforts. Havemeyer Family Based in Brooklyn, the Havemeyer family made their fortune through sugar refining in the second half of the nineteenth century. Henry Osborne Havemeyer (1847–1907) developed the companies so successfully that he came to control sugar refining in the usa. He and his second wife, Louisine, became passionate art collectors – ivory figures, Japonaiserie, textiles and old and modern pictures. His taste was personal and his purchases impulsive. Louisine had a passion for French Impressionists, travelling frequently to Europe, and was a close friend of Mary Cassatt who advised her on her purchases. Their three children were also dedicated collectors. When Louisine died in 1929, the greatest beneficiary of the Havemeyer Bequest was the Metropolitan Museum in New York, who were given free rein to choose what they wanted and received nearly two thousand works of art. Hearst, William Randolph William Randolph Hearst (1863–1951), the celebrated American newspaper publisher, built the largest newspaper and magazine business in the world. A voracious collector, he acquired Greek vases, Spanish and Italian furniture, oriental carpets, Renaissance vestments, manuscripts, rare books and autographs, paintings and sculptures. His mansion, Hearst Castle in California, overlooking the Pacific Ocean, was donated to that state in 1957.

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Hendy, Philip Sir Philip Hendy (1900–1980) had no formal training in art history but he became an Assistant Keeper and Lecturer at the Wallace Collection in London in 1923. His contributions to their catalogue and his articles for the Burlington Magazine so impressed the trustees of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Collection in Boston that, in 1927, they funded a three-year research trip to Italy, during which he catalogued their collection.This led to him being appointed the curator of paintings at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 1930. He resigned after being heavily criticised for purchasing Matisse’s early nude, Carmelina, in 1933. In 1934, he was appointed the director of Leeds City Art Gallery. He served as the director of the National Gallery from 1946 to 1967, a record tenure of more than twenty years. Heydenreich, Ludwig Ludwig Heydenreich (1903–1978) was a Dresden-born art historian, specialising in Italian Renaissance architecture. He began his studies at Dresden’s military academy and was expected, like his father, to join the officer class. But Germany’s defeat in the First World War forced the academy’s closure and Heydenreich was obliged to look for other areas of interest. He initially studied art history at the University of Berlin but quickly changed to Hamburg in 1919 in order study with Erwin Panofsky. He met Berenson in Hamburg in 1927. In the 1930s, when many intellectuals were fleeing the Nazis, Heydenreich’s career developed rapidly. He was appointed to a chair at the University of Berlin in 1941 and became the director of the Kunsthistorisches Institut (Florence) in 1943. While there, he advised Berenson to hide as many of his possessions as he could so as to keep them out of the hands of Goering’s agents, and he subverted orders to have other works of art sent to Germany. After the war, Heydenreich helped found, and became the first director of, the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich, a research centre devoted to art history, which was located in the former Nazi headquarters. Hill, Derek (Arthur) Derek Hill (1916–2000) was a portrait and landscape painter. Born into a wealthy, sugar-trading family in Hampshire, he first achieved success as a theatre designer in Leningrad in the 1930s. During the 1960s, he became successful and sought-after with fashionable clients. He was also a keen collector and traveller. In 1981, he donated his home in Ireland, with his paintings by Picasso, Degas, Braque, Sutherland and J. B. Yeats, to the Irish state. He and his family spent five winters at the Berensons’ Villino, from 1948 to 1953. In Hill’s own words: ‘it was more than friendship. I was completely devoted to [Berenson] and to Nicky Mariano. . . . both my parents died in the early fifties . . . they became my family . . . he had an infallible sense of the weak spot in any painting, even if, as was often the case, one disagreed with his reasoning as to why it was weak’ (Grey Gowrie, Derek Hill: An Appreciation, Quartet Books, London, 1987 pp. 104–6). Jane Clark did not like him. Hinks, Roger Roger Hinks (1903–1963) was the Assistant Keeper of Greek and Roman Antiquities at the British Museum from 1926 to 1939. He resigned following a formal reprimand for dereliction of duty over the cleaning of the Elgin Marbles (now the Parthenon Marbles). The cleaning had been authorised by the head of the department (who then became the director of the museum) and paid for by Duveen. It caused the sculptures to be scrubbed and abraded.When this came to light there was a public scandal and an official enquiry. Hinks’s superiors, who were ultimately responsible, either ran for cover or pleaded sickness, leaving Hinks to take the blame. In 1939, he accepted a position at the Warburg Institute where he lectured on medieval art but then, with the advent of war, Hinks was posted to Sweden under the auspices of the British Council but actually working in intelligence. He was there at the time of Clark’s

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wartime visits to Sweden. After the war, Hinks joined the British Council and was head of the British Institute in Rome in 1945–9. A lifelong bachelor, and inclined to gloom, he had a wide circle of intellectual and literary friends and connections, and was a compulsive diarist. He and Clark became good friends during Clark’s years with the Ashmolean in Oxford. Clark thought Hinks had been shamefully treated by the British Museum and the board of inquiry. Hinks made several visits to I Tatti, both before and after the war; his stimulating company was welcomed by Berenson. Hirsch, Robert von Robert von Hirsch (1883–1977) was born in Frankfurt, into a well-to-do, industrialist family of iron founders who first made their money in the leather trade. Robert and his elder brother Paul (1881–1951) were both avid collectors. From 1917, Robert was in charge of the family business which also had a branch in Switzerland. At the age of twenty-four (1907), driven by a strong aesthetic sense, he began to build his own art collection and was especially active in the 1920s and 1930s, voraciously acquiring paintings, prints and drawings, porcelain, furniture, metalwork and medieval works of art. In 1933, both Robert and Paul left Germany, Paul to Cambridge – his library of musical literature was bought by the British Museum for the nation in 1946. Robert emigrated to Basel, taking his treasures with him, never to return to Germany. With a childless marriage, when he died, his collection was dispersed at auction in 1978, by Sotheby’s, in a sale comprising four separate catalogues. In a letter to Nicky Mariano of 28 September 1922, Berenson recorded meeting von Hirsch in Frankfurt: ‘a young man in a beautiful house, full of splendid books, carpets, tapestries and objets d’art. Among the pictures a darling little diptych of early 13th century, all but Byzantine.’ Holmes, Charles Sir Charles John Holmes (1869–1936) was a man of many parts. Educated at Eton and Brasenose College, Oxford, his first interest was as a practising artist – paintings, drawings and etchings – largely self taught, but taking lessons from Charles Ricketts and William Strang and influenced by Walter Pater. He also undertook art criticism and was asked by Roger Fry, in 1906, to take on the editorship of the recently founded, but financially ailing, Burlington Magazine, which he fulfilled with success. In 1904, he became a member of the New English Art Club and the Slade Professor of Art at Oxford. In 1909, he became the director of the National Portrait Gallery and in 1916 of the National Gallery. He re-hung the former to acclaim but struggled with the trustees of the latter, and retired in frustration in 1928. His approach was that of an artist rather than an art historian; he was a good administrator and sought to open his museums to wider public access. Hope-Johnstone, Charles (Charles) John Hope-Johnstone (1883–1970) was an eccentric member of the Bloomsbury Group who advised Mr and Mrs Frank Stoop about art. He was for a short time the private tutor to the children of the artist Augustus John and was the co-editor of The Gramophone with Compton MacKenzie and then, briefly, the editor of the Burlington Magazine in 1919–20, until sacked by Roger Fry. Hope-Johnstone was an accomplished photographer. In 1939 he was appointed a lecturer at the University in Peking (Beijing) and in 1943–8 he lectured at the University in Istanbul. According to Clark, he had walked, as a young man, to Persia (Iran), pushing his belongings in a perambulator. He married Audrey Petit-Hampson who petitioned for divorce on the grounds of nullity in 1929. Huxley, Aldous Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) was a humanist, pacifist, and sometime mystic, who expressed his views in a number of famous novels such as Brave New World (1932). Disqualified from

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service in the First World War because of illness, he spent much of his time at Lady Ottoline Morrell’s Garsington Manor near Oxford (working as a farm labourer), meeting members of the Bloomsbury set such as Bertrand Russell and Clive Bell. In 1919, he married a Belgian, Maria Nys (1899–1955). They lived in Italy part-time in the 1920s with their son Matthew (1920–1955). Huyghe, René René Huyghe (1906–1997) was a prolific French writer on the history, psychology and philosophy of art. He was also a curator in the department of paintings at the Louvre (from 1930) and a professor at the École du Louvre. Huyghe was one of the first people in France to make films on art. During the Second World War, he organised the evacuation of the Louvre’s paintings into the Unoccupied Zone and took charge of their protection until the liberation of France. In 1974, he became the director of the Musée Jacquemart-André in Paris. He served on the Conseil Artistique des Musées de France at the same time as Clark. Huyghe was elected a professor at the Collège de France and a member of the Académie Française. Jamot, Paul Paul Jamot (1863–1939) was the assistant director and curator of the department of painting at the Louvre, before becoming the director of the Rheims Museum (1927–39). He was also noted as an archaeologist and poet and was a dedicated collector of paintings from the midnineteenth century (Courbet and Corot) to Picasso and Renoir, and also of Lalique glass. When he died, he left his collection to various museums in Paris. A room at the Louvre is named after him. Kahn, Addie Addie Kahn (1875–1949), née Wolff, was the American wife of Otto Hermann Kahn (1867– 1934), a German-born Jew who came to work at Deutsche Bank in London in 1888 and became a British citizen in 1893. They married in 1896 in the usa (where he had gone to work for Speyer and Co.). She was the daughter of Abraham Wolff, a partner in Kuhn, Loeb and Co, which Otto then joined after a year’s honeymoon in Europe. In 1917, he renounced his British citizenship and became a us citizen. He made a fortune out of, inter alia, the railways. The Kahns lived in some style on Manhattan’s Upper East Side (91st Street) and on a 443-acre estate which they built on Long Island, the gardens designed by Frederick Law Olmsted, at the heart of which was the second largest private residence in the us. They were also patrons of the arts, backing George Gershwin and Toscanini, theatre and opera in New York, and investing in Hollywood films. Kerr, Philip Philip Kerr, 11th Marquess of Lothian (1882–1940), was a politician and diplomat who, at various times, was Lloyd George’s private secretary, served in the South African government, was Under Secretary of State for India and the British ambassador in Washington in 1939–40. With Berenson he was also involved in the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. Unmarried, and with no direct descendants, he bequeathed Blickling Hall, Norfolk, to the National Trust on his death. Kessell, Mary Mary Kessell (1914–1978) was an artist whom Clark met when she was young; they had an affair lasting fourteen years, starting in the 1930s. She studied at Clapham School of Art in 1935–7 and the Central School in 1937–9. In 1945, she spent six months in Germany as an Official War Artist, where she made drawings at Belsen and Berlin. Her first solo exhibition was at the Leicester Galleries, London, in 1950.

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Krautheimer, Richard Richard Krautheimer (1897–1994) studied in Munich, Berlin and Marburg, specialising in Byzantine and Renaissance art. His major project in the 1920s and 30s was a handbook of churches in Rome, which he worked on with Rudolf Wittkower. It eventually ran to five volumes and was completed in 1977. He and his wife, Trude Hess, who was also a noted art historian, were forced to flee Germany in 1933. They settled in Rome but changing circumstances there forced them to flee again, to the usa, in 1935. In America, he took up various posts, including a permanent position at New York University in 1952. His book on Ghiberti, which was co-authored with his wife, was published by Princeton and Oxford University Presses in 1956. Kress, Samuel H. Samuel H. Kress (1863–1955), the businessman and philanthropist, was the founder of S. H. Kress & Co., the five- and ten-cent store chain. Kress used his fortune to put together one of the best collections of Italian Renaissance and European works of art. In 1929, he established a Foundation which, in the 1950s and 60s, donated 776 works to 18 regional art museums and 23 universities across the us. The Foundation was a major donor to the National Gallery in Washington, dc, from its inception (376 paintings, 94 sculptures, 1307 bronzes, 38 drawings). Lapsley, Gaillard Gaillard Lapsley (1868–1949) was a Harvard-educated (Class of 1893) American who became a don at Trinity College, Cambridge, with a special interest in medieval history. He was a tutor and Reader in Constitutional History. Learned Hand, Judge Billings Billings Learned Hand (1872–1961) was a Harvard graduate (philosophy and law) who was appointed a Federal District Judge in Manhattan at the age of thirty-six. He rose to become Chief Judge of the Court of Appeals for the second circuit but was always passed over for appointment to the Supreme Court. Judge Learned Hand was of a scholarly and detached frame of mind, with a noted mastery of the English language. His well-crafted judgements and his robust defence of civil liberties continue to be cited as precedents. Berenson met him and his wife Frances through Walter Lippmann in the early 1920s and they became close friends and regular correspondents. Clark claimed that Learned Hand was the only person who argued with Berenson with impunity and that, although Berenson much admired him, the judge did not admire Berenson. Lee, Arthur Arthur Hamilton Lee (1868–1947), who became Viscount Lee of Fareham in 1918, was the youngest son of an impoverished country vicar who died when he was two. He was mostly brought up in a regime of tyranny by a spinster who took in the children of poor gentlefolk. A clever boy, he was sent away to boarding school where he was miserable and bullied. He joined the army where he progressed rapidly and, through an appointment as military attaché to the us Army, he formed a close friendship with Theodore Roosevelt. In 1899, he married Ruth Moore, the daughter of a leading New York banker. He became a Conservative mp in 1900. Supposedly charming and easy to get on with, and with a reputation as a brilliant and persuasive administrator, holding many military, ministerial and diplomatic posts, he could nevertheless be hysterical and bullying when thwarted. Although he was a dedicated member of the House of Commons, he did not achieve the high office he might have hoped for. His marriage was childless and he and his wife turned to art collecting to fill their country house, Chequers. Lee absorbed a great deal of knowledge about the arts but his purchases were not always judicious. He and his wife gave the Chequers estate and their first art collection to the nation in 1917, with an endowment, as a permanent country residence for British prime

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ministers. It was Lee who conceived the idea of setting up an institution for the study of the arts. Whereas his friend Samuel Courtauld had it in mind simply to leave his pictures to the National Gallery, it was Lee who persuaded him to create and fund the eponymous institution. Lee gave his second art collection to the Courtauld. He also expeditiously arranged for the transfer of the Warburg Institute and Library from Hamburg to Britain shortly after the Nazis came to power in 1933. He was a trustee of the National Gallery in 1926–33 and 1941–7 and the chairman in 1931–2. Lady Lee died in 1966. Lehmann, Rosamond Rosamond Lehmann (1901–1990) was a novelist and playwright whose writings and private life were considered by many to be scandalous. Her father was an English mp, her mother from New England. Educated at Cambridge, she was first married, unhappily, to Leslie (Viscount) Runciman. Her first novel explored lesbian relationships and was a critical and popular success. Friendly with the leading members of the Bloomsbury Group, she married, secondly, a leftwing artist, Wogan Philipps, who left her and their children in order to fight in the Spanish Civil War. After an affair with the writer and academic Goronwy Rees, she embarked on a ‘very public affair’ with the Anglo-Irish poet (and future Poet Laureate), Cecil Day-Lewis. It was a troubled romance and Day-Lewis eventually left her to marry the actress Jill Balcon. Leigh, Vivien see Laurence Olivier Lewis, Sinclair Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951) was a highly successful American novelist, short-story writer and playwright. In 1930, he became the first American to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Highly strung and hyperactive, he was constantly on the move round the us and Europe and easily succumbed to melancholy and drink. His sharply observant works are wittily critical of middle American society and values. In 1949, he was briefly resident in Florence and he and Berenson had a number of friends and acquaintances in common. He died in Rome in 1951 from alcohol poisoning. Lippmann, Walter Walter Lippmann (1889–1974) was a journalist and philosopher, from a New York GermanJewish background. Harvard-educated, his interest lay in reconciling liberty with democracy and in exploring the role the journalist plays in the dialogue between policy-makers and the electorate. His syndicated newspaper column ‘Today and Tomorrow’, which he wrote between 1934 and 1964, appeared in more than 250 us newspapers and more than 25 international publicatons. He won two Pulitzer Prizes for journalism. Berenson first met Lippmann when they were both at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 (at which Lippmann assisted Woodrow Wilson to draft his Fourteen Points). They became immediate friends and Lippmann and his second wife, Helen Byrne Armstrong, were regular visitors to I Tatti in the post-war years. Longhi, Roberto Roberto Longhi (1890–1970) was an art historian and art critic. He first taught at a high school in Rome, where Umberto Morra was his pupil (see Appendix 1). His principal scholarly interests were Caravaggio and Piero della Francesca but he also took a keen interest in modern art. In the 1920s, he became part of the circle of the collector and art dealer, Count Alessandro Contini-Bonacossi, who funded Longhi’s travels and helped launch his career as a connoisseur. In 1934, Longhi was appointed to the chair of art history at the University of Bologna and in 1939 he acquired the Florentine villa Il Tasso. Longhi was an influential teacher, more an advocate for connoisseurship than the history of art, and he was accused of authenticating fakes to pay gambling debts. Berenson had a high regard for him, and encouraged him as a young man, but then there was a quarrel, possibly more to do with Mary than Berenson himself, and for nearly forty years, until 1956, they did not meet or speak.

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Loria, Arturo Arturo Loria (1902–1957) was born in Capri, the son of a maker of straw hats. The family moved themselves and their factory to Florence in 1912. Although left with a limp by polio as a young boy, he travelled widely and found success as a writer of short stories and poetry. In 1936, he first met Berenson who welcomed him into his inner circle. He and his family (his father was Jewish) suffered hardship and difficulties in the Second World War, resulting in the loss of many original manuscripts and books. After 1945, he became the principal translator of Berenson’s works into Italian. Berenson dedicated his Essays in Appreciation (1958) to Loria. Lubbock, Percy Percy Lubbock (1879–1965) came from a family of Norfolk bankers, was educated at Eton and Cambridge and made a name for himself as an essayist, critic and biographer. Well-connected socially and intellectually, he settled in Italy and in 1926 married Lady Sybil Cutting, the mother of Iris Origo. A member of the Berenson circle, he was a close friend of Henry James, whose letters he edited, and of Edith Wharton until he fell out with her over his marriage. He wrote a biography of Wharton which was published in 1947. MacCarthy, Desmond Desmond MacCarthy (1877–1952), the literary critic and writer, was a friend of Bertrand Russell and Logan Pearsall Smith. He became a journalist in 1903, with moderate success, and during the First World War spent some time in Naval Intelligence. He joined the New Statesman as their drama critic in 1917 and in 1920 became the literary editor. In 1928, he started a new literary journal, Life and Letters, which continued until 1935. Clark was a contributor to it. Maclagan, Eric Sir Eric Maclagan (1879–1951), the son of an Archbishop of York, was the director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, from 1924 to 1945, having joined the staff as an assistant keeper in his mid-twenties. An expert on textiles and sculpture, his first love was Renaissance sculpture. He was a good scholar and administrator with a quick and lively intellect. His warm personality was matched with an expressive face and gleaming prominent teeth. He opened up the museum to a wider public through exhibitions, popular publications, fresh ideas and exemplary leadership of his staff. In 1918 he headed the British Ministry of Information in Paris, where he met Edith Wharton and Berenson. Mahon, Denis A lifelong bachelor, Denis Mahon (1910–2011) was a collector and connoisseur of independent means, an heir of the Guinness Mahon banking dynasty. He was educated at Eton and while at Oxford was befriended by Clark, who was then the Keeper of Fine Art at the Ashmolean Museum. Mahon’s particular interest was in the once neglected field of seventeenth-century Italian Baroque art and Clark steered him in the direction of Nikolaus Pevsner, who was then teaching at the newly established Courtauld Institute. Clark also made him, with John PopeHennessy, an honorary attaché of the National Gallery when he was the director. As well as an astute and passionate collector, Mahon was a respected scholar and connoisseur with a remarkable eye for quality. He collected Italian Baroque art between the mid-1930s and late 1960s, when such art was entirely out of fashion, and he is said never to have paid more than £2000 for a painting. He was committed to the public good, giving his collection to public galleries in the uk (including 26 works to the National Gallery) in 1989, and fighting vigorous and vociferous campaigns against the passing of Acts of Parliament which sought to allow the National Gallery to sell works of art (1950s), and later against the imposing of entry fees to public collections (1970s). He was twice a trustee of the National Gallery.

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Mallet, Victor Sir Victor Alexander Louis Mallet (1893–1969) was the British ambassador in Rome in 1947– 53. He was educated at Winchester and Oxford. His father was a godson of Queen Victoria. He married Christiana Jean Andreae in 1925 and they had three sons and a daughter. Mallet was the minister in Stockholm in 1940–45, where he and Clark met during Clark’s two wartime diplomatic missions. His book, Life with Queen Victoria, was published in 1968. Berenson wrote in his diary of 29 November 1953 that Lady Mallet treated him ‘as if I were a bad smell’. Marchig, Giannino Giannino Marchig (1897–1983), who was born in Trieste, moved to Florence in 1915 and was accepted into the Academy of Fine Arts as a promising pupil. During the 1920s, he became a well-established painter and traditional draughtsman. In 1929, he was appointed as the professor of drawing at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence. While there he became part of the Berenson circle. However, the economic circumstances of the 1930s caused him to take on restoration commissions. A number of books from the I Tatti Library were given to him for safe-keeping in the summer of 1942. Marchig, along with Alda von Anrep and Geremia Gioffredi (Berenson’s factor), brought back the books and re-hung the pictures at I Tatti for Berenson’s return to I Tatti in September 1944. His studio in the Lungarno suffered in the bombardment of 1944 and, after the war, in part because of the personal crisis brought about by the war, and in part because of his belief in the importance of conserving beauty, he turned away from painting and devoted himself to restoration. In 1949, he met Jeanne, a young Swedish girl who was holidaying in Italy and some twenty years his junior. They married and settled in Geneva, where Jeanne inspired him to return to painting. Margheri, Clotilde Clotilde Margheri (1897–1981) was a talented writer from Naples whom Berenson first met in 1926 and with whom he maintained an intense and flirtatious relationship and correspondence until the end of his days.Their 1100 surviving letters, written between 1927 and 1955, came to light in 1981, when Margheri published a selection translated into Italian. Maugham, William Somerset William Somerset Maugham (1874–1965), the playwright, novelist and short-story writer, was one of the most popular writers of his day. Born in Paris, where his father was a lawyer with the British Embassy, he was by far the youngest of four boys. French was his first language and his early years were enlivened by frequent guests from the worlds of literature and the arts, including Guy de Maupassant. He was devastated when his mother died of tuberculosis when he was only eight. Two years later, his father died of cancer and he went to live with his aunt and uncle who was a vicar in Kent. He attended the King’s School, Canterbury, before travelling to Germany aged sixteen to study literature and philosophy at Heidelberg University. He then studied medicine at St Thomas’s Hospital in London and qualified as a doctor but never practised. His first novel was published in 1897 and was such a success that from then on he devoted his life to writing. He moved between London and Paris until the First World War, when he volunteered for the Red Cross. There he met Gerald Haxton who became his lover and loyal companion and secretary. In 1917, he married and had a daughter, Syrie, who became a celebrated interior decorator. The marriage was dissolved in 1929. During the Second World War he worked for British intelligence in Switzerland and Russia. When Haxton died in 1944, Alan Searle became his lover and secretary. Maugham bought the Villa Mauresque at Cap Ferrat in the South of France in 1928, where he lived and entertained until his death.

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Meiss, Millard Millard Meiss (1904–1975) who was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, was a historian of late medieval and early Renaissance art. He sought to incorporate traditional connoisseurship with social history and Erwin Panofsky’s iconography. Meiss was among the first American scholars to benefit from the influx of German scholars to the us, fleeing the Nazis in the 1930s, and was considered among their best students. In 1953, he moved to Harvard to be the professor of art and curator of painting at the Fogg Art Museum, noted for its collection of early Italian paintings assembled by Edward Forbes. Molyneux, Edward Edward Molyneux (1891–1974), of Huguenot ancestry, was a fashionable and successful couturier, with establishments in Paris, London and Monte Carlo. He was a friend of Noel Coward and dressed such stars as Greta Garbo, Gertrude Lawrence and Vivien Leigh and European royalty. His hallmark style was classical, with a soft look and tailored line. He collected Impressionist and modern art – Monet, Manet, Renoir, Picasso – and was an important influence on Derek Hill. His collection was bought in its entirety by Ailsa Mellon Bruce, who gave it to the National Gallery of Art in Washington. He served with distinction in the First World War. Monckton, Walter Walter Monckton (1891–1965; 1st Viscount Monckton of Brenchley) was a highly successful lawyer, an adviser to Edward viii during the abdication crisis, friend of Winston Churchill and a cabinet minister in the post-war government of 1951. Ambitious to be Lord Chief Justice, in the end, he accepted the chairmanship of the Midland Bank. His second wife, whom he married in 1947, was Biddy, Lady Ruthven of Freeland (who was able to inherit her title from her father since the Ruthven peerage was Scottish and predated the Act of Union of 1707). Moorhead, Alan Australian-born Alan Moorhead (1910–1983) was a war correspondent covering the campaigns in the Middle East, Asia the Mediterranean and north-west Europe in the Second World War. He wrote about his war experiences and had considerable success with popular histories, notably The White Nile (1960) and The Blue Nile (1962). In 1945 he published Eclipse, the story of the rise and fall of Germany in the war, followed in 1946 by a biography of Field-Marshal Montgomery. He and his family lived in England and Italy from 1937 onwards. He suffered a paralysing stroke in 1966. Moravia, Alberto Alberto Moravia (1907–1990) was born in Rome into a well-to-do middle-class family. His father was Jewish, an architect and painter; his mother was Catholic. On his father’s side, his two Rosselli cousins who were staunchly anti-fascist were murdered on Mussolini’s orders. On his mother’s side, in contrast, was an uncle who was a high-ranking official in the fascist party. At the age of nine, he contracted tuberculosis of the bone and was bedridden for five years. Although he published his first novel in 1927, he had to find strategies to thwart fascist censorship and harassment, living a shadowy existence until the ending of hostilities in 1944. This was the time when he became firm friends with Umberto Morra and came to Berenson’s notice. Moravia was a prolific writer with a dry, unadorned style, his themes encompassing love and marriage, boredom, alienation, politics and contemporary life. He was the master of psychological observation and detached description. A member of the Communist Party, he became one of the most highly regarded authors of post-war Europe.

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Morelli, Giovanni Giovanni Morelli (1816–1891) trained as a doctor but established his reputation as an art critic. He thought, not without some justification, that by applying the principles of medical diagnosis, the characteristic hand of a particular artist could be best detected by examination of minor details such as ears or fingernails which, because they are not important, the artist tends to reduce to a formula and always to execute in the same manner. He published his theory in 1880 under the pseudonym Ivan Lermolieff. The book had a significant influence on the young Berenson. Morgan, Jack John Pierpont ‘Jack’ Morgan (1867–1943) was the son of John Pierpont ‘J. P.’ Morgan (1837– 1913), the American financier, banker, philanthropist and art collector, who dominated corporate finance and industrial consolidation in the electricity and steel industries. His father was a voracious and eclectic collector, notably of books and incunabula, paintings and drawings, furniture, tapestries, precious objects and gems. J. P. was the president of the Metropolitan Museum in New York and a powerful force in its establishment. After his father died in Rome, leaving the fortune and the business to him, Jack donated 7000 objects to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, created the Pierpont Morgan Library in 1924 as a memorial to his father, and disposed of much of the remainder of his father’s art collection at auction. Like his father, he disliked publicity. In his inheritance was the bank J. P. Morgan, which, in the First World War, was the official purchasing agent for the British government, managed Germany’s reparation payments after the war and became a major lender to Germany and Mussolini. In 1920, he gave his London residence, 14 Princes Gate, to the us government for use as its embassy. Morshead, Owen Owen Morshead (1893–1977) was educated at Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he became a fellow and the Pepys Librarian. In 1926, he was appointed the Royal Librarian at Windsor Castle, thanks to the patronage of the Prince of Wales who had been at Cambridge with him and with whom he had served in the First World War. At Windsor, Morshead organised a series of catalogues of the drawings. Clark’s volumes on Leonardo were the first in the series and by the time of Morshead’s retirement in 1958 a total of fourteen volumes had been published. Of a sunny disposition, Morshead was more of a communicator than an academic and he was responsible for many guide-books, lectures and broadcasts. He served on many public bodies inside and outside the field of art and enjoyed a long and close friendship with Queen Mary. Mortimer, Raymond Raymond Mortimer (1895–1980), the literary and art critic, was best known for his reviews in the New Statesman (of which he was the editor from 1935 to 1947). He then became the chief reviewer for the Sunday Times (1948–52). Mostyn-Owen, William William (‘Willy’) Mostyn-Owen (1929–2011) spent six years working with Berenson in the 1950s and had a close rapport with him. Cambridge-educated, he was the youngest son of a British military family. His elder brothers were both killed in the war and, as a consequence, he came into a substantial inheritance, including estates in Scotland and Shropshire. He was introduced to Berenson by Rosamond Lehmann. While at I Tatti, he compiled a bibliography of Berenson’s writings and edited the new English edition of Lorenzo Lotto and (with Luisa Vertova Nicolson) revised Berenson’s publications on Venetian and Florentine painters. He was then a director of the ‘Old Master’ picture department at Christie’s for almost

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thirty years. His reminiscences of Berenson and Clark were delivered at the I Tatti Convegno to mark the 50th anniversary of Berenson’s death, in 2009. Murray, Gilbert George Gilbert Aimé Murray (1866–1957) was an outstanding classical scholar and public intellectual, with influence and connections in many areas, including Liberal politics. A leading authority on the language and culture of ancient Greece, he was appointed the Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford in 1908 and in 1925–6 he was the Charles Elliot Norton Lecturer at Harvard University. He and Berenson first met at the turn of the century. Nicolson, Benedict Benedict Nicolson (1914–1978) was the elder son of Harold Nicholson and Vita SackvilleWest. He was brought up at Sissinghurst Castle, Kent, and educated at Eton and Balliol College, Oxford. In the late 1930s, he worked for Clark at the National Gallery as an assistant. From 1939 to 1947 he was the Deputy Surveyor of the King’s Pictures, at first under Clark and then under Anthony Blunt. He resigned this position in 1947 to become the editor of the Burlington Magazine, a post he held until 1978. His brother Nigel was a well-known writer, politician and co-founder of the publishers Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Nicolson, Luisa Vertova Luisa Vertova (1920–) is the daughter of an Italian philosopher and educator. She studied art history at the University of Florence and joined the I Tatti household in 1945. She was one of Berenson’s most valued assistants and translators. In 1955, she married Benedict Nicolson. They divorced in 1962. Noailles, Charles and Marie Laure de Charles de Noailles (1891–1981) and his wife, Marie-Laure (née Bischoffsheim; 1902–1970), were, in the 1920 and 30s, leaders of fashion in Parisian society and important patrons of modern art, particularly Surrealism; they supported film projects by Man Ray, Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel and commissioned paintings, photographs and sculptures from Picasso, Cocteau, Balthus, Giacometti, Brâncusi, Miró and Dora Maar. In 1923, they commissioned the architect Robert Mallet-Stevens to build a summer villa in the South of France, in the hills above Hyères, close by Edith Wharton’s villa. Norton, Robert Robert Norton (1868–1939) was educated at Cambridge. He was the Private Secretary to Lord Salisbury when Prime Minister in 1900. Norton made enough money in the City to retire and paint watercolours. He was a close friend of Edith Wharton and of MartineMarie-Pol de Béhague. Offner, Richard Dr Richard Offner (1889–1965) specialised in the early Florentine Renaissance and was a professor at New York University. He was born in Vienna but his parents emigrated to America in 1891. He studied art history at Harvard, graduating in 1912. Offner advocated an approach to art history based on connoisseurship and dedicated his Studies in Florentine Painting (1927) to Berenson, whose method he had followed and whose company he had sought in the 1920s. Later, their friendship cooled after he disputed the authorship of various paintings that had been authenticated by Berenson and were for sale at the Duveen Galleries. Offner’s major work, Critical and Historical Corpus of Florentine Painting, which appeared in 14 volumes during his lifetime, sought to identify previously anonymous artists and, in many cases, refuted former attributions to better-known names. His re-assessment of the St Francis Legend in Assisi, hitherto attributed to Giotto, caused great controversy.

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Ojetti, Ugo Ugo Ojetti (1871–1946) was a well-known and influential Italian writer, essayist, journalist and art critic. He founded the art journal Dedalo (1920–33) and was the editor of the Corriere dell Sera in 1926–7. Ojetti organised important exhibitions – he had been the first to float the idea of an Italian exhibition in London – and wrote novels as well as many books on art. He and his wife Fernanda lived in the Villa Salviatino, Maiano, south of Fiesole, overlooking Florence. In 1925 he was a signatory of the Manifesto of Fascist Intellectuals and was nominated to the Italian Academy in 1930. Olivier, Laurence Laurence Olivier (1907–1989), the celebrated actor, director and producer, and his second wife, the actress Vivien Leigh (1913–1967), who won two Oscars, were married in 1940 and divorced in 1960 after an increasingly stormy and difficult relationship. The Clarks became close friends, and Clark was fascinated by Leigh, whom he first met in 1940, supporting her through her many illnesses, bouts of depression and breakdowns. The Oliviers’ country house was a half-derelict Gothic ruin called Notley Abbey, on the Buckinghamshire–Oxfordshire border near Thame. When Colin Clark decided on a career in film-making after university, in 1957, he became a personal assistant to Olivier. Oppenheimer, Henry Henry J. Oppenheimer (1859–1932) was an American banker and patron of the arts. He collected widely and knowledgeably, his areas of interest ranging from engravings to Renaissance jewellery, drawings to antiquities. Especially notable was his collection of drawings, with examples by Michelangelo and Leonardo. As well as bequeathing works of art to national institutions in his lifetime, his collections were sold at Christie’s, London, in 1936, the drawings in three sales in July. He was honorary treasurer of the National Art Collections Fund. Oppenheimer came to England as a young man, joining Speyer Brothers’ banking firm. Generous and kindly, friends called him ‘Hen Opp’. He laid the foundation of his drawings collection when he made an extensive purchase from the Heseltine Collection. Cultivating the friendship of art experts like Sir Charles Holmes, the director of the National Gallery, who could never understand how ‘a man of such essential goodness could have amassed a fortune in the City’, Oppenheimer became himself an expert. When war broke out in 1914, Speyer Brothers went out of business and ‘Hen Opp’ retired.With limited funds at his disposal, he bought little to add to the collection. At the height of the Zeppelin raids over London in 1917, Holmes’s thoughts turned to ‘Hen Opp’, who had helped finance the Underground, and they arranged to store, in the unused station in the Strand, some nine hundred pictures from the National Gallery, with selected works from great private collections. Origo, Iris Iris Origo, Marchesa of Val d’Orcia (1902–1988), was the daughter of a wealthy American socialite (Bayard Cutting) and Lady Sybil Cutting, the neurotic daughter of Lord Dysart. After Cutting died in 1910 from tuberculosis, Iris and her mother settled in Italy, at the Villa Medici in Fiesole, and became close friends of the Berensons. Lady Sybil, after an affair with Berenson, married again twice, each time to friends in the Berenson circle: first to Geoffrey Scott (1918–26) and then to Percy Lubbock. She died in 1943. Iris married Count Antonio Origo in 1924 and they bought the run-down estate of La Foce, near Siena, and devoted a lifetime to rehabilitating the estate, creating a famous garden and attending to the welfare of the local peasants. During the Second World War they stayed at La Foce looking after refugee and peasant children, even though they were on the front line of the fierce fighting between the Allies and the retreating Germans. A meticulous writer, who published painstakingly researched biographies, Iris kept a diary of these extraordinary events, which she published in 1947 as War in the Val d’Orcia.

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Paget, Violet Violet Paget (1856–1935), whose pseudonym was Vernon Lee, was a writer of supernatural fiction and of works on aesthetics. She was an early follower of Walter Pater and wrote many essays on art, music and travel. Paget spent the majority of her life on the Continent and lived in the Villa Il Palmerino near Fiesole until her death. Of an excessively nervous disposition, she had long-term passionate friendships with Mary Robinson and Kit Anstruther-Thomson. She and Berenson had a close and combatively stimulating intellectual relationship during his early years in Florence, although eventually they quarrelled when he suggested that she and Thomson had stolen some of his unpublished ideas on aesthetics and were intending to promulgate them as their own. Later the friendship resumed in a lower key, and both Mary Berenson and Nicky Mariano were fond of her. Panofsky, Erwin Erwin Panofsky (1892–1968) was a German art historian celebrated for his work on the symbols and iconography within works of art. He divided his time between the University of Hamburg and New York University from 1931, settling permanently in the usa after Hitler’s rise to power in 1934. He took a particular interest in Dürer. Berenson was antagonistic towards his iconographic approach to art history. Parker, Karl Theodore Karl Theodore Parker (1895–1992), ‘KTP’, was the son of an English surgeon and an American mother. His family moved to Germany in 1912. Parker studied chemistry at the University of Freiburg and then wrote a dissertation on Milton at the University of Zurich. His passion was for drawings and in 1925 he was appointed assistant keeper in the Department of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum. He edited the quarterly magazine Old Master Drawings from 1926 until its demise in 1940. Parker succeeded Clark as Keeper of the Department of Fine Art at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, in 1934, and was Keeper (director) of the Ashmolean from 1945 until his retirement in 1962. He helped to create there one of the best collections of drawings in the world. Lugubrious with an inclination towards melancholy, he was not without humour and had a strong gift for friendship. Pater, Walter Walter Pater (1839–1994) was the godfather of the Aesthetic Movement and a significant influence on Oscar Wilde, Berenson, Clark, Roger Fry, Marcel Proust, W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot. He was born in London, the son of a physician, and educated at King’s School, Canterbury, and The Queen’s College, Oxford. He did not shine academically but eventually obtained a classical fellowship at Brasenose College, Oxford, thanks to his ability to teach modern German philosophy. He wrote fluently and passionately about the arts. His most influential works were Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) and Marius the Epicurean (1885). At the heart of his philosophy was the idea that everything should be experienced as intensely and as subjectively as possible, whether it be a fleeting physical sensation or an intellectual insight. Marius the Epicurean is an imaginary portrait of a young Roman, of moral principle, who wishes to pursue an ideal aesthetic life, centred on intensity of sensation combined with self-discipline and self-denial. The book had a profound influence on Berenson. Pater believed that moments of vision, however transient, and however simple in origin, counted among the most exquisite of human experiences. His philosophy met with much hostility and many considered his views to be undesirably amoral and hedonistic. Peake, Charles Sir Charles Peake (1897–1958) was a strong opponent of Appeasement. In 1939, at the beginning of the war, he was serving in the news department of the Foreign Office and was chief press adviser to the Ministry of Information; he was then posted to the embassy in

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Washington, dc. On his return in 1942, he was appointed as the British Representative with the French National Committee in London. Between October 1943 and May 1945 he was the political adviser to the Supreme Commander, Allied Expeditionary Force, with the personal rank of minister. He continued his career as a diplomat after the war as the consul in Tangier, ambassador in Belgrade and ambassador in Greece (1951–7). Phillips, Duncan and Marjorie Duncan Phillips (1886–1966), with his painter wife, Marjorie (1894–1985), whom he married in 1921, took a deep interest in modern art and those historic artists, such as El Greco and Goya, who they thought had been a vital influence on its development. Having started with a small collection in the family home in Washington, dc, they expanded the collection substantially after the deaths of Duncan’s father and brother in 1917 and 1918. In 1930, they moved to a new house and turned the family residence into a public art museum. Always innovative in their taste, and encouraging of young and unknown artists, they constantly rearranged their galleries in ways that disregarded chronology and tradition, in order to bring out visual connections between works of art. Pichetto, Stephen Stephen Pichetto (1887–1949) was a highly influential art restorer, consultant and adviser. Although little is known about his early education and training, he had established a restoration studio in Manhattan by 1908. He had a close relationship with Lord Duveen and was the principal adviser and sole restorer to Samuel Kress. He was also a consultant restorer at both the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, maintaining a studio in each museum as well as continuing his private practice. Pichetto was also one of the first to recognise the contribution that scientific analysis could make to the understanding of pictures. Pinsent, Cecil Ross Cecil Ross Pinsent (1884–1963) was an English architect and landscape garden designer. With Geoffrey Scott (who married Lady Sybil Cutting in 1918), Pinsent moved to Florence in 1907 and they both were invited to join the Berenson circle. As a result, he and Scott became the principal architects of the Villa I Tatti whose restoration commenced in 1909. Pinsent, having worked in an architect’s office, had some knowledge of the technical aspects of restoration work (he had a particular interest in drains); Scott had no such training and his interest in architecture was principally aesthetic and historical. Their work at I Tatti brought them fame ,and Pinsent went on to specialise in gardens in the Italian Renaissance style. His masterpiece is considered to be the Villa La Foce, designed and constructed for the Origos from 1927 to 1939. Among other works are the Villa dell’Ombrellino at Bellosguardo (1926). Placci, Carlo Carlo Placci (1861–1941) was one of Berenson’s earliest Italian friends. A colourful and cosmopolitan character, novelist, traveller, politician, incorrigible social climber, and bon viveur with an uproarious sense of fun, he was adored by both Berensons and was an integral part of the Florentine Anglo-American community. The son of an Italian banker who had married a Mexican, he was brought up by an English governess and was a passionate Anglophile. In the Fascist era he became a vociferous nationalist, which led to fierce arguments with Berenson, but they always buried the hatchet and their friendship survived. Planiscig, Leo Leo Planiscig (1887–1952) studied art history in Vienna with Max Dvorak and took his degree in 1912. He became the artistic advisor to Archduke Franz Ferdinand and, after his assassination at Sarajevo, he moved the Archduke’s collection to the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. The author of many scholarly articles, he became the director of sculpture and decorative

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arts at the museum in 1933. Planiscig survived a bombing raid on his house, but suffered mental problems as a result, and in 1938 moved to Florence to pursue private research, writing monographs on Italian sculptors and fifteenth-century Italian Renaissance bronze sculptures. Pope, Arthur Upham Arthur Upham Pope (1881–1969) was an American archaeologist and historian of Persian art. In 1925 he became an art adviser to the Iranian government. He and his wife Phyllis Ackerman were pioneers in the study of the arts of Asia and in 1925 they established the American Institute for Persian Art and Archaeology, which later became the Asia Institute, in New York. Pope and Ackerman spent their final days in Iran and on their deaths they were honoured with a magnificent mausoleum built in the Professor Pope Park, on the banks of the Zayandeh River, in their beloved city of Isfahan. Pope-Hennessy, John Berenson first met the already scholarly and imperious John Pope-Hennessy (1913–1994) in Salzburg in 1936. He described the future Renaissance art historian and director of both the Victoria and Albert and British Museums as ‘the budding or rather dawning new grand lama of British art criticism’ (Samuels ML p. 424). Pope-Hennessey visited I Tatti and Vallombrosa on several occasions and was fulsome in his admiration of both Berenson and Clark, personally and professionally. Of Berenson he wrote: ‘the main thing I learned from him was honestmindedness . . . our relationship seemed entirely natural. There was no faking on either side. It is to this that my devotion is due.’ Of Clark he wrote: ‘he was the greatest director of the [National] Gallery in this century’ (Pope-Hennessy pp. 151 and 300). Pope-Hennessy was the son of a career army officer and diplomat; his mother was a noted writer (Una Birch). At Oxford as an undergraduate, he met Clark when he was the Keeper at the Ashmolean and Clark also took him on as an attaché (with Denis Mahon) when he was the director of the National Gallery. With no formal training in art history, Pope-Hennessy joined the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1938 (in the engraving, illustration and design department) and after the war returned there to the department of sculpture, where he made his reputation as a connoisseur and scholar, and as an acerbic and impatient colleague. He was appointed director in 1967, retiring in 1974 when he took on the directorship of the British Museum. PopeHennessy’s younger brother James was a successful biographer who lived a louche existence, careless with money and over-fond of drink and rough young men: he was murdered in his London flat by three of them in 1974. Much disturbed by the episode, John Pope-Hennessy moved to New York in 1977 in a role as ‘Consultative Chairman’ of the Metropolitan Museum. He retired to Florence in 1986. Preston, Stuart Stuart Preston (1915–2005), unmarried and with a fund of arcane knowledge, was a charming and erudite American and a legendary society figure who was the art critic of the New York Times from 1949 to 1965. He was sent to London in 1942 to work on Eisenhower’s staff in intelligence and while there made close friendships with the principal figures among London’s literati, such as Harold Nicolson, Nancy Mitford, Harold Acton, Anthony Powell, Cyril Connolly and Evelyn Waugh. In 1944, he was sent covertly to France with the Fifteenth Army to save works of art and track German plunder. After the war, he returned to New York but, in the early 1970s, feeling himself to be no longer at the centre of the art world, he exiled himself to Paris. Read, Herbert Herbert Read (1893–1968) was a poet and a critic of art and literature, with an interest in anarchism and existentialism. He championed modern British artists such as Paul Nash, Ben Nicholson, Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth. Read was the professor of fine art at the

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University of Edinburgh in 1931–3 and then the editor of the Burlington Magazine in 1933–8. He was one of the organisers of the London International Surrealist Exhibition in 1936. Read became a trustee of the Tate Gallery and in 1947 co-founded the Institute of Contemporary Art with Roland Penrose. He was also the Norton Professor at Harvard University in 1953–4. Ricketts, Charles Charles Ricketts (1866–1931) was an artist, illustrator, author and printer, best known as a book designer and typographer and as a set and costume designer. He was a member of the selection committee of the Italian Exhibition of 1930. At the City & Guilds Technical Art School, Lambeth, which he entered as a student in 1882 following the death of his parents, he met Charles Shannon (1863–1937), a painter and lithographer, who became his lifelong partner. Clark claimed that he died of a broken heart after Shannon developed a passionate hatred for him as the consequence of falling off a ladder and becoming insane. Riegl, Alois Alois Riegl (1858–1905) was an Austrian art historian, one of the major figures in the establishment of art history as a self-sufficient academic discipline. Riegl put forward the thesis that art is not the imitation of reality but the expression of a desired reality. He proposed that it was possible to penetrate to the essence of a culture or an era through formal analysis of the art that it produced. Roberts, Laurance Page Laurance Page Roberts (1907–2002) was a distinguished orientalist and museum curator. He was the director of the Brooklyn Museum (1938–42) and of the American Academy in Rome from 1946 to 1960. Roberts was held in high regard not only as a curator but also as an authority on oriental art. He and his wife, Isabel, whom he married in 1937, were inseparable. He was responsible for the catalogue of The Bernard Berenson Collection of Oriental Art at Villa I Tatti (1991). Ross, Janet Janet Ross (1842–1927) was the daughter of Lucie, Lady Duff Gordon, who had been the friend of Thackeray, Dickens, Carlyle, Tennyson and other such literary luminaries. In 1860, aged eighteen, she had married Henry Ross, aged forty, who lost most of his considerable fortune in the Egyptian banking crisis of 1867. They moved to Italy, purchasing the medieval castle of Poggio Gherado. Boccaccio, who had grown up on the same hillside, is said to have lived there during the plague of 1348 and he used Poggio Gherado as the setting for the first three days of The Decameron. Janet Ross managed the estate in the manner of an ‘autocratic empress’, selling its produce, dealing in art, and writing articles and classic cookery books. She entertained constantly and was on intimate terms with the Berenson household – indeed, Berenson had lived with ‘Aunt Janet’ while he and Mary undertook the restoration of I Tatti with the help of a loan from her in 1900. Lina Waterfield was her niece and ward. Ruhemann, Helmut Helmut Ruhemann (1891–1973) was one of the leading picture restorers of his generation. Born in Berlin, he studied painting in Germany and Paris and, during the First World War, in Spain. He practised as a freelance picture restorer from 1921, becoming the chief restorer in 1929 at the Kaiser Friedrich Museum, Berlin, where he was among the first to use x-rays for analysis. He left Germany in 1933, coming to England where he already had clients among leading London art dealers, including Duveen. Ruhemann restored paintings for the National Gallery from 1934 and worked on paintings evacuated to Wales from the National and Tate galleries in 1939. He was appointed as a consultant restorer at the National Gallery in 1946 and chief restorer until 1972. Ruhemann’s cleaning methods favoured complete varnish removal and led to public controversy in 1947 when Clark’s successor as director, Philip Hendy,

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mounted an exhibition of recently cleaned pictures at the National Gallery, giving rise to vociferous complaints that many paintings had been ruined by Ruhemann. Ruspoli, Marthe Marthe-Marie de Pineton de Chambrun (1899–1984) married, in 1924, Alessandro Edmondo Eugenio dei Principi Ruspoli (1895–1975), the third son of Mario Ruspoli, 2nd Prince of Poggio Suasa. Oxford-educated, she was a writer, linguist, scholar of mysticism and a patron of the arts. Sachs, Paul Joseph A Harvard graduate, Paul Sachs (1878–1965) joined the family firm of Goldman Sachs, becoming a partner in 1904. While a student he became a firm friend of Edward Forbes who, after his appointment as the director of the Fogg Art Museum in 1909, persuaded Sachs to become his assistant curator in 1914. In addition to war service with the American Red Cross, Sachs taught art history at both Wellesley and Harvard Colleges during the First World War and, from these lectures, went on to develop what was the first course in museum curatorship, using his business acumen to teach students administrative, as well as curatorial, skills. His approach was much in the Berensonian style, which he himself termed ‘connoisseur-scholar’. Many of his students had distinguished careers as museum directors. Salles, Georges Georges Salles (1889–1966), an art historian specialising in oriental art, was the director of the museums of France from 1945 to 1957. At the Louvre he undertook many far-reaching reforms to restore the historic continuity of the building in order to ensure that its collections were displayed in the best possible setting; his policy was to attempt to make museums more accessible to the public at large. His mother was the daughter of Gustave Eiffel, the famous engineer, and much of his early years were spent at his grandfather’s house where he met many distinguished French people of the day. He served with distinction in the First World War, gaining the Croix de Guerre twice. In 1926, he joined the staff of the Louvre which then became the centre of his life. In the Second World War, he played an active part in the French Resistance, and was successful in ensuring that the French national collections did not suffer damage or destruction. Himself a collector, he supported and encouraged young and living artists. His private collection contained works by Picasso and Matisse, both of whom he knew personally, and he commissioned works from them and from Braque and Mirò to decorate public buildings. A passionate anglophile, he was made an honorary kbe in 1954. In a diary entry in August 1956, Berenson wrote: ‘had not seen him in six years, found him changed from a still youngish Frenchman to a white haired elderly Jew . . . member of “Charm Incorporated”, like Johnnie Walker, like Robert Berenson . . . who no doubt have capacities, and even merits, but nothing like (equal to) the rewards they gain . . . Georges a sugarplum for hungry but beautiful women his life long, and still so, I dare say. What a successful career.’ Sassoon, Philip Philip Sassoon (1888–1939) was the only son of Sir Edward Albert Sassoon, mp, and Aline, the daughter of Gustave Samuel de Rothschild. The Sassoons were descended from an IraqiJewish family from Baghdad, who migrated to India in the eighteenth century and made an immense fortune as Bombay merchants. In the late nineteenth century, various members of the family settled in England where they became successfully assimilated into English society at the highest level. Sassoon was educated at Eton and Oxford and his sister, Sybil, married Lord Rocksavage, later the Marquess of Cholmondeley, so becoming chatelaine of one of England’s great country houses, Houghton Hall in Norfolk, which she brought back to life after decades of slumber. Siegfried Sassoon was a cousin, although the two families rarely, if ever, met. Aline took a passionate interest in the arts and enjoyed a romantically intense attachment to Bernard

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Berenson shortly after he married Mary in 1907. It was she who introduced the Berensons to Joseph Duveen at about the same time. Philip and his sister, Sybil, stayed at I Tatti when they were children. Thus, Philip inherited immense wealth, a vivid and eclectic interest in the arts and a galaxy of social, political and financial connections. His father had been a part of the then Prince of Wales’s inner circle and Philip cultivated friendship with the next Edward, Prince of Wales. Unmarried, he enjoyed entertaining on a lavish scale at his London house, 25 Park Lane, and at his mansions at Port Lympne, Kent, and Trent Park, Hertfordshire. His artistic tastes ranged from the opulently vulgar, to fashionably modern, to traditional English Grand Tour and chintz, to luxurious French eighteenth-century furniture and objets d’art, as well as paintings. He indulged his artistic interests, social connections and wealth to the full. Like his father, he sought a career in politics. Speaking nine languages, he was the private secretary to Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig in 1915–18 and in attendance at many international conferences. He became the mp for Hythe in Kent (his father’s constituency) and was the Under Secretary of State for Air in 1924–9 and 1931–7. After 1937, he was appointed the First Commissioner for Works, responsible for all government-owned properties, including the royal palaces. He was the chairman of the trustees of the National Gallery in 1933–5 and a trustee of the Tate Gallery and Wallace Collection. Energetic, charismatic and accustomed to getting his own way in matters aesthetic, he included the Clarks in his circle of friends and they rented a house, Bellevue, at the entrance to Port Lympne, from Sassoon, as their out-oftown residence. His health began to decline in the 1930s and, neglectful of it, he died suddenly from influenza which turned into a fatal chest infection (there were no antibiotics in 1939) at the age of fifty-one. He requested that his body be cremated and that his ashes be taken up in his private aeroplane and scattered over the airfield which he had built at Trent Park, with a Royal Air Force squadron providing an escort. Shapley, Fern Fern Shapley (1890–1984) was the curator of paintings at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, dc, from 1947 to 1960. She was the daughter of Ralph Rusk, a professor of English at Columbia University. She married John Shapley, the professor of art history at Brown University. In 1925 she worked at I Tatti on The Florentine Drawings. In 1936, Ralph Rusk, then a professor at the University of Chicago, used his income and connections there to secure the publication of The Florentine Drawings by the university press, in 1938, at a modest and subsidised price. She joined the National Gallery of Art as a research assistant in 1943. Smith, John Hugh (Arnold) John Hugh Smith (1881–1964), Cambridge-educated, was a merchant banker with Hambros Bank and knowledgeable about Anglo-Russian finance. He was a friend of Percy Lubbock, who introduced him into Edith Wharton’s circle in 1908. Smith was an ardent admirer of Wharton, with whom he entered into a flirtatious correspondence, remaining a lifelong friend. He married late, in 1941, Adriana Pelleccione. Smith was the treasurer of the National Art Collections Fund. A keen collector of paintings and sculpture, on his death he gave works of art to three museums in England via the Fund, including a Renoir still life to the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. Sprigge, Sylvia Sylvia Sprigge (1903–1966) and her husband Cecil Sprigge (1896–1959) were correspondents for English newspapers in Rome (she for the Manchester Guardian 1928–33 and 1945–1953; he wrote for the Catholic Herald and was Reuters’s chief correspondent 1943–6). Berenson and Sylvia met in 1945 when she came up from Rome to I Tatti, becoming thereafter a frequent visitor. Berenson enjoyed her company and the news she brought of political events. Nevertheless he much regretted his half-hearted acquiescence in a proposal that she write about him – he conceiving the proposal as not more than a personal memoir but she as a full-

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blown biography. Her book, which two publishers backed out of, was eventually published in 1960, a year after Berenson died. Sylvia was killed in a motoring accident in 1966. Stark, Freya Freya Stark (1893–1993) was a celebrated writer, notably of travel books. She was born in Paris to an English painter father and an Italian mother, spending much of her childhood in northern Italy. She was often ill and found an outlet in reading: at the age of nine, she read One Thousand and One Nights and became fascinated with the Middle East. She learned Arabic and Persian and studied history in London during the First World War. Between 1927 and 1931, she travelled in Lebanon, Iran and Arabia, being one of the first Western women to travel alone through the Arabian deserts. During the Second World War, she joined the British Ministry of Information and contributed to the creation of the propaganda network Ikhwan al Hurriya (Brotherhood of Freedom), aimed at persuading Arabs to support the Allies or at least remain neutral. She wrote more than two dozen books based on her travels. In 1947, she married Stewart Perowne (1901–1989), an orientalist, historian and archaeologist, whom she had met when she was posted to Aden, in 1939, to act as his assistant to his role as information and political liaison officer. Stoclet, Adolphe Adolphe Stoclet (1871–1949) was a Belgian railway engineer and financier who, on the death of his father, took control of the Société Générale de Belgique, one of the largest industrial and banking companies in Europe. While in Vienna to oversee the construction of a railway, Stoclet became fascinated by the art and architecture of the Vienna Sezession and shortly after 1900 he commissioned Josef Hoffmann to design a villa in Brussels to be the exemplar of what a modern bourgeois house should be: a comfortable residence for the family; a place to entertain guests and friends; a haven for artists and musicians; and a suitable setting for his substantial art collections, which included Egyptian and Chinese sculpture, late medieval Italian painting, medieval metalwork, enamels and relics, Byzantine art, pre-Columbian art and Japanese, Cambodian and Tibetan art. Hoffmann was given not only unfettered artistic licence for the design but also an unlimited budget; he left much of the interior decoration of the Palais Stoclet to Gustav Klimt and Fernand Khnopff. Strachey, Lytton Giles Lytton Strachey (1880–1932) was one of the ten children of General Sir Richard Strachey, a colonial administrator who had spent much of his life in India, and his wife Jane, a passionate woman with a love of conversation and French literature. Life in the Strachey family was intellectual and eccentric. Strachey was at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he met Clive Bell, E. M. Forster, G. E. Moore, the Woolfs and Bertrand Russell. Strachey became a prominent figure in the Bloomsbury Group. He is best known for his book, Eminent Victorians. His private life was complicated and unconventional, involving interlocking emotional and sexual relationships with men and women. Suida, William William Suida (1877–1959) was, from 1947, the head of the department of art historical research at the Kress Foundation, advising on art purchases for Samuel Kress and later helping to disperse the collection to museums across the United States. Born and brought up in Vienna (his mother was related to Richard Wagner), he studied art history there and at Heidelberg, and in 1902–4 was an assistant at the Deutsches Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence. In 1905, he completed his studies there with a monograph on Florentine painting. In 1911, he was appointed a professor of art history at the university in Graz and managed the picture gallery of the Landesmuseum Joanneum in Graz. He served in the First World War. Suida developed an expertise in Lombard and Venetian art, and his career took him to

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Austria and Italy in 1934 but, following the annexation of Austria in 1938, he emigrated, first to England and then to the United States. His daughter Bertina studied art history at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, marrying a fellow student, Robert Manning. Suida gave his son-in-law a position as a curator for the Kress collection. Bertina was a curator at the Chrysler Collection.The Suida family’s collection of Baroque art was donated to the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas, Austin, in 1999. Sweden, Crown Prince Gustaf Adolf Oscar Fredrik Wilhelm Olaf Gustaf Adolf (1882–1973) succeeded to the throne of Sweden in 1950. A modest man who disliked pomp and ceremony, he was an accomplished and well respected archaeologist and was interested in architecture, botany, and Far Eastern art and history. In addition, he was a keen gardener and sportsman (tennis, golf, fishing). He was in regular correspondence with Berenson from the mid-1920s and a visitor to I Tatti. He married first Princess Margaret of Connaught (a granddaughter of Queen Victoria), in 1905 at Windsor Castle; she died following an operation in 1920. In 1923, he then married Lady Louise Mountbatten, the sister of Lord Mountbatten (and aunt of the Duke of Edinburgh). Clark met the Crown Prince in Sweden in 1942 and they established an immediate and warm friendship. Toesca, Pietro Pietro Toesca (1877–1962), a specialist in medieval and early Renaissance art, was the professor of art history at the University of Rome from 1926 to 1948, formerly at the Universities of Turin (1907–14) and Florence (1914–26). Berenson was in close sympathy with Toesca’s writings on art history and paid him a warm tribute in Studies in Mediaeval Art, published in 1930. Tolnay, Charles de Charles de Tolnay (born Karoly Vagujhely Tolnai; 1899–1981) was a Hungarian who later became a professor at Columbia University, New York. He studied art history at Berlin and Frankfurt Universities (his post-doctoral ‘Habilitation’ in 1929 was on Michelangelo’s architecture) and became a noted Michelangelo scholar, closely associated with many of the leading German and Austrian art historians (such as Dvorak and Panofsky). A Protestant by religion, he left Germany for Paris in 1933 and emigrated to the usa in 1938, where he worked at Princeton. His five-volume analysis of Michelangelo was completed in 1960. Trevelyan, Robert and Julian R. C. (Robert) Trevelyan (1872–1951), ‘Trevy’, was the second son of Sir George Trevelyan (1838–1928), and the brother of the celebrated historian, G. M. Trevelyan. A ‘rumpled, eccentric poet’, he was a follower of Logan Pearsall Smith and close to the Bloomsbury Group. Having been impoverished, he inherited a fortune after the death of his mother in 1928. Like Clark, he had attended Wixenford Preparatory School. Trevy’s only child, Julian (1910– 1988), became a painter and printmaker, much influenced by Surrealism in the 1930s, and an influential teacher in London art schools in the post-war period. Trevor-Roper, Hugh Hugh Trevor-Roper (Baron Dacre of Glanton; 1914–2003) was a distinguished but controversial historian who became the Regius Professor of History at Oxford and Master of Peterhouse, Cambridge. During the Second World War, he served in the Secret Intelligence Service, working on the interception of messages from the German intelligence service. In November 1945, he was ordered to investigate the circumstances of Hitler’s death and to rebut the Soviet propaganda that Hitler was alive and living in the West. Trevor-Roper interviewed the last people to have been present in the bunker with Hitler and the investigation resulted in The Last Days of Hitler (1947). Trevor-Roper turned the complex and confusing evidence

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into a literary masterpiece, rich in sardonic humour and drama. The book became an instant best-seller and earned him a small fortune which he used, in part, to buy a grey Bentley in which he drove out to Italy in July 1947, commissioned by The Observer to report on the Italian Communists’ electoral strategy. He had become friendly with Logan Pearsall Smith and it was Logan’s sister Alys Russell who suggested to Trevor-Roper that he call on Berenson. They became devoted correspondents from 1947 onwards, Trevor-Roper writing long, carefully crafted letters full of waspish and witty gossip about academia and society. The correspondence was published posthumously in 2006. Tyler, Royall Royall Tyler (1884–1953), who married a Florentine, Elisina Palamadessi di Castelvecchio, was an authority on Byzantine art and helped to organise the Paris exhibition of 1931. Born into a wealthy Boston shipbuilding family, he was educated in England at Harrow School and Oxford. Charismatic and always elegantly dressed, he pursued a glittering and varied career, not only in the arts but also as a soldier, banker and diplomat. He advised Robert and Mildred Bliss on the formation of their collections and the Byzantine Research Library at Dumbarton Oaks.Tyler was a friend of Edith Wharton and Berenson doted on him as ‘a real scholar and man of taste’. He committed suicide in Paris in 1953 while working on a history of the Emperor Charles v. An ancestor was another Royall Tyler (1757–1826), who was the first significant American playwright. Venturi, Adolfo and Lionello There were two Venturi art historians, father and son. Adolfo (1856–1941) pioneered a modern approach to art history in Italy and was the professor of medieval and modern art at the University of Rome (1896–1931). In 1888, he had been appointed the general inspector of the Belle Arti at the Ministry of Public Instruction in Rome, where he instituted formal training on conservation and initiated a catalogue of the national artistic heritage. He supported Duveen and Berenson in the famous court case in New York over the authenticity of a version of a supposed Leonardo painting, La Bella Ferroniere. Lionello (1885–1961), his son, was the professor of art history at the University of Turin (1919–31) and a specialist in Italian Renaissance and late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century art. He was exiled from Italy for refusing to swear an oath of loyalty to Mussolini, and was appointed a professor at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. He later became the professor of art history at the University of Rome (1945–55). Waley, Arthur Arthur David Waley (1889–1966) was the Assistant Keeper of Oriental Prints and Manuscripts at the British Museum from 1913 to 1929. British-born but of German-Jewish heritage, he changed his surname to his paternal grandmother’s maiden name in 1914. He taught himself Chinese and Japanese to help catalogue the paintings in the Museum’s collection. After 1929, he devoted his time exclusively to literary and cultural interests. In 1918, he met Beryl de Zoete, the dance critic and writer, and they lived together until her death in 1962. He was on friendly terms with the Bloomsbury Group. His translations of Chinese poetry were much admired in the Berenson household. Walker, John John Walker (1906–1995) was born into a wealthy Pittsburgh family with many worldly goods but he contracted polio when he was thirteen which confined him to a wheelchair for several years. He turned this adversity to his advantage by studying the paintings in the Metropolitan Museum in New York from his wheelchair, claiming that a sitting position gave the best vantage point for viewing them. He studied at Harvard with Paul Sachs, graduating summa cum laude. He then went to I Tatti to work with Berenson, following which he was appointed

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the professor of fine arts at the American Academy in Rome, in 1935–9. While there, he met and married ‘Margie’ Drummond, the eldest daughter of the 16th Earl of Perth who was the serving British ambassador. In Rome, in 1937, he learned of the proposal to create a National Gallery of Art in Washington, dc, funded by Andrew Mellon, whose son Paul was a boyhood friend from Pittsburgh. He wrote to Paul to ask if there might be an opening for him and in January 1939 he was appointed the Chief Curator. He remained there for the rest of his working life, thereby dashing Berenson’s hope that he might become the first director of I Tatti, if and when Harvard took it on. Walker was endowed with diplomatic skills as well as scholarship, and he formed easy and genuine friendships with many collectors, who in turn became supporters of, and donors to, the National Gallery. In 1956, he succeeded David Finley as the director. From the beginning, he helped plan the National Gallery’s layout, its construction and the installation of the gallery’s initial group of thirty-eight paintings donated by Samuel Kress. Through his influence, the gallery became a world-class institution. He always acknowledged his debt to Berenson and, by extension, Berenson’s influence on the formation of the National Gallery. Walker retired in 1969 and settled with his wife (who died in 1987) in Amberley, near Arundel, Sussex, spending the winters in Florida. Walton, William Sir William Turner Walton (1902–1983) was one of the most distinguished composers of his generation, writing music in all classical modes, as well as film scores and operas. The son of a musician, he was a chorister and undergraduate at Christ Church, Oxford. He was taken up by the Sitwells who nurtured his talents. From 1934, he had a long-standing affair with a woman twenty-two years his senior. She was Alice, the wife of Lord Wimborne, from whom she separated amicably in 1930. When Alice Wimborne died in 1948, the music publisher Leslie Boosey persuaded him to be a British delegate to a conference on copyright in Buenos Aires in order to alleviate his grief. While there, he met Susana Gil Passo (1926–2010), the daughter of an Argentine lawyer, twenty-four years his junior. They were married in December 1948 and from then on spent half the year on the Italian island of Ischia, moving there permanently in the mid-1950s.They purchased a property on Zaro, a hill in an attractive but barren, volcanic corner of the island. They built a house carved into the rock, Susana Walton creating at La Mortella (named after the wild myrtles which grew in profusion) one of the great gardens of Europe. Walton’s widespread sexual escapades were legendary, and he and Jane Clark were rumoured to have planned to run away together in the war. Warburg, Abraham Abraham (‘Aby’) Warburg (1866–1929) was born in Hamburg into a family of German-Jewish bankers but his interests were always in literature and history. He was a rebel in a conservative family and agreed to forfeit his right to inherit the family bank, as long as his younger brother, Max, provided him with books. Warburg studied art history in Bonn, Munich and Florence, developing an interest in applying scientific methodology to the study of art. After receiving his doctorate in 1892, he studied medicine and psychology in Berlin and, in 1895, travelled extensively in the us where he became fascinated by American-Indian rituals and symbolism. Returning to Europe, he married in 1897 Mary Hertz, the daughter of a Hamburg senator, a Lutheran. They settled in Florence where he researched the living and business circumstances Renaissance artists. He rejected Berenson’s aestheticism and initiated the study of iconography. Waterfield, Caroline (‘Lina’) Lina Waterfield (1874–1964), born Lina Duff Gordon, was Janet Ross’s niece and ward and she was brought up at Poggio Gherado. She became a successful writer of popular travel books, the London Observer’s Italian correspondent between the wars, and one of the founders of

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the British Institute in Florence. She married the painter Aubrey Waterfield in 1902 and they pursued an independent, bohemian lifestyle. When in Italy, they divided their time between their own castle at Aulla (in the Massa Carrara in the far north-west of Tuscany) and Poggio Gherado. Her eldest son Gordon was a friend of Clark at Oxford. On Janet Ross’s death in 1927, Poggio Gherado was left to Lina’s younger son John, with a life interest to Lina, thereby disinheriting Ross’s only son Alick whom she regarded as a spendthrift, like her brother Maurice, Lina’s father. Waterfield, Gordon Gordon Waterfield (1903–1987) was the eldest son of Lina and Aubrey Waterfield. He was at Oxford at the same time as Clark and on graduation went to Egypt to learn about the cotton trade with a view to joining a family firm but almost immediately abandoned this career for journalism, obtaining a post on the Egyptian Gazette and then becoming the correspondent for the London Times. He was engaged to Jane Martin, also an Oxford contemporary, but it was Clark whom she married in 1927. In 1929 he married Kitty Hornsby (1908–1989), the daughter of the governor of the National Bank of Egypt. The only interruption in his career as a journalist was service in the army during the Second World War. Before the war, he worked in Paris and Rome, and after was the first head of Eastern and Arabic services of the bbc. Born near Canterbury, Kent, he retired to live a few hundred yards from Saltwood Castle. A large, courteous, kindly man, he showed no rancour or bitterness over Jane’s breaking of their engagement and her marriage to Clark, but to the end of his days he carried in his breast pocket the letter Clark wrote to him on the evening of his marriage to Jane. Waterhouse, Ellis Ellis Waterhouse (1905–1985) was an eminent English art historian with a penetrating eye and strongly held, often controversial, opinions. He specialised in Roman Baroque and English painting. Educated at Oxford and Princeton, he was appointed an assistant keeper at the National Gallery, London, in 1929. In a long and distinguished career, he became the director of the National Galleries of Scotland (1949–52), Slade Professor at Oxford (1953–5), Barber Professor of Fine Art at the University of Birmingham and the director of the Barber Institute (1952–70), and adviser to the director of the new Yale Center for British Art (1970–73). Of his many publications, Painting in Britain, 1530–1790 (1953), remains the standard text on the subject. Wharton, Edith Edith Wharton (1862–1937) was born into a wealthy family of descendants of English and Dutch colonists, whose fortune derived from shipping, banking and real estate. As a girl, she lived in Europe for six years with her family. When they moved back to the us they lived in a fashionable area of Manhattan. She was educated at home by governesses, her thirst for knowledge assuaged by reading books from her father’s library. In 1885, she married Edward Robbins Wharton (‘Teddy’), a banker from Boston but with little interest in intellectual pursuits or the arts. In 1905, she published the book that made her famous, The House of Mirth. In 1907, she discovered that her husband had taken money from her in order to establish a mistress in Boston.This revelation, together with a desire to continue to write full-time, led to divorce in 1912. A prolific writer, and much influenced by her friend Henry James, her novels portray the manners and morals of New England society at the turn of the century. The Age of Innocence won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1921. She also wrote short stories, poems, articles, translations and reviews. Wharton was a relief volunteer in France during the First World War. She lived for most of the time in France, dividing her time between her houses at Saint-Brice-sous-Forêt in the northern suburbs of Paris and at Hyères in the South of France. The same age as Berenson, she first met him in 1903 but without any rapport; however, a

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carefully orchestrated second meeting in Paris in 1909 bore fruit, and she became one of Berenson’s closest friends. Clark first met her at I Tatti in early 1931. She died following a stroke in 1937 and is buried in the American Cemetery at Versailles. Whittemore, Thomas Thomas Whittemore (1871–1950) was a distinguished Harvard Byzantine scholar who discovered important mosaics at Hagia Sophia in Istanbul. In 1911, Whittemore became the American representative for the (British) Egyptian Exploration Fund, participating in the archaeological digs at Abydos and Balabish. He inherited wealth which he used to establish the Byzantine Institute in Boston, with a research centre in Paris and a field office in Istanbul. Wilde, Johannes Johannes Wilde (1891–1970) was born in Hungary and studied in Vienna under Max Dvorak. He settled in Vienna, working in the museum service and becoming the keeper of the Gemäldegalerie in the early 1920s. A Roman Catholic, he married a Jew and they left for Holland in 1939, from where they went to Britain at the invitation of Clark. He worked principally with Italian Renaissance paintings but is also remembered for his pioneering use of x-rays to examine paintings in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. In Britain, he worked on cataloguing pictures at the National Gallery, drawings at the British Museum and at Windsor Castle. In 1940, he went to Aberystwyth and was asked to work with A. E. Popham on a catalogue of the Italian drawings in the British Museum.While there, he was erroneously accused of signalling to German submarines and subsequently deported to Canada. He returned to England, taking British citizenship, and joined the staff of the Courtauld Institute, eventually becoming the deputy director. Wilde believed in the first-hand study of the object and was especially noted for his scholarship on Michelangelo and Venetian art. Wind, Edgar Edgar Wind (1900-1971), German-born and educated, studied with Erwin Panofsky and Aby Warburg. He was instrumental in arranging for the Warburg Library to move from Hamburg to London in 1933. From 1940, he lived and taught in the us. In 1955, he was appointed as the first professor of art history at Oxford (in the Faculty of Modern History). A classicist and Renaissance expert, he nonetheless defended modern art. He made his reputation through research in exploring the uses of allegory and pagan mythology during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. His Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance was published in 1958. On 14 November 1958, Clark made a radio broadcast on the bbc’s Third Programme with the title The Concealed God, in which he discussed Wind’s book. Witt, Robert Sir Robert Clermont Witt (1872–1952) was one of the most prominent and influential men in the London art world. Oxford-educated, he trained as a solicitor and became the senior partner of one of London’s law firms (Stephenson, Harwood and Tatham). Of Spartan habits, but with great energy, he had a passionate interest in the cause of art, being a founder and the first honorary secretary, and later chairman, of the National Art Collections Fund. He was a trustee of the National Gallery (1916–23 and 1924–31) and the Tate Gallery (1916–31). Witt had an encyclopaedic knowledge of works of art and their whereabouts, and he and his wife gave to the Courtauld Institute their collection of more than 750,000 photographs and reproductions of works of art. Witt had helped found the Courtauld Institute and served on its management committee. He was a prime mover behind the Burlington House Italian Exhibition of 1930.

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Wittkower, Rudolf Rudolf Wittkower (1901–1971) was a German art historian, born in Berlin, who moved to London in 1934: his father was British and he held British citizenship throughout his life. He taught at the Warburg Institute from 1934 to 1956, after which he moved to America, becoming the chairman of the department of art history and archaeology at Columbia University, New York. Wölfflin, Heinrich Heinrich Wölfflin (1864–1945) was a pioneering Swiss-born art critic and historian celebrated for developing the vocabulary and methodology of formal analysis of works of art. The first of his hugely influential books was Renaissance und Barock (1888); in 1915 he published Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe (Principles of Art History) in which he identified and contrasted five pairs of precepts in form and style, such as linear and painterly. Berenson’s ‘tactile values’ was not part of his vocabulary. He taught at the Universities of Basel (1897– 1901), Berlin (1901–12) and Zurich (1912–24) and is said to have pioneered the use of twin slide projectors so that images could be compared side by side. Worth, Irene Harriet Abrams (1916–2002), whose professional name was Irene Worth, was a theatrical star with a talent for high comedy. Born in Nebraska and educated in California, she moved to Britain in 1944. Her crowded career included commercial successes in London and New York, and her breakthrough came with T. S. Eliot’s The Cocktail Party in 1949–50. Following this, she was invited to join the Old Vic Company, notably as Portia and Lady Macbeth, both in 1953. She then joined Alec Guinness and Tyrone Guthrie for the first pioneering season of the Shakespeare Festival Theatre at Stratford, Ontario. In the 1950s she performed with most of the leading actors of the day and in the early 1960s formed a rewarding association with the Royal Shakespeare Company. Yugoslavia, Prince Paul of Prince Paul of Yugoslavia (1893–1976) was educated at Oxford and had many British friends. In 1923, he married Princess Olga of Greece and Denmark, the sister of Princess Marina, Duchess of Kent. The future George vi was his best man. In 1934, he became Regent of Yugoslavia following the assassination of his cousin King Alexander. A kind and happily married man, he was a keen art collector and a disciple of Berenson whom he had met before 1919, and with whom he maintained a close lifelong friendship, evidenced by many letters and mutual visits to I Tatti and Prince Paul’s properties in Yugoslavia. He donated a significant number of masterpieces by artists such as Rubens, Rembrandt, the French Impressionists and Picasso to the Serbian people, and these are to be found in the National Museum of Serbia in Belgrade.

Selected Bibliography

The books in the first section below are quoted in the editorial text and footnotes, where they are identified by the author and abbreviated title (given here in parentheses) where appropriate. Berenson, Bernard, Aesthetics and History in the Visual Arts, Doubleday, New York, 1948 (Berenson A&H) —, Sketch for a Self-Portrait, Pantheon, New York, 1949 (Berenson SSP) —, The Italian Painters of the Renaissance, Phaidon, London, 1952 (Berenson IPR) —, Sunset and Twilight: From the Diaries of 1947–1958, Harcourt, Brace and World, New York, 1963 (Berenson S&T) Clark, Colin, Younger Brother,Younger Son, Harper Collins, London, 1997 (Colin Clark) Clark, Kenneth, Another Part of the Wood, John Murray, London, 1974 (Clark APW) —, The Other Half: A Self-Portrait, John Murray, London, 1977 (Clark OH) —, Moments of Vision, John Murray, London, 1981 (Clark MV) —, Apologia of an Art Historian, Oliver and Boyd, Edinburgh, 1951 (Clark AAH) Glasgow, Mary, The Nineteen Hundreds: A Diary in Retrospect, Oxford University Press, 1986 (Glasgow) Hadley, Rollin van N., The Letters of Bernard Berenson and Isabella Stewart Gardner, Northeastern University Press, Boston, 1987 (Hadley) Mariano, Nicky, Forty Years with Berenson, Knopf, New York, 1966 (Mariano) Morra, Umberto, Conversations with Berenson, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1965 (Morra) Pope-Hennessy, John, Learning to Look, Heinemann, London, 1991 (Pope-Hennessy) Samuels, Ernest, Bernard Berenson:The Making of a Connoisseur, Harvard University Press, Boston, 1979 (Samuels MC) —, Bernard Berenson:The Making of a Legend, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Boston, 1987 (Samuels ML) Strachey, Barbara, and Jayne Samuels, Mary Berenson: A Self-Portrait from her Letters and Diaries, Hamish Hamilton, London, 1985 (Strachey) Walker, John, Self-Portrait with Donors, Little Brown, Boston and Toronto, 1974 (Walker) Acton, Harold, Memoirs of an Aesthete, Methuen, London, 1948 Beevor, Kinta, A Tuscan Childhood,Viking, London, 1993 Behrman, S. N., People in a Diary, Little, Brown, Boston, 1972 Bell, Clive, Enjoying Pictures, Chatto and Windus, London, 1934 Berenson, Bernard, The Florentine Painters of the Renaissance:With an Index to their Works, Putnam, New York, 1894 —, Lorenzo Lotto: An Essay in Constructive Art Criticism, Putnam, New York, 1895; 3rd rev. edn, trans. Luisa Vertova, Electa, Milan, 1955, and in English as Lorenzo Lotto, Phaidon, London, 1956 —, Venetian Painting, Chiefly before Titian, privately printed, 1895 —, The Venetian Painters of the Renaissance:With an Index to their Works, Putnam, New York, 1896

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Selected Bibliography

553

—, The Central Italian Painters of the Renaissance, Putnam, New York, 1897 —, Study and Criticism of Italian Art, George Bell, London, 1901 —, The Drawings of the Florentine Painters, Classified, Criticised and Studied as Documents in the History and Appreciation of Tuscan Art:With a Copious Catalogue Raisonné, John Murray, London, 1903 —, North Italian Painters of the Renaissance, Putnam, New York, 1907 —, A Sienese Painter of the Franciscan Legend, Dent, London, 1909 —, Study and Criticism of Italian Art: Second Series, George Bell, London, 1914 —, Study and Criticism of Italian Art:Third Series, G. Bell and Sons, London, 1916 —, Venetian Painting in America:The Fifteenth Century, Frederic Fairfield Sherman, New York, 1916 —, Essays in the Study of Sienese Painting, Frederic Fairfield Sherman, New York, 1918 —, Three Essays in Method, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1927 —, The Italian Painters of the Renaissance, Oxford University Press, 1930 —, The Italian Pictures of the Renaissance: A List of the Principal Artists and their Works, with an Index of Places, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1932 —, The Drawings of the Florentine Painters, 3 vols, University of Chicago Press, 1938 —, Piero della Francesca o dell’arte non eloquente, Electa, Florence, 1950; Piero della Francesca or the Ineloquent in Art, Chapman & Hall, London, 1954 —, Del Caravaggio, delle sue incongruenze e della sua fama, Electa, Florence, 1951; Caravaggio: His Incongruity and his Fame, Chapman and Hall, London, 1953 —, L’Arco di Constantino o della decadenza della forma, Electa, Florence, 1952; The Arch of Constantine: or, The Decline of Form, Chapman and Hall, London, 1954 —, Echi e riflessioni, Arnoldo Mondadori,Verona, 1950; Rumour and Reflection, 1941–1944, Constable, London, 1952 —, Vedere e sapere:Versione dal manoscritto inedito di Luisa Vertova, Electa, Milan, 1951; Seeing and Knowing, Chapman and Hall, London, and Macmillan, New York, 1953 —, Disegni di Maestri Fiorentini del Rinascimento in Firenze, Radio Italiana, Turin, 1954 —, Italian Pictures of the Renaissance: A List of the Principal Artists and their Works, with an Index of Places, Venetian School, 2 vols, Phaidon, London, c. 1957 —, Essays in Appreciation, Macmillan, New York, 1958 —, Essays in Appreciation, Chapman and Hall, London, 1958 —, The Passionate Sightseer: From the Diaries 1947–56, Simon and Schuster and Abrams, New York, 1960 —, One Year’s Reading for Fun, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1960 —, Sunset and Twilight: From the Diaries of 1947–1958, Harcourt Brace & World, New York, 1963; Hamish Hamilton, London, 1964 —, Venetian Painters of the Renaissance:With an Index to their Works, Putnam, New York, 1984 Berenson, Mary, A Modern Pilgrimage, Appleton, New York, 1933 Berlin, Isaiah, Enlightening Letters 1946–60, Chatto and Windus, London, 2009 Biocca, Dario, Letters of Bernard Berenson and Clotilde Marghieri, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1989 Bosman, Suzanne, The National Gallery in Wartime, National Gallery, London, 2008 Briggs, Asa, The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, Oxford University Press, 1995 Brown, David Alan, B. Berenson and the Connoisseurship of Italian Painting, National Gallery of Art, Washington, dc, 1979 Caygill, Marjorie, The Story of the British Museum, British Museum Press, London, 1992 Clark, Alan, ed., ‘A Good Innings’:The Private Papers of Viscount Lee of Fareham, John Murray, London, 1974 Clark, Kenneth, The Gothic Revival, Constable, London, 1928 —, A Catalogue of the Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci in the Collection of His Majesty the King, at Windsor Castle, 2 vols, Cambridge University Press, 1935 —, 100 Details from Pictures in the National Gallery, National Gallery, London, 1938 —, Leonardo da Vinci: An Account of his Development as an Artist, Cambridge University Press, 1939 —, Last Lectures of Roger Fry, with an Introduction by Kenneth Clark, Cambridge University Press and Macmillan, New York, 1939 —, More Details from Pictures in the National Gallery, Trustees of the National Gallery, London, 1941

Selected Bibliography

554

—, Florentine Paintings, Faber Gallery Series, Faber and Faber, London, 1945 —, Leon Battista Alberti on Painting: Annual Italian Lecture of the British Academy 1944, Cumberlege, London, 1945 —, Landscape into Art, John Murray, London, 1949 —, Piero della Francesca, Phaidon, London, 1951 —, The Nude: A Study of Ideal Art, John Murray, London, and Pantheon, New York, 1956 —, Looking at Pictures, John Murray, London, 1960 —, Ruskin Today, John Murray, London, 1964 —, Rembrandt and the Italian Renaissance, John Murray, London, 1966 —, Civilisation: A Personal View, bbc, London, and Harper and Row, New York, 1969 —, Moments of Vision, John Murray, London, 1981 —, The Art of Humanism, John Murray, London, and Harper and Row, New York, 1983 —, and Lord Balniel, eds, A Commemorative Catalogue of the Exhibition of Italian Art held in the Galleries of the Royal Academy, Burlington House, Oxford University Press, 1931 Cohen, Rachel, Bernard Berenson: A Life in the Picture Trade,Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2013 Conlin, Jonathan, The Nation’s Mantelpiece: A History of the National Gallery, Pallas Athene, London, 2006 Connors, Joseph, and Louis Waldman, eds, Bernard Berenson: Formation and Heritage,Villa I Tatti Series 31, Harvard University Press, Boston, 2014 Constable, W. G., Art History and Connoisseurship, Cambridge University Press, 1938 Davenport-Hines, Richard, Letters from Oxford, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 2006 Dunn, Richard M., Geoffrey Scott and the Berenson Circle, Edward Mellen Press, Lewiston, Queenston, Lampeter, 1998 Fowles, Edward, Memories of Duveen Brothers, Times Books, New York, 1976 Gimpel, René, Diary of an Art Dealer, Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1966 Goldman-Price, Irene C., and Melissa McFarland Pennell, eds, American Literary Mentors, University Press of Florida, Gainesville, 1999 Goldstein, Malcolm, A History of Art Dealing in the United States, Oxford University Press, 2000 Gonzáles-Palacios, Alvar, Persona e maschera: collezionisti, antiquari, storici dell’arte, Archinto, Milan, 2014 Goodman, Susan, Edith Wharton’s Inner Circle, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1994 Haskell, Francis, The Ephemeral Museum,Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2000 Hazzard, Shirley, Greene on Capri,Virago, New York, 2000 Hinks, Roger, The Gymnasium of the Mind, Michael Russell, Salisbury,Wiltshire, 1984 —, and Naomi Royde-Smith, Pictures and People,Victor Gollancz, London, 1930 Howard, Jeremy, Colnaghi. Established 1760:The History, Colnaghi, London, 2010 Hugh Smith, Craig, and Peter M. Lukeheart, The Early Years of Art History in the United States, Princeton University, 1993 Israëls, Machtelt, The Borgo San Sepolcro Altarpiece,Villa I Tatti, Florence, 2009 Jebb, Louis, Leonardo da Vinci’s Miniature Madonna: Arthur Hungerford Pollen and the Virgin and Child with a Cat, privately printed, 2013 Kiel, Hannah, The Bernard Berenson Treasury, Methuen, London, 1964 Kinglake, Alexander William, Eothen, Macmillan, London, 1932 Lacey, Robert, Sotheby’s: Bidding for Class, Warner Books, London, 1998 Landow, George, Victorian Types,Victorian Shadows: Biblical Typology in Victorian Literature, Art, and Thought, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1980 Lebrecht, Norman, Covent Garden, Simon and Schuster, London, 2000 Lees-Milne, James, Ancestral Voices, Chatto and Windus, London, 1975 Lewis, Richard W. B., Edith Wharton, Constable, London, 1975 Lewis, Sinclair, Babbitt, Eveleigh Nash and Grayson, London, 1922 Lindsey, Anne H., Four Years, privately printed, 1930 McComb, A. K. The Selected Letters of Bernard Berenson, Hutchinson, London, 1965 Macgregor, Arthur, The Ashmolean Museum, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, 2001 Major, Norma, Chequers, Harper Collins, London, 1996

Selected Bibliography

555

Mariano, Nicky, An Inventory of Correspondence on the Centenary of the Birth of Bernard Berenson,Villa I Tatti, Florence, 1965 Millar, Oliver, The Queen’s Pictures, Chancellor Press, London, 1977 Moorhead, Alan, The Villa Diana, Charles Scribner’s, New York, 1951 Moorhead, Caroline, Iris Origo, John Murray, London, 2000 Mostyn-Owen, William, Bibliografia di Bernard Berenson, Burt Franklin, New York, 1972 Origo, Iris, A Need to Testify, John Murray, London, 1984 —, War in the Val d’Orcia, Jonathan Cape, London, 1947 —, Images and Shadows, John Murray, London, 1970 —, ‘The Long Pilgrimage: One Aspect of Bernard Berenson’, Cornhill Magazine, no. 1023 (Spring 1960), pp. 139–55 Panofsky, Erwin, Meaning in the Visual Arts, Penguin, London, 1970 Pater, Walter, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, Macmillan, London, 1873 —, Marius the Epicurean (1885), Dent, London, 1934 Pope-Hennessy, John, On Artists and Art Historians, Leo S. Olschki, Florence, 1994 Popham, A. E., Italian Drawings exhibited at the Royal Academy, Burlington House, London, 1930, Oxford University Press, London, 1931 Popham, Margaret, Boring – Never!, Johnson, London, 1968 Saumarez Smith, Charles, The National Gallery, Frances Lincoln, London, 2009 Secrest, Meryle, Being Bernard Berenson, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1980 —, Kenneth Clark, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1984 —, Duveen: A Life in Art, Knopf, New York, 2004 Shone, Richard, and John-Paul Stonard, The Books that Shaped Art History, Thames & Hudson, London, 2013 Simpson, Colin, Artful Partners: Bernard Berenson and Joseph Duveen, Macmillan, London, 1987 Spalding, Frances, Roger Fry, Paul Elek Granada, London, 1980 Sprigge, Sylvia, Berenson, George Allen and Unwin, London, 1960 Stansky, Peter, Sassoon:The World of Philip and Sybil,Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2003 Strachey, Barbara, Remarkable Relations:The Story of the Pearsall Smith Family,Victor Gollancz, London, 1980 Sunday Times, The, Encore:The Sunday Times Book, Michael Joseph, London, 1962 Tooley, John, In House: Covent Garden, 50 years of Opera and Ballet, Faber and Faber, London, 1999 Trevelyan, Julian, Indigo Days, MacGibbon and Kee, London, 1957 Trevor-Roper, Hugh, Letters from Oxford, Phoenix, London, 2007 Trewin, Ion, Alan Clark:The Biography, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 2009 Vane, Francis, Walks and People in Tuscany, Bodley Head, London, 1910 Wharton, Edith, A Backward Glance, Appleton, New York, 1934 Witt, Robert Clermont, How to look at Pictures, G. Bell and Sons, London, 1925 Wright, Adrian, Foreign Country:The Life of L. P. Hartley, André Deutsch, London, 1996

Index

note: Page numbers followed by n refer to information in a footnote; those in bold refer to main entries in the Dramatis Personae section. Locators for the illustrations in the plates section appear after the regular locators. Plates 1- 20 are placed between pages and 112 and 113; plates 2141, between pages 272 and 273. Abbott, Senda Berenson (née Berenson, BB’s sister) 88, 133, 353, 509 Aberconway, Christabel 322n, 323 Aboriginal art in Australia: KC’s enthusiasm for 306–7, 308 Ackerman, Phyllis 541 Acton, Harold: Memoirs of an Aesthete 2–3 Aesthetic Movement 99, 127, 472, 486 Agnew, Colin 297, 301 Agnolo di Donnino 41, 43 Agostino di Duccio 410 Ajanta Caves, India 151, 152, 429, 430–1 Albany, Piccadilly, London: KC’s London flat 402, 513 Alberti, Gugliemo degli 110, 283, 490 Alberti, Leon Battista 74 KC’s first edition gift to BB 316, 318 KC’s lecture on 254, 255 KC’s plans for paper on 254, 255 Aldeburgh Festival, Suffolk 287, 345, 370n Alexander of Aphrodisias 75–6 Alexander of Tunis, Lord 391 Allen, Reginald Clifford, Baron Allen of Hurtwood 118 Allendale, Lady 82 Allendale,Viscount 75, 77, 78, 82 Duveen and Adoration of the Shepherds attribution 129, 482, 524 Alnwick Castle, Northumberland: Sebastiano del Piombo fresco 152 Altamura fantasy 384, 422

Amarna, Egypt (Tel-el-armena) 16 Anderson, Domenico 148n Anderson, James 148 ‘Andrea di Michelangelo’ (BB’s art historical fiction) 173 Angerstein, John Julius 148n Anrep, Alda von 138, 471, 509, pl. 8 BB’s artworks at Borgo San Jacopo in Florence during WWII 228 and BB’s death 467 letter to KC 268–9 as member of I Tatti staff 110, 229, 239, 316, 509, 534 care of Library and BB’s researches 4, 352, 418 visits KC and Jane in England 418 Anrep, Cecil von 4, 60, 138, 509 Anrep, Baron Egbert von (Bertie) 4, 138, 229, 239, 509 anti-fascist movement in Italy 138n, 228, 519, 535 BB’s sympathies with 58–9, 131, 226, 241, 242, 490 Morra’s sympathies and role in viii, 59, 490–1, 491, 492, 511 Antique in English Culture lectures 78 Antonello da Messina: Christ Crucified 143, 145 Ardizzone, Edward 224 Ardnamurchan, Scotland: KC’s family estate 14n, 23 Arles, France 92–3 Arnold, Miss 207 Art in the Dark Ages exhibition (1930) 83, 84 Art Fund 80 see also National Art Collections Fund art history and BB’s legacy for I Tatti 494–5 BB’s post-war writings on his theories of art 281–2, 475

556

Index

and BB’s scholarship and connoisseurship 484–6 KC’s comparative view of 485–6, 502–3 KC’s impatience with recent writing on 362 KC’s reputation as art historian 484–5, 487, 488, 513–14 KC’s ‘The Sage of Art’ on BB’s role in 472–7 limited opportunities for study in Britain 2 new German scholarship and BB’s dislike for 127–8, 151, 162–3, 215, 308 art market as context for BB’s career 481–4, 500, 501 Arts Council of Great Britain 224–5, 243–4, 339, 354, 370n KC and Chairmanship of 225, 279, 382, 390, 450, 462 Arundel Society, The 233–4 Ashby St Ledgers manor house, Northamptonshire 193n Ashmole, Elias 97–8 Ashmolean Museum, Oxford 1, 2, 142, 321, 449 background and founding collections 97–9 BB and KC’s research at 22, 23 BB’s donation of painting 1 Charles Bell at 1, 2, 38, 67n, 94, 97, 104, 109, 516 Dürer’s St Jerome in the Wilderness on show at 450–1 Henry (Bogey) Harris’s bequest 334 KC as Keeper of Fine Art 97–121 acquisitions 120–1, 137 ambivalence about post 100 BB’s reservations about post 103, 487 departure for National Gallery 136, 137, 140 lecturing duties 117–18 loan to fund new wing 120, 137 offer of post and acceptance 94–5, 103–7 settling into post and move to Oxford 109 Ashton, Sir Frederick 313 Ashton, Sir Leigh 29–30, 94–5, 216–17, 515 Asscher, Martin 358, 359 Associated TeleVision see ATV Athens, Greece Berensons in 43 KC and Jane in 188, 362 ATV (Associated TeleVision) KC’s programmes for early broadcasts 382, 453, 455, 457, 464, 513 Five Revolutionary Painters series 382 Auden, W. H. 288 Augustine, St 92 Australia KC lectures in 280, 281, 285, 299, 301, 304, 306 KC’s enthusiasm for Aboriginal art 306–7, 308 Avignon, France: Palais des Papes frescoes 92

557

Baker, Collins 73, 123, 125, 515 Baker, Sir Herbert 192n Baker, Walter C. (?Harold) and collection 426–7 Baldass, Ludwig von 184, 515 Baldwin Brown, Gerard 81 Balfour, Archie 121n Ballets Russes 194n Balniel, David Alexander Robert Lindsay, Lord (later 28th Earl of Crawford) 75, 90, 105, 149, 206, 278, 295, 302, 305, 312, 443, 515, pl. 35 appendicitis on return from Italy 273, 274 and Harvard institute at I Tatti 496 KC visits in Scotland 393 as National Gallery trustee 124, 177, 192n, 243, 335 sale of Rembrandt to National Gallery 222 visits to I Tatti 108–9, 110, 456 Balniel, Robin 301, pl. 35 Barber Institute, Birmingham 297, 298 Barberini, Cardinal Antonio 209–10 Baroque: KC’s plans for book on 40–1, 44 Bassiano, Marguerite Caetani 355 BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) 379 see also Civilisation: A Personal View by Kenneth Clark Bearsted,Viscount 124, 158n Beaton, George see Brenan, Gerald Beccafumi, Domenico 36 Becker, Thieme 41 Beerbohm, Max: Rossetti and his Circle 9 Béhague, Martine-Marie-Pol de, Comtesse de Béarn 185, 424, 515–16, 537 Beistegui, Carlos de and collection 397 Bell, Charles 6, 9, 14, 32, 167n, 278, 516 Italian tour with KC and meeting with BB 1, 481 as Keeper of Fine Art at Ashmolean 1, 38, 67n, 94, 97, 104, 109, 516 encouragement of KC’s studies 2 retirement and commemorative gift 111 Bell, Clive 435, 438, 503, 516 Bell,Vanessa 226 Bellevue, Port Lympne, Kent: KC and family rent house at 192, 214, 225, 544 Bellini, Giovanni 105n, 182, 208, 297, 298, 300, 301, 311 attributed works or works in school of in KC’s collection 405, 409 (?)Pagan Rite 263, 265, 442 double portrait of and KC’s Degas copy 263, 313, 409, 412 exhibition in Venice (1949) 312, 314, 346 Prudence 64 Resurrection 16 Benozzo see Gozzoli, Benozzo

Index

Benozzo Sketchbook 68, 70 Benson, Reginald Lindsay (Rex) 301 Benson, Robert 66n Berenson, Abraham (Abie) (BB’s brother) 134, 509 Berenson, Albert (Alter Valvrojenski, BB’s father) 507, 509 Berenson, Bernard (Bernhard) ix–x, xii–xiii, 507–9, pls 5, 7, 10, 19, 30 American Academy of Arts election 135 analysis of correspondence with KC 478–87 appearance and dress 476 on appreciation of art 485 in later life 346–7 archive of personal papers xiv–xv art collection 183, 508 Sassetta altarpiece panels 129, 149n war damage to works removed to Florence 239, 250–1 wartime removal and dispersal for safekeeping 228–9, 239, 250–1 assessment of KC and his career in Sunset and Twilight 479, 480 attitude towards Germans and Jews 127, 151, 162–3, 183, 236, 308 and attractions of museum director role 97 background in Lithuania and upbringing in US 63, 127, 472 parents’ lives in America 482, 507, 509 as student at Boston and Harvard 99, 472, 497, 507, 507–8, 508, pl. 1 wartime conditions and American nationality 228, 242, 249 biographies of KC’s proposed account of life and work 354, 355, 385, 403, 452–3, 454, 457, 480 KC’s ‘The Sage of Art’ article for Sunday Times 468, 472–7 Sylvia Sprigge’s biography 385, 403, 452–3, 454, 544–5 career and reputation as adviser and authority on Renaissance art 3, 100, 472–3, 508–9 as adviser to Duveen 22, 58, 129, 135, 482, 483, 484, 509, 523, 524–30, 537, 547 as adviser to Wildenstein 241–2, 248, 482 and Allendale Adoration attribution 129, 482, 524 attributions and risk to reputation 482 commitment to connoisseurship in youth 498 in context of art market and dealers 481–4, 500, 501 creation of wealth through advisory work 473–4, 481–2 decline in advisory work 1930s 474, 475, 501 defenders of integrity of BB’s advice 483–4

558

KC’s view of 484 legacy in American collections 488 negative perceptions of relationship with dealers 481, 483 New Gallery Exhibition (1895) review 473, 500, 522 opinion on KC’s Michelangelo drawing 36n see also Lists and scholarship below and cats 322 character and comparison with Morra 493 classical preferences in art 267 and plans for book on classical and medieval art 503, 504 concerns over transporting artworks 56, 80 ‘conoscing’ as favourite hobby 386 cultivation of young friends 131, 245 death and funeral 387, 467–8 KC’s memorial address 468, 481, 497–506, pl. 41 KC’s ‘The Sage of Art’ article 468, 472–7 obituary xii, 468 on delight of old age 300 demands on assistants 20, 501 demands as friend 479 diaries and publications from 227, 229, 240, 258, 264, 282, 283, 479, 480 ‘enemy-friends’ 479 enjoyment of conversation and letters 226–7, 235, 283, 474–5, 505 and Exhibition of Italian Art 56, 67, 70–1, 80, 478, 479 fame and legendary status after survival of war 240, 241, 242, 283–4, 476 favourite tree on walks 401, pl. 16 financial situation arrangement with Duveen 22, 58, 129, 130, 482, 484 in comparison to KC’s 480 creation of wealth through advisory work 473–4, 481–2 impact of Wall Street Crash 58 post-war arrangement with Wildenstein 241–2, 248, 482 problems in 1930s 130, 501 and French modern art 503 friendship with and influence on KC 478–9 BB’s reflections on and KC’s response 190, 192 disapproval of KC’s acquaintances 246 disapproval of KC’s marriage to Jane 21, 25–7, 416 influence in career 486–7 influence on KC’s writing style 278 and KC’s acceptance of Ashmolean post 103, 487

Index

KC’s acknowledgement on BB’s 90th birthday 415 KC’s acknowledgement and dedications to BB 278–9, 325, 326, 373, 374, 404, 428–9, 431, 432, 433 KC’s first visit to I Tatti 1, 5, 481 and lack of time to spend together 199–200 master–pupil relationship 190, 192, 487 mutual friends 56, 245–6 request for photograph 216, 218 thoughts after visit from KC and Jane 202–3 health 78, 196, 305, 353, 365, 371 constraints on life in later years 284, 311, 346, 369, 385, 434 fall and painful osteoporosis 387, 388, 389, 408, 410–11, 455, 456, 471 hay fever attacks 36, 331, 345 illnesses late in life 387, 398, 434, 436, 438, 440, 452, 467, 476 problems with teeth and dental treatment 190, 320 strain of constant visitors 91–2, 267, 360–1, 442 homes in Italy see Casa al Dono; I Tatti; Il Villino honours and awards at end of life 389 freedom of city of Florence 241, 285, 288n, 477, 506 medals 288n for services to Italian government 241, 285, 288n Italian politics and anti-fascist sympathies 58–9, 490–1 post-war accusations of collaboration 242 and post-war fame and popularity 241, 242 and situation before and during WWII 131, 146, 219, 226, 226–37, 475, 505–6 KC as assistant on The Drawings of the Florentine Painters 1–2, 3, 19–53 arrangements for arrival and initial visit 6–17, 478 enormity of task 20 friendship as result of 56, 478 instructions for KC in Rome 42–3 KC’s work on in Britain 33, 36–7 publication and acknowledgement of KC 198–200 response to news of KC’s marriage to Jane 21, 25–7, 478 termination of arrangement 22, 46–8, 49–53, 56, 478, 479 termination and KC’s ongoing contribution 75, 81–2, 84, 105, 113 on KC’s communicative skills with public 454

559

KC’s encyclopedia article and review of work 53, 62, 63, 64, 66 on KC’s Landscape into Art 319, 334, 337 language studies at Harvard 472, 497, 498, 507 later life and commitment to friends and writing 385–6, 407 Lists 24, 28, 37, 39, 60, 73, 82, 85, 281, 473, 502–3, 508 attributions and reputation 482, 483 detailed research for 19–20 finality of and flaws in 499–500 KC’s ongoing supply of information 104, 106–7, 143, 153, 160, 405, 409 as legacy 488 preparation of new editions in later life 386, 405, 407, 409, 501, 504 publication as The Italian Pictures of the Renaissance 101, 113, 283, 450, 501–2 published prefaces and theory of art 503–4 love of Italy and Italians 505–6 marriage see Berenson, Mary: marriage to Berenson and Mary’s death 252, 253 and Mary’s illness 159 on Morra’s friendship 490 name change 143n newspapers and magazine reading at I Tatti 118, 179 on KC’s The Nude 350, 374, 392, 433, 436, 454 Oxford University term in residence 99–100 comparison of Oxford and Harvard 100 post-war accusations of collaboration 242 post-war recommencement of life at I Tatti 239–41, 248, 250–3 religious faith 127, 508 reputation see career and reputation as adviser and authority on Renaissance art above Ruskin sighting in Venice 272 scholarship 484–6, 500–1 aesthetic and humanist approach to art 3, 99, 100, 127, 242–3, 281, 472, 473, 485, 486, 498–9, 503–4 antipathy towards new German scholarship 127–8, 151, 152, 162–3, 215, 308 and attribution of Oppenheimer/Clark Michelangelo drawing 162 KC’s appreciation in memorial address 498–506 KC’s comparative view of 485–6, 502–3 post-war writings on theories of art 281–2 writing appears in Read’s English Prose Style 114, 115 see also photographs and BB’s research and Lists above; writings/publications below

Index

Second World War and difficulties for 226–37, 475 70th birthday letter in The Times 167 supporting staff for life and activities 386, 387, 434 as translator in First World War 509 travels and cultural interests 5, 22, 23, 24, 39–40, 46, 60, 61, 101, 131–2, 133, 134, 135, 137, pls 3–4, 6 Asia Minor (Turkey) 195 considers visit to Russia 174–5, 176, 178 Constantinople 24, 39, 175, 195 constraints in later years 311, 346, 369 constraints in wartime 226–7, 230–1 European trip after university 508 in France and Paris 286, 331, 332, 333 interest in Near East 190 in Italy 213, 249, 284, 285, 286, 287, 290, 291, 293, 363–4, 377, 386, 388, 389 Libya trip in last years 386, 388, 414 North Africa 58 plans for and stays in Rome with KC 266–7, 363, 364, 365, 367, 369, 370, 397, 398 plans for and visits to England 116, 155, 156, 170, 172, 178, 183, 184, 333 in Rome with Nicky Mariano 101, 134, 207, 226, 235–6, 240, 249, 265, 273–4, 286, 287, 388, 392, 397 Spain 59, 60, 66, 69, 70 Switzerland 285, 298 writing account of process 282–3 articles for press and magazines 283 assistants in post-war years 283 KC on BB’s writing style 504–5 as occupation in wartime 227, 281, 475 ‘supplementary essays’ 300, 319 on theories on art in post-war period 281–3 weighty commitments in last years 421, 434 writings/publications Aesthetics and History in the Visual Arts 227, 281, 282–3, 297, 298, 300n, 307–8, 310–11, 313, 475, 504, 505 Alberto Sani: Un artista fuori del suo tempo 282, 325, 331, 348 ‘Altamura’ article 384, 422 ‘Andrea di Michelangelo e Antonio Mini’ article 173 L’Arco di Constantino (The Arch of Constantine) 282, 373, 374, 474, 504 article on art of seeing (Iterum Censeo) 446 Bibliografia di Bernard Berenson (by MostynOwen) 417 Bollettino d’arte articles 138, 147

560

Caravaggio: His Incongruity and his Fame 282, 337 Central Italian Painters 19, 473, 503, 504 Corriere della Sera articles 386, 387, 437n Dedalo articles 20, 136 Del Caravaggio delle sue incongruenze e della sua fama 282, 337 The Drawings of the Florentine Painters (1903) 20, 473, 474, 488, 500, 508 The Drawings of the Florentine Painters (revised edition 1938) 1–2, 3, 20, 49–50, 84, 105, 113, 127, 134, 157, 169, 178, 198–9, 421, 544 Florentine Painters 19, 473, 503 Italian Painters of the Renaissance (four volumes) 19, 60, 61, 114, 283, 476, 485, 488, 508 Italian Pictures of the Renaissance (published Lists) 101, 113, 283, 450, 501–2 Lorenzo Lotto 365, 366, 377, 409, 434–5, 508, 536 Missing Pictures articles 88 North Italian Painters 19, 473, 503, 505 One Year’s Reading for Fun 240 Piero della Francesca or the Ineloquent in Art 281–2, 328, 329, 330–1 Placci article 258 Rumour and Reflection 227, 258, 283, 326–7, 364, 368, 369, 505 Seeing and Knowing see Vedere e sapere below Sketch for a Self-portrait 227, 281, 314, 315, 351, 474, 475–6, 498, 503, 505 Studies in Medieval Painting 61 The Study and Criticism of Italian Art 508 Sunset and Twilight: From the Diaries 1947 to 1958 227, 283, 479, 480 Three Essays in Method 20, 23, 498–9, 501 Tiepolo articles 347 Vedere e sapere (Seeing and Knowing) 282, 348, 351 Venetian Painters 19, 473 Viaggio in Sicilia 417 see also KC as assistant on The Drawings of the Florentine Painters above Berenson, Bessie (Elizabeth) (BB’s sister) 353, 467, 509, pl.18 Berenson, Julia (Eudice Mickelshanski, BB’s mother) 507, 509 Berenson, Lawrence 242, 310n, 496 Berenson, Mary (formerly Costelloe, née Pearsall Smith, BB’s wife) xiv, 3, 509–10, 522, pls 3–5 appearance and personality 476, 510 art collection and purchase of Sassetta altarpiece panels 149n background and family 476, 509–10, pl. 2

Index

and BB’s contemplation of museum directorship 97 contribution to Berenson’s career and art research 476, 500, 504, 508, 510 critiques of BB’s writing 282, 505 instructions for KC’s research on Florentine drawings 33 and Lists 19 reservations over KC’s capabilities as BB’s assistant 47n correspondence with Jane Clark 48–9 correspondence with KC xv, 4, 25–36, 42, 120–1, 165–6, 181–2 and A Modern Pilgrimage 120, 136 and arrangements for arrival at I Tatti 6, 7–17 and marriage to Jane and tour of France and Italy 25–9 settling in London and birth of Alan 30–6, 35–6 death 240, 248, 251 burial with BB at I Tatti 468 disapproval of KC’s marriage to Jane 21, 25–7 and Duveen 60, 61, 101, 129, 133, 524 in England 60, 65, 135, 154 outbreak of war and return to I Tatti 219, 226, 230, 232 visits Clarks at Richmond 101, 109–10 health 23, 78, 134, 138, 140, 147, 181, 182, 510 final deterioration and death 250, 252 operation and illness after 101, 111, 112, 113, 115 serious decline in 1930s 130–1, 155, 156, 157, 159, 161, 163, 197, 200, 211, 213, 226 Vienna sanatorium and tubercular diagnosis 167, 169–70, 172 wartime confinement and German occupation of I Tatti 229 introduction of Nicky Mariano to I Tatti 511 marriage (first) to Costelloe 510 marriage (second) to BB first meeting and move to Italy on marriage 508, 510 later accommodations 4, 131, 240, 510 travels and cultural interests 5, 22, 23, 24, 39–40, 46, 58, 60, 61, 66, pls 3–4 writings Across the Mediterranean 181 A Modern Pilgrimage 120, 136 A Vicarious Trip to the Barbary Coast 24, 60, 65, 133 Berenson, Rachel see Perry, Rachel Berenson, Richard Arthur 63, 510 Berenson, Robert 241, 543 Berenson, Senda see Abbott, Senda Berenson Berkeley, Mollie 444

561

Berlin, Isaiah 337, 343, 480, 516 Berlin: KC’s visits 16, 65, 173, 174 Bertoldo di Giovanni 81, 84, 259n Beuttler, Jane see Clark, Jane (née Beuttler) Bibliotheca Hertziana, Rome 44, 65 Biddle, Francis 355 Biddle, George 355n Biddle, Katherine (Katherine Garrison Chapin) 355 Big Chilling, Hampshire 48, 53, 74, 511 Binyon, Cicely (née Powell) 79 Binyon, Laurence 167n, 516, 526 Binyon, Nicolette see Gray, Nicolette Bliss, Mildred 375–6, 516–17, 547 Bliss, Robert Woods 375–6, 516–17, 547 Blochet, Edgard 78–9 Blunt, Anthony 243, 496 Bode, Wilhelm von 84, 500, 503, 517, 523, 525 Bode Museum, Berlin see Kaiser Friedrich Museum Bodkin, Thomas 257, 517 Bodleian Library, Oxford 98, 99 Italian Illuminated Manuscripts exhibition ( 1948) 293, 297, 298 Bodmer, Heinrich 117, 495 ‘bodyline’ bowling controversy 118 Boethius, Axel 496 Böhler, Julius and collection 68 Böhler, Julius Wilhelm 68n Bolletino d’arte (Italian journal) 138, 147n Bologna, Italy KC and Jane visit after marriage 27–8 KC’s stay at I Tatti and visit to 324, 326, 327 Bompiani (Italian publishers) 334, 337, 339 Bonacossi, Count Contini see Contini-Bonacossi, Count Alessandro Bonnard, Pierre 266 Bonner, Paul Hyde 305 Bonnet, Georges 209 Borenius, Tancred 45, 257, 517 Borghese Gallery, Rome 267 Borrow, George 69 Bos, Charles du 66, 186, 517 Bosch, Hieronymous 157 Boston, Massachusetts BB’s early life and career in 127, 482, 507, 508 KC and Jane visit 389, 422, 463–4 KC’s views on museum 463–4 Boston University: BB as student 507, 508, pl. 1 Boswell, James 113 Botticelli, Sandro BB’s evaluation in Lists 502 BB’s purchases for Isabella Stewart Gardner Collection 464 Birth of Venus in Exhibition of Italian Art 55

Index

Descent of the Holy Ghost 459 Giuliano de’ Medici 425 Lee’s purchase of The Madonna of the Veil 77, 78, 87 in National Gallery 149, 460 drawing on back of Adoration of the Magi 179, 180, 182 Botticini, Francesco 183 The Resurrection 42n Bottrall, Ronald 274 Bournemouth see Toft, The, Bournemouth Bowes-Lyon, David 296 Bowes-Lyon, Elizabeth see Elizabeth, queen consort Bowood House, Wiltshire 161 Bowra, (Cecil) Maurice 94, 278, 372, 399n, 408, 409, 419, 428n, 517 Bracci family 110, 172, 490, 492 Bracken, Brendan 223 Bradman, Don 118n Brahmins and division of life 257 Brandi, Cesare 363 Braun, Jean Adolphe 148 Brenan, Gerald (George Beaton): Jack Robinson 141, 142 Brescia, Italy: La Pittura bresciana dei rinascimento (1939) 213, 216 Bretton Hall, nr Wakefield, West Yorkshire 75n Brinckmann, Albert Erich 15, 518 British Academy 434 British Broadcasting Corporation see BBC British Council and KC’s lecture tours 281, 382 British Museum, London BB and KC’s research for Florentine drawings 22, 23, 41 Codex Siniaticus purchase 150 confusion over photographs ordered from 36–7 Hinks and cleaning of Elgin Marbles 528, 529 British Restaurants: Jane organises artworks for 226 Bronzino, Il 149 Brown, J. (John) Carter 34n, 518 Brown, John Nicholas, II 356n, 496, 518 Brown, Oliver 45n Browning, Robert 371, 377 Brummer, Joseph 427, 518 Bugiardini, Giuliano 162 Bülow, Prince Bernhard Heinrich Karl Martin von 79, 84 Bundy, McGeorge 467 Burckhardt, Jacob 418, 495 Burlington Fine Arts Club, London 66, 69, 75, 77, 410n Art in the Dark Ages exhibition (1930) 83, 84

562

Burlington House, London see Royal Academy, London Burlington Magazine 94, 182, 183, 528, 529 BB and Fry as founders 63, 525 BB’s ‘Zanobi Machiavelli’ 335 KC’s article on ‘Giorgionesque’ panels 189 KC’s article on Masolino panels 335 KC’s article on Piero della Francesca altarpiece in Lisbon 271 KC’s review of BB’s Aesthetics and History 302, 303, 307–8, 310–11, 313 KC’s review of Krautheimer’s book on Ghiberti 456 Nicolson’s editorship 289, 290, 307, 537 publication of KC’s address on death of BB 497 on purchase of Sassetta panels for National Gallery 149n, 158, 159, 164 review of KC’s Leonardo catalogue 168 Burton, Gertrude 508 Buschbeck, Ernst H. 184, 518 Byron, Robert 94, 518 Byzantine art in Paris exhibition (1931) 93–4

Cahors, France 429–30 Cain, Julien 194, 519 Cambiaso, Luca 339 Canada: KC and Jane visit 456, 459, 460, 461–2, 463 Capo di Monte, Hampstead Heath, London 225, 246 Caracci, Agostino 429 Caracci, Anibale 429 Carandini, Elena 253, 519, pl. 7 Carandini, Nicolo 253, 519 Caravaggio BB’s view of and book on 267, 282, 337 Beheading of St John the Baptist in Malta 414 exhibition in Milan (1951) 345–6 Cariani, Giovanni 409n, 411 Carmichael, Mrs 31 Carracci, Ludovico 99, 267 Carusi, Enrico 107 Casa al Dono, nr Vallombrosa 211, 256, 265, 314, 315, 328, 332, pls 17–18 Cassatt, Mary 407 Castagno, Andrea del attribution of works 41–2, 425 The Crucifixion in National Gallery 183 reference to ‘Flagellation’ in BB’s collection 183, 250 Cavalcaselle, Giovanni Battista 41n, 495, 498, 502–3, 508 Cellini, Benvenuto 207 Perseus 160

Index

Cesaro, Nina di 329 Cézanne, Paul 282 ‘Chalandon Sassettas’ 129–30, 149–50, 151, 154, 157–8, 160, 165, 484 Chamberlain, Ivy, Lady 55 Chamberlain, Joseph 55 Chamberlain, Neville (Chambrella) 130, 197, 202, 206, 209, 214, 221 Chambrun, Jacques Aldebert de 186, 519 Chambrun, Marthe-Marie de Pineton de see Ruspoli, Marthe Chantrey, Sir Francis 304 Charles I, king of England: paintings from Royal Collection 32, 33 Charteris, Sir Evan 124 Chatsworth drawings collection 47, 67–8, 70 Chéret, Jules 347 Chesterton, G. K. 51, 84 Chilling see Big Chilling, Hampshire Chiostro di San Martino, Italy: apartment near I Tatti 21, 26–7, 28–9, pl. 13 Choiseul, Duchesse de 421 Chrysostom, St John 300n Churchill, Sir Winston 118n, 125, 214, 221, 379, 381, 391n Churchill Club, London: Jane organises cultural events 226 Ciano, Count 227 Cicogna, Anna Maria 386, 414n Cimabue attribution of Frick ‘flagellation’ 350 The Virgin and Child with Six Angels 158 Città di Castello, Master of 170, 171 City of Manchester Art Gallery 451 Civilisation: A Personal View by Kenneth Clark (BBC TV series) 128, 382, 487, 488, 513–14 Clark, Alan (KC’s son) 303, 361, 362, 372, 432, 443, 514, pl. 35 birth in London 21, 24, 29, 30, 31, 35 as child 42, 49, 68, 72, 80, 88, 114, 206, pl. 26 unidentified illness 140, 141–2, 144, 147, 148–9 misses trip to I Tatti and meeting BB 293, 294 ownership of Saltwood 514 proposed legacy of Old Quarries 303n Rye homes 453, 458 student at Christ Church College, Oxford 247, 280, 301 ‘hair-raising’ European holiday 291, 293–4 Swiss home in Zermatt 453 trip to America after university 323, 324, 325, 327 unsettled youth 384, 441, 452 National Service confusion 325 training for the Bar 336, 369

563

visits to I Tatti and meetings with BB 414, 428, 458 wedding and marriage to Jane Beuttler 384, 389, 458, 459, 464–5 writing ambitions and publications 458 military histories 384, 464–5, 514 novels 384, 453 Clark, Alice (Margaret) (née MacArthur, KC’s mother) 29, 136, 164, 225, 512, pl. 24 death 247, 249 disapproval of KC’s career in art 6, 9–10, 53 opposition to KC’s move to Richmond 57, 68 reliance on KC after husband’s death 118 Clark, Colette (KC’s daughter) 368, 372, 380, 384, 420, 432, 450, 514 birth and childhood 101, 116, 118, 121, 140n, 165, 206, 247, 301, 326, 345, pl. 26 at Coronation ball 393 Italian holidays and stays at I Tatti 286, 287, 292, 294, 297, 344, 347, 361, 362, 377, 388, 440, 443 BB on Colette’s appearance and personality 443–4 study stay at I Tatti and Villino with KC 399, 400 jaundice 453 lengthy pneumonia-type illness 436, 437, 439, 440, 441, 471 school and Oxford University 280, 336, 402–3 Clark, Colin (KC’s son) 361, 514 birth and childhood 101, 116, 118, 121, 140n, 165, 206, 247, 301, 326, 331, pls 26, 35 career after school and RAF 280, 336, 339, 345, 348, 362, 368–9, 372, 384, 393 career in filmmaking 453, 514 works for Olivier 441, 443, 444, 538 on father’s love of writing 278 inheritance from godmother Edith Wharton 193n Italian holidays and visits to I Tatti 287, 292, 294, 297n meets BB in Rome with KC 370 night in police cells 372 Clark, Jane (Elizabeth Winifred) (née Martin, KC’s first wife) 514–15, 548, 549, pls 27, 35–6 children see Clark, Alan; Clark, Colette; Clark, Colin compiles index to KC’s The Gothic Revival 37 correspondence with BB 70–1, 76–80, 112–13, 140–2, 202–3, 205–7, 210–11, 214, 264–5, 270, 291–4, 295–6, 312–13, 322–4, 355, 356, 393–4, 397–8, 419–21, 440–5, 455–6 on BB’s 90th birthday 416 on BB’s fall 408, 410–11 BB’s thanks for gift of shawl 471 on Canada trip 461–2

Index

disappointment on missing visit to I Tatti 447–8 during KC’s lecture trip to Australia 299–306 on joy of meeting with BB in Rome 397 and KC’s The Nude 431–2 news from Washington 425–6 on operations and recovery 368–9, 370, 372, 377, 393 on visit to I Tatti 412–13 correspondence with Mary Berenson 48–9 death 514, 515 and Florentine drawings research and travels 36, 41, 43 health 75, 76, 131, 196, 309, 331, 404, 429, 513 car accident 114 influenza bouts 43, 45–6, 80, 177, 307, 327, 328, 419 lumbago and Abano cure 446, 447, 448 need for operations in early 1950s and recuperation 353, 355, 356, 357, 359, 360, 361, 363, 365, 366, 367, 368, 370, 393 post-war illnesses and low moods 265, 266, 270, 273, 274, 280, 336, 350, 352, 353, 384 wartime separation and unhappiness 225–6 love of gardening 266, 289, 361, 368, 384, 393, 446, pl. 38 and making of Civilisation television series 513 marriage Berensons’ disapproval and move to apartment near I Tatti 20–1, 23, 25–7, 416, 478 birth of children 21, 29, 30, 31, 35, 101, 116, 118 in France and Italy after wedding 27–9 lifestyle and lack of contact with children 131 London wedding 23, 25 marital problems 246, 280, 513, 514 and move to Saltwood 384, 407, 453, 461 quieter life after KC’s retirement from National Gallery 289 separation in wartime and problems 225–6, 231, 234–5 public commitments 325 roles in fashion industry 280, 287, 388 social circle in London 125 wartime projects in London 226 Clark, Jane (née Beuttler, KC’s daughter-in-law) 384, 389, 458, 459, 464, 514 Clark, Kenneth ix–x, xii–xiii, 512–14, 522, pls 28–9, 35, 37, 40 aesthetic sensibility 128, 245, 486, 512 and wartime storage of NG paintings 222 analysis of correspondence with BB 478–87 archive of personal papers xiv–xv art collection 35–6, 225, 289, 292, 294–5, 313–14

564

connoisseurship and speculation in art 482, 486 Cook Collection purchases 458–9 Degas copy of Bellini double portrait 313, 409 Florentine plaque of Petrarch’s Triumph of Death 409–10 information for BB’s new editions of Lists 405, 407, 409 interest in modern art and artists 126–7, 225 items from sale of ‘Bogey’ Harris’s collection 335, 336 Jacometto Portrait of a Woman 292n, 293, 294, 297 ‘Portrait of an Architect’ 327, 328 Renoirs 139–40 Saltwood contents purchase 402, 403 shares photographs of works with BB 265–6, 271, 272, 293, 294, 321, 402, 403 on art historian’s role 484–5, 485–6 artistic aspirations 126, 279 assistantship to BB and The Drawings of the Florentine Painters 1–2, 3, 19–53 arrangements for arrival and initial visit to I Tatti 6–17, 478 and later career and reputation 486–7 learning German and stay in Dresden 5, 13–17 marriage to Jane and disapproval of Berensons 21, 25–7, 416, 478 publication and appreciation of 198–200 research in Britain 33, 36–7, 40–2 research in Rome 42–4 termination of arrangement 22, 46–8, 49–53, 56, 478, 479 termination and ongoing contribution 75, 81–2, 84, 105, 113 background and family 512, pls 21–4 BB’s opinion of KC in Sunset and Twilight 479, 480 car and chauffeur 11–12, 14 career see Ashmolean Museum, Oxford: KC as Keeper of Fine Art; National Gallery, London: KC as Director; Oxford University: KC as Slade Professor of Fine Art; Royal Collection: KC as Surveyor of the King’s Pictures and assistantship to BB above television career below character 2–3 BB’s reflections on nature of friendship 190, 192, 203 Mary Berenson’s view of 47n Mary Glasgow’s summary of art and life dilemma 279

Index

natural habitat as socialite and connoisseur 125–6 perceived arrogance 21, 126 children see Clark, Alan; Clark, Colette; Clark, Colin communication skills 278, 454, 457, 485, 488, 513 death 514 obituary xii and death of BB 467–8 memorial address 468, 481, 497–506, pl. 41 dedication of works to friends and family 278–9 requests for and dedication of books to BB 325, 326, 373, 374, 404, 428–9, 431, 432, 433 disinclination to read fiction 246 education and schools 3, 512 self-education in art 40–1, 67, 74 and Exhibition of Italian Art co-authorship of catalogue 70–1, 71–2 on selection committee 44–5, 53, 55–7, 67, 71, 478, 479, 487 family business 8, 58, 131, 478, 512 and father father’s disapproval of career in art 6, 7, 9–10 inheritance on death 131 KC’s assistance after ‘Welsh Dam Disaster’ 8n financial security 131, 478, 480 first meeting with BB 1, 5, 481 friendship with BB 478–9 BB’s reflections on and response 190, 192 mutual friends 56, 245–6 reflections on time spent at I Tatti and with BB 422, 438, 469, 487 see also Berenson, Bernard: friendship with and influence on KC gardens at homes and enjoyment of 74, 95, 111n, 246, 361, 364 health 177, 196, 197, 514 heart problems 163, 291–2, 296 impacted wisdom tooth 173 influenza bouts 7, 71, 80, 205, 206, 419, 421, 444 jaundice 7 whooping cough 291, 293, 295 home life and family 131, 165, 184, 206, 246–7, 258–9 on Alan’s marriage to Jane Beuttler 458, 459, 464–5 children’s schooling and start in world 280 Cornwall holiday 285, 291, 293 domestic obligations 331, 359 Norfolk holiday 168, 171 Portugal holiday without Jane 262, 265, 285

565

post-war family holidays in Europe 249, 262, 285, 286, 312, 362 quieter life as Slade Professor 289, 293 reluctance to socialise 289, 457 reservation in discussing Jane’s illness 352, 353 separation in wartime and marital problems 225–6, 231, 234–5 servants and problems with 35, 37, 331 tensions in marriage and female friendships 280, 349 time spent with grown-up children 344, 345, 347, 348 homes see Capo di Monte; Old Palace Place; Portland Place; St Ermin’s Hotel; Saltwood Castle; Tufton Street; Upper Terrace House honours and awards 513 Honorary Degree from Oxford 428n Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath 193 life peerage 514 lectures on art 93, 117, 145–6, 321, 340 accessible style 278, 488 on Alberti 254, 255 in America 164, 164n, 193, 245, 260, 280–1, 286, 336n, 337–8, 342, 348, 375–6, 377, 382, 389, 404, 420, 421–2, 423, 426 ‘Art and Photography’ 329, 402, 403 in Australia 280, 281, 285, 299, 301, 304, 306 in Canada 462 Edinburgh University address 348, 350 ‘English Romantic Poets and Landscape Painting’ 255 French Romantic painting 307, 313 Hertz lecture on landscape art 167, 168 in India 280, 281, 382, 389 on Millet and Rodin at Phillips Gallery in Washington 420, 421–2, 423, 426 in Netherlands 346 The Nude series 278, 280–1, 287, 348, 351, 354, 373, 375–6, 377, 388, 402 on Rembrandt 245, 293, 295, 337–8, 346, 347–8, 349–50 Romanes lecture ‘Moments of Vision’ 399, 401, 404n, 405 Ruskin in Oxford inaugural Slade lecture 271, 272 and Slade Professorship 244–5, 258, 271, 289, 293, 295, 321, 325 ‘The Study of Art History’ 420, 427 in wartime 223 worldwide demand for 280–1 library of books on art 289 marriages see Clark, Jane (née Martin); Clark, Nolwen

Index

post-war board and committee posts 243–4, 256, 279, 280, 354, 359, 370–1, 513 as Arts Council chairman 225, 279, 382, 390, 450, 462 as chairman of ITA 379–82, 388, 389, 408–9, 412, 417, 429, 440, 445, 447, 487 reception and reviews of The Nude 434, 438 religious beliefs 514 reputation as art historian 484–5, 487, 488, 513–14 as reviewer of art history books 464, 465 shortcomings as researcher 22, 37, 47n, 87–8, 89 as society figure and social life in London 125, 280 as student at Trinity College, Oxford 2–3, 6, 11, 512, 517 Gothic Revival thesis plans 2, 11, 14 graduation and trip to Italy 1–2 television and broadcasting career 128, 513–14 as chairman of ITA 379–82, 388, 389, 412, 414n, 417, 429, 440, 445, 447, 487 comparative success as ITA chairman 447 early broadcasts for ATV 382, 453, 455, 457, 464, 513 New York visit 406 radio broadcasts in 1950s 464 radio broadcasts during WWII 223 Shakespeare speech at Stratford-upon-Avon 412–13, 414 taste and flair for broadcasting 457, 464, 513 views on mass entertainment 417 wartime broadcasts from National Gallery pl. 31 see also Civilisation: A Personal View by Kenneth Clark travels 131–2, 315 America and New York 135, 164, 184–5, 198, 210, 211–12, 245, 258, 280–1, 286, 336, 340–1, 375–6, 388, 389, 404, 405–6, 423–7, 463–4 Canada 456, 459, 460, 461–2, 463 England by car 136, 139 in Europe 119, 133, 134, 135, 136–7, 139, 172, 180, 183, 188, 189, 214, 249, 286 France and Italy after marriage and later 27–9, 92–3, 429 in Germany as language student 13–17 India 280, 281, 382, 428, 429–31, 432–3 Italy in 1920s with Bell 1 Italy in 1930s and I Tatti 200, 201 Italy in 1940s and I Tatti 261–2, 316–17, 324–5 Italy in 1950s and I Tatti 324, 326, 327, 328, 332, 344, 346, 348, 352, 353, 354, 360–1, 388, 389, 396, 412, 413, 438, 447–8, 469

566

Italy in 1950s and Villino 351, 352, 353, 354 lectures in America 164, 245, 280–1, 286, 336n, 337–8, 342, 375–6, 377, 389, 404, 420, 421–2, 423, 426 Paris visits and Conseil du Louvre 280, 285, 286, 302, 330, 331, 332, 336, 350, 397, 419, 437, 440–1 plans for and stays in Rome and Italy with BB 266–7, 363, 364, 365, 367, 369, 370, 397, 398, 436, 437, 447 Russia and Hermitage Museum 173, 174, 176–7, 178 trips without Jane 384 views on life and culture in US 211–12, 336, 340–1, 375–6, 405–6, 424–5, 426–7 in wartime committee work on Home Front 222–5, 231, 243–4 concern for BB and Mary and Nicky Mariano 230–7 protection of ‘enemy alien’ refugees 230–1 resumption of duties after war 243–4 see also under National Gallery, London: KC as Director writing plans and projects ambitions for art historical critical writing 217–18, 488 anthology of drawings 427 BB’s influence on approach 278 plans for book on Baroque 40–1, 44 plans for book on Classicism 40–1, 45, 47, 48, 49, 50, 65, 68, 74 plans for papers on Piero della Francesca and Alberti 254, 255 post-war focus on writing 277–9, 325 proposes accounts of BB’s life and work 354, 355, 385, 403, 452–3, 454, 457, 480 revisits The Gothic Revival 314 spare time as Arts Council chairman 390 writings/publications The Age of Humanism 254n Another Part of the Wood (autobiography) 481, 511, 512, 514, 516 ‘Apologia of an Art Historian’ 484–5 ‘Art and Democracy’ article 256 Burlington review of BB’s Aesthetics and History 302, 303, 307–8, 310–11, 313 A Catalogue of the Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci in the Collection of His Majesty the King 109, 110, 111, 117, 150, 165, 166, 168, 169, 199 Civilisation (book of TV series) 514 encyclopedia article on BB 53, 62, 63, 64, 66 The Gothic Revival 2, 21, 23, 24, 29, 30, 31, 37, 39, 42, 43, 244, 278, 314

Index

100 Details from Pictures in the National Gallery 128, 196 introduction to Ruskin’s Praeterita 292, 295, 296–7, 298, 299 John Constable:The Haywain with an Introduction by Sir Kenneth Clark 259 Landscape into Art 277, 278, 316, 319, 320, 325, 334, 337, 514 Last Lectures of Roger Fry, with an Introduction by Kenneth Clark 171, 233 lectures see lectures on art above Leonardo da Vinci: An Account of his Development as an Artist (Ryerson lectures at Yale) 168, 193, 196, 214, 215, 217, 233, 278 Listener article on Piero della Francesca 151, 152 Masterpieces of English Painting exhibition essays 245, 259 Moments of Vision lecture 404n, 481 More Details from Pictures in the National Gallery 217 The Nude 278, 280–1, 361, 363, 364, 373, 374, 376, 382, 399, 402, 404, 408, 420, 427, 428–9, 431, 432, 433–4, 436–7, 438, 514 ‘On the Development of Miss Sitwell’s Later Style’ article 262, 263 The Other Half: A Self-Portrait 514 Piero della Francesca 277, 323, 325, 329–30, 331, 340, 343 ‘Piero della Francesca’s St Augustine Altarpiece’ 266n Rembrandt and the Italian Renaissance 514 Ruskin at Oxford (Slade inaugural lecture) 271, 272 Ruskin Today 278, 446–7, 450, 456, 514 ‘The Sage of Art’ article for The Sunday Times 468, 472–7 Sunday Times articles on paintings 382, 445, 447, 453, 460 ‘Venetian Drawings in Windsor Castle’ article 89 The Work of Bernard Berenson essay 481 Clark, Kenneth MacKenzie (KC’s father) 512, pls 21, 24 death 101, 118n, 131 disapproval of KC’s career in art 53 conditions for assistantship with BB 6, 7, 9–10 opposition to KC’s move to Richmond 57, 68 ‘Welsh Dam Disaster’ and KC’s assistance 8 Clark, Margaret see Clark, Alice Clark, Nolwen (formerly Rice, née de Janzé, KC’s second wife) 514

567

Clark, William Andrews 427, 519 Clarke, Sir Ashley 404, 438, 445, 519–20 Clary-Aldringen, Prince Alphonse (Alfons) 322, 520 Classicism: KC’s plans for book on 40–1, 45, 47, 48, 49, 50, 65, 68, 74 Cleveland Museum of Art, USA 376 Clutton-Brock, Alan Francis 166n, 168, 520 Cockerell, Sydney 86, 89, 94, 520 Codex Siniaticus 150 Codice Atlantico 87 Colefax, Jane 154n Colefax, Sibyl 55, 125, 154n, 270, 288, 296, 313, 314, 520 illnesses and concern of friends 301, 302, 303, 304, 323, 324, 325, 330, 331 respite at I Tatti 311 Collingwood, William Gershom 272 Colnaghi’s and BB’s advisory role 482 Colston, Sir Charles 380 Colvin, Sidney 86n Combe, Thomas 99 Commissione Vinciana see Reale Commissione Vinciana Connolly, Cyril 31–2, 34, 198, 204, 521 Constable, John 177, 204, 259 Constable, W. G. (William George) 46, 51, 72, 82, 87, 114n, 123, 167n, 333, 403–4, 496, 521 Constables (publisher) 24, 31, 32, 33, 44 Constantinople BB in 24, 39, 175, 195 KC and Jane in 188 Consuma see Poggio al Spino, Consuma, Italy Contini-Bonacossi, Count Alessandro 242, 366, 424–5, 482, 521, 532 Conway of Allington, Lady 383, 521 Conway, Martin 187, 400n, 521 Cook, Sir Francis 263, 522 Cook, Sir Herbert 90–1, 167n, 522 KC’s purchases from sale of collection 458–9 Coolidge, John 394 Cooper, Douglas 255–6, 446, 522 Cornhill Magazine 404 Coronation of Elizabeth II 390, 393 Correggio, Antonio Allegri da: in KC’s collection 36, 38 Corriere della Sera (newspaper): BB’s articles for 386, 387, 437n Corsini drawings in Rome 42, 43–4 Cortona, Italy viii–ix Costelloe, Frank 4, 508, 510 Costelloe, Karin see Stephen, Karin Costelloe, Mary see Berenson, Mary Costelloe, Rachel see Strachey, Rachel (Ray) Coster, Charles Henry 496

Index

Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA) 224 Council of Industrial Design 223 Courtauld, Samuel 28, 146, 244, 303n, 522, 532 as National Gallery trustee 124, 130 Courtauld Galleries, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge 94n Courtauld Gallery, London 77n Courtauld Insitute of Art, London 104, 123, 146, 522, 532, 550 KC’s lectures on art 117 Covent Garden Opera Trust 243–4, 266 Cowdray House, West Sussex 395 Cox, Geoffrey 429n Cox, Trenchard 114n craquelure (crackleure) on NG paintings 149, 151, 164 Crawford, Earl of see Balniel, David Crawley, Aidan 381, 429n Credi, Lorenzo di 147 Portrait of Constanza Caetani attribution 163 cricket and ‘bodyline’ bowling controversy 118 Cripps, Dame Isobel 302 Cripps, Sir Stafford 302 Crivelli, Carlo 69–70, 175, 212 Croft-Murray, Edward 251, 522–3 Crowe, Sir Joseph Archer 41, 498, 502–3 Crown Prince of Sweden see Gustaf Adolf Cunard, Emerald, Lady (Maud Alice Burke) 118, 125, 225, 292 Cust, Sir Lionel Henry 82 Cutting, Lady Sybil 533, 538, 540

d’Abernon,Viscount 124 Dachau concentration camp 162 Dale, Chester 424 Daniel, Sir Augustus Moore 123 Dante 12 David, Jacques-Louis 313 Davies, Martin 192n, 222, 355n Davis, Robert Tyler 423 Day-Lewis, Cecil 288, 532 de Gasperi, Alcide 391 De La Warr, ‘Buck’, Lord 224, 379, 381 de Pass collection 449 dealers and art market and BB’s career 481–4, 500, 501 Dedalo (Italian art journal) 20, 136, 137, 538 Degas, Edgar: copies of Italian art 313, 357, 409 Delacroix, Eugène 307, 313 Dennistoun of Dennistoun, James and collection 139, 265–6 d’Entrèves, Alessandro Passerin see Entrèves Desmond, Shaw: ‘Children of the Sun’ 109n

568

Dickey, E. M. O’R. 46 Divonne, Philomène de la Forest see Forest Divonne, Philomène de la Dixon, John Pierson 235, 237, 523 Diyarbakir, Turkey 195 Dodgson, Campbell 67n, 167n Donatello marble reliefs 295, 299, 301 Douce, Francis and collection 410 Douglas, Lord Alfred 99 Douglas, Robert Langton 164, 523 Draper, Ruth 329 drawings: difficulty of attribution 20 Dresden, Germany KC’s stay for language study 5, 13–17 KC’s work in Kupferstich-Kabinett print room 15–16 du Bos see Bos, Charles du Duccio di Buoninsegna: attribution of Frick ‘flagellation’ 350 Duff, Lady Juliet 301 Dulles, John Foster 470 Dürer, Albrecht 74, 85, 88, 363, 396 St Jerome in the Wilderness panel 450–1 Duveen, Henry 523 Duveen, Joseph 24, 42, 349, 523–4, 528, 540, 542, 544 BB as adviser on Renaissance art 22, 58, 130, 133, 473–4, 483, 484, 509, 523, 524, 537, 547 Allendale Adoration and end of relationship 129, 135, 482, 524 death 135 effect of Wall Street Crash 58 and Mary Berenson 60, 61, 101, 129, 133, 524 as National Gallery trustee 124 donation of Hogarth picture 157 KC’s removal from board 130 and Sassetta panels 129–30, 149–50, 151, 154, 157–8, 484 peerage 102 Duveen, Joseph Joel 523 Dvořák, Max 308n

E-Leo (unidentified person) 28 Earle, Sir Lionel 82 Eastlake, Charles 233n Eckermann, Johann Peter 113 Eden, Anthony 124, 201, 206, 214, 381, 391 Eden, Beatrice 201, 206 Edgell, Harold 333 Edinburgh KC’s discovery of drawing in Royal Academy 390, 392 KC’s research for Florentine drawings 33, 40, 41

569

Index

Edinburgh Festival KC and Jane attend 287, 393, 417–18, 446 Monet exhibition (1957) 446 Edinburgh University KC declines offer of chair 81 KC’s lecture on election as President of the Associated Societies 348, 350 Edward, Prince of Wales (later Edward VIII) 124, 154 Eisenhower, Dwight (Ike) 433, 470 Elephanta Caves, India 430 Elizabeth II, queen of Great Britain 441 Coronation events 390, 393 Elizabeth, queen consort (Lady Elizabeth BowesLyon) 206, 222, 443, pl. 32 Ellesmere, Lord 99 Ellora, India 429 Elsie (Edith Wharton’s maid) 121n Enciclopedia italiana di scienze, lettere ed arti (Enciclopedia Treccani) 62n, 66 Entrèves, Alessandro Passerin d’ 203, 490, 493 Estève, Augustin 267n Evans, Sir Arthur 98 Exhibition of French Art 1200–1900,The (Royal Academy, 1932) 114 Exhibition of Italian Art,The (Royal Academy, 1930) BB’s interest in catalogue 70–1, 71–2, 108 KC co-writes catalogue 67, 71–2, 108 KC on selection committee 44–5, 53, 55–7, 67, 71, 478, 479, 487 opening 60 Oppenheimer drawings 107 opposition to 56, 67, 80 visitor numbers and success of 55 Eyck, Jan van 64, 270, 406

Fausto (BB’s dog) 76 Ferrand, Beatrix Jones 169 Fesch, Cardinal Joseph 152 Festival of Britain exhibition (1951) 339 Fiedler, Conrad 503 film production in WWII under KC 222–3 Finiguerra, Maso 86n Finley, David E. 260, 280–1, 294, 376, 424, 425, 524 Fiocco, Giuseppe 327 Fisher, Sir Warren 202 Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge 86n, 94 Laocoön works 268 Five Revolutionary Painters (ATV series) 382 Fleming, Peter: ‘Under the Bandstand’ 109n Florence BB awarded freedom of city 241, 285, 288n, 477, 506 BB on exhibitions in 268, 270, 311

BB and restoration and casting of Baptistery Doors 291, 334 BB’s Corriere della Sera article on 437 BB’s research on Florentine drawings in Uffizi 78 bombardment in Second World War 229, 239 KC and drawing of Santa Croce fresco of St John 390, 392 KC and Jane’s joy at post-war visit 262 KC’s memorial address for BB in 468, pl. 41 KC’s research on Florentine drawings in Uffizi 51–2 Palazzo Strozzi exhibition (1949) and KC’s visit 311, 317 post-war exhibition of French art (1945) 252, 253 Folkestone public library drawing 338, 339 Fonteyn, Margot 313 food: standard of English cooks 35 Foppa,Vincenzo: Adoration of the Kings 171, 172n Ford, Richard 69 Forest Divonne, Philomène de la 186, 264, 310, 524 forgeries of Old Masters 77n Forster, E. M. A Room with a View 3 Fox-Strangways, W.T.H. 98–9, 121n France BB visits with Nicky Mariano 286, 331, 332, 333 KC and Jane tour South of France 92–3 KC lectures on French art 307, 313, 315 search for drawings in 39 see also Hyères, France; Paris; Sospel, France Francis, Henry 467 Frankfurter, Alfred 245 Frankfurter, Felix 214, 340, 524 Fraser, Sir Robert 380 Freer Gallery of Art, Washington DC 341–2, 407 Frey, Karl 145, 162, 524–5 Frick, Henry Clay and collection 341, 350, 406, 525 Friedländer, Max Jacob 65, 251, 525 Frizzoni, Gustavo 503 Fry, Roger 77n, 106, 108n, 148, 503, 522, 525, 527 and Burlington Magazine 529 influenza and stay with Clarks in Oxford 114, 115 KC on 525 KC writes entry for DNB 271, 273 KC writes introduction to Last Lectures 171, 233 Fulbright, Senator James 426

Gardner, Isabella Stewart 100, 508 collection and BB’s advice 464, 482, 528

Index

Gardner, John L. (Jack) 482 Garrett, Mary 512 Gasperi, Alcide de see de Gasperi Gazette des beaux-arts (journal) 62 Geneva BB at and Prado exhibition in 213, 215 KC and Jane in 214 George V, king of Great Britain 125 George VI, king of Great Britain 206, 214, pl. 32 Géricault, Théodore 307, 313 Germany art historical scholarship BB’s approach at odds with 127–8, 151, 152, 162, 215, 308 on Michelangelo 20, 151, 152, 373 Dachau concentration camp 162 KC and Jane visit 64, 65, 68 KC’s stay for language study 5, 13–17 Ghiberti, Lorenzo I Commentarii 74 KC’s review of Krautheimer’s book on 446, 456 Ghirlandaio, Domenico 147, 502 Portrait of Constanza Caetani attribution 163, 164 Ghyka, Princess Giovanna 269n Giacometto see Jacometto Veneziano Gibson, William Pettigrew 197n Giglioli,Yule 205, 206 Gioffredi, Fiorella 467 Gioffredi, Geremia 467, 534 Giorgione and Allendale Adoration attribution 129, 482, 524 BB’s study of 394, 396 KC and National Gallery panels and attribution 126, 186–7, 189, 191, 484 and KC’s art lectures 321 KC’s discovery of work from collection of Charles I 32, 33 Moses and the Burning Bush (attrib.) 77, 78, 87, 327–8 The Tempest in Exhibition of Italian Art 55 Giovannetti, Matteo 92n Giovanni (Givanni) di Paolo 251, 265 Giraldi, Gugliemo 298 Giunti, Umberto 77n Gladstone, W. E. 406 Glasgow, Mary 279 Glasgow: KC’s research for Florentine drawings 41 Gleadowe, R. 46 Gobetti, Piero 490, 492 Goebbels, Joseph 162–3 Goering, Hermann 162–3, 383, 521, 525 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 472, 473, 495, 503 Gogh,Vincent van 465 Golden Urn,The (literary magazine) 384

570

Goldschmidt, Adolph 295, 525 Golf-Hotel see Sospel, France Goloubev,Victor 151, 152, 525 Goya, Francisco José de 267 Gozzoli, Benozzo 68n, 91n, 116, 263, 265 Grandi, Ercole 212 Grant, Duncan 225, 226 Gray, Basil 403, 526 Gray, Nicolette (née Binyon) 403, 526 Gray’s Inn, London: KC and Jane’s flat in 214, 216, 225 Grayson, Cecil 254n Greenlees, Ian 119, 526 Greg, Sir Robert 195n Gregory, E. C. (Peter) 289–90 Gross, Catharine 121n Gsell, Stéphane 92 Gualino, Riccardo and collection 27–8 Guest, Alice 193n Guest, Ivor Churchill, 1st Viscount Wimborne 193n Guest, Ivor Grosvenor 193n Guido Reni 451 Guinness, Benjamin 158n Gulbenkian, Calouste Sarkis and collection 130, 135, 246, 248, 526 assists Alan at Portuguese border 291, 293–4 Gulbenkian, Nubar 246 Gustaf Adolf, Crown Prince of Sweden (later Gustaf VI) 245, 251, 252, 319, 320, 389, 428n, 546 Gwinn, Mamie 512

Haig, Dawyck (George Alexander Eugene Douglas) (Hague) 305, 526 Haigh Hall, nr Wigan 90 Halévy, Daniel: Décadence de la Liberté 110 Halifax, Lord 201 Hall, Chambers 99 Halpern, Barbara (née Strachey) 35, 133, 288, 510 Halpern, Roger 133, 182n, 510 Hamilton, Jamie (Hamish) 367, 452, 453, 457, 526–7 Hammell (guest of Clarks in Oxford) 111–12 Hammond, Mason 203 Hampton Court Palace, Surrey 65, 73, 153, 154, 155, 158, 221 Hand, Billings Learned see Learned Hand Hanfstaengl, Franz 148 Hare, Augustus John Cuthbert 317, 318 Harris, Henry (Bogey) 86, 106, 124, 162, 225, 527 bequest of painting to Ashmolean 334 KC writes appreciation on death of 332 reconciliation of BB and Fry over lunch 525 sale of collection and KC’s purchases 335, 336

571

Index

Hartley, L. P. 404 Hartt, Frederick 36n, 245, 251, 527 Harvard University BB as student 99, 472, 497, 507–8 Harvard Center for Renaissance Studies xiv, 340 see also I Tatti, nr Fiesole, Italy: as gift to Harvard University and Oxford University 99, 100 Panofsky as Charles Eliot Norton Professor 128 Harvey, Oliver 397 Haslip, Joan 269, 270 Havemeyer family and collection 406, 407, 527 Haydon, Benjamin Robert 207 Hazlitt, William 321 Hearst, William Randolph 427, 527 Hemingway, Ernest 245 Hendy, Sir Philip 243, 244, 254n, 257, 335, 359, 528, 542–3 Henry VII’s tomb in Westminster Abbey 390 Hermitage Museum, Leningrad BB considers visit 174–5, 176, 178 Giorgione’s Madonna 411 KC and Jane visit 173, 174, 176–7 Titians in 175 Hertz, Henriette/Henriette Hertz Trust 44n, 167, 168 Hertziana library, Rome 44, 65 Hess, Myra 221–2 Hess, Trude 531 Heydenreich, Ludwig 256, 528 Hildebrand, Adolf von 503 Hill, (Arthur) Derek 299, 303, 305, 329, 343, 345, 361, 374, 399, 418, 526, 528, 535 Hill, Charles 380, 381 Hill, George 167n Hilliard, Nicholas 271, 272–3 Hind, A. M. 167n Hindus, Maurice 88–9 Hinks, Roger 46, 274, 528–9 Hirsch, Paul von 529 Hirsch, Robert von and collection 297, 529 History of Art Society: KC’s proposals for 45, 46 Hodson, Harry 468 Hofer, Philip 496 Hoffmann, Josef 545 Hogarth, William 157 Holder, William 222 Holford family and collection 31n, 34n, 38 Holford Sales in London 31, 34 Holland see Netherlands Holmes, Sir Charles John 123, 167n, 168, 245, 529, 538 Holroyd, Sir Charles 123, 515 Hope-Johnstone, Charles John 141, 142, 529

Horovitz, Bela 277, 349n, 351, 407n Houghton, Edmund 47n Howard, Francis 338 Hudson, Rob 210 Huxley, Aldous 83, 151, 529–30 Huyghe, René 186, 312, 333, 397, 530 Hyde, Charlotte Pruyn 26 Hyères, France 69n, 83 see also Wharton, Edith

I Tatti, nr Fiesole, Italy (BB’s villa) xiv, 474, pls 9–12, 15, 19–20 archive of BB’s papers xiv–xv BB’s death and burial at 467–8 and BB’s passion for ‘conoscing’ 386 Berensons take lease on marriage 63, 508, 509 as gift to Harvard University 102, 133, 211, 488 BB’s concerns and vision in ‘On the Future of I Tatti’ 58, 128, 130, 387, 394, 424, 494–6 BB’s recommendations for trustees/advisory committee 204–5, 207, 387, 496 KC’s involvement 204–5, 387, 496 KC’s suggestion for sponsoring students 415 as lasting resource for students 495 prevarication from Harvard over terms 130, 242–3, 284 proposal of Johnnie Walker as director 59, 424, 496 transformation into Harvard Center for Renaissance Studies 340 wartime fears for scheme 227 KC’s visits and stays at arrangements for arrival as assistant 6–17 as assistant to BB 19–53 first visit 1, 481 KC and Jane visit in 1930s 200–1 last visit 469 on post-war change in atmosphere 240 post-war plans and visits with Jane 249, 261–2, 269, 270, 273, 291, 292, 294–5, 296, 314, 344, 348, 396, 412, 413, 436, 437, 438, 447–8, 459 reflections on time spent at 422 regular visits in post-war years 280, 285, 286, 315–16, 324, 326, 327, 328, 332, 344, 348, 352, 353, 354, 360–1, 388, 389, 399, 400, 401, 413, 438, 447–8 Library 19, 295, 473, 474, 475, pl. 11 Mary employs Nicky Mariano as librarian 511 post-war extension 283, 285, 352 in wartime 228, 251 Morra’s connection and visits ix, 489, 492 as Renaissance court 19, 476

572

Index

supporting staff for BB’s activities 386, 434 visitors and open house atmosphere 91–2, 260, 302–3, 305, 328–9, 385 KC arranges visits for friends and acquaintances 108–9, 110, 119, 289–90, 312, 406 lack of room for KC and Jane to visit 194–5 post-war fame of BB and increase in 283–4, 476 post-war visitors and news 240–1, 248 strain on BB’s health 91–2, 267, 360–1 wartime difficulties for Berensons at 226–37, 475 BB and Nicky Mariano in hiding at Villa La Fontanelle 228, 229, 239–40 occupation by Germans 228, 229, 239 removal and dispersal of art and books for safekeeping 228–9, 239, 250–1 return and post-war recommencement of life at 239–41, 248, 250–3 icons: KC on Russian trip 176, 177 Incorporated Society of London Fashion Designers: Jane as president 280, 287 Independent Television Authority see ITA India KC lectures in 280, 281, 382, 389 KC’s 1956 visit and views on 428, 429–31, 432–3 Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique 313 Madame Moitessier 181, 182 International Congress on the History of Art (1939) 216–17 Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and Collection, Boston 464, 482, 528 Isarlov, George (Iserlow) 362 Isherwood, Christopher 204 Islamic art: BB’s interest in 78–9 Istanbul see Constantinople ITA (Independent Television Authority) introduction of commercial television 379, 406n KC as chairman 379–82, 388, 389, 408–9, 412, 414n, 417, 429, 440, 445, 447, 487 Italian art exhibition see Exhibition of Italian Art, The Italian artworks and post-war retrieval 251 Italian politics 58–9, 490–1 BB’s position in wartime 131, 146, 219, 226–37, 239–40, 475, 505–6 Morra’s father’s political and diplomatic roles 491 Morra’s role in and visit to America 371 see also anti-fascist movement in Italy Ivins, William M. (Billy) 245, 489

Jacometto Veneziano: Portrait of a Woman 292n, 293, 294, 297, 298n James, Henry 117, 533, 549 James, William 472, 473, 498, 507 Jamot, Paul 185, 530 Janzé, Comte de 514 Jarvis, Alan 455–6 Jebb, Gladwyn 441 Jirmounsky, Myron 310 Joad, C. E. M. 376n Joannides, Paul 162n John, Augustus 207 Johnson, John G. and collection 341 BB and published catalogue 281 Johnson, Lionel 99 Johnstone, Hope 29–30 Justi, Carl 354

Kahn, Addie (Mrs Otto Kahn) (née Wolff) 203, 260, 341, 530 Kaiser Friedrich Museum, Berlin (KFM, later Bode Museum) 174, 517, 525 Kano Masonobu 313–14 Kay, Harold Isherwood 192n, 197n Keene, Charles 370 Kelmscott Press 299 Kerr, Philip, Marquess of Lothian 76, 530 Kessell, Mary 343–4, 349, 357, 530 Ketteler, Baroness Mathilda von 269n Keynes, John Maynard 224–5, 243, 244, 279 Kiel, Hannah 433 Kinglake, A. W.: Eothen 319n Kinnaird, Lord 265 Knox, Father Ronald 340 Koenigs Collection 68, 70 Komisayevsky, Fyodor Fyodorovich 28 Krautheimer, Richard 446, 456, 531 Kress, Rush 366, 367 Kress, Samuel/Kress Foundation 54, 324n, 341, 350, 531, 540 donation of pictures to National Gallery of Art, Washington 424–5 donation to National Gallery in London 548 Kress’s purchases from Contini-Bonacossi 242, 366n, 521 support for new editions of BB’s books 283, 407n Kriegbaum, Friedrich 229 Kristeller, Paul 68 Kupferstich-Kabinett, Dresden: KC’s work in print room 15–16

Index

Lange, Julius 351 Laocoön works in Fitzwilliam Museum 268 Laparelli di Lapo, Colonel Pirro 491 Lapsley, Gaillard 79–80, 531 Lascelles family 395 Laurie, A. P. 151 Lauro, Giacomo: Antiquae Urbis Splendor Romae 68 Lautrec, Henri de Toulouse- 347 Lawrence, D. H.: The Virgin and the Gypsy 83 Lawrence, Sir Thomas 99 Leader, John Temple xiv Learned Hand, Billings 245, 349, 355, 524, 531 Leavis, F. R. 434 Lee, Arthur Hamilton,Viscount Lee of Fareham 123, 524, 531–2 art collection and attributions 482–3 and Giorgione’s Moses and the Burning Bush 77, 78, 87, 327–8 Old Quarries and art collection 303n, pl. 33 Lee, Ruth,Viscountess Lee of Fareham (née Moore) 303n, 328, 531–2 Lee,Vernon see Paget,Violet Leger Gallery 265, 409, 412 Lehman, Robert and collection 342, 496 Lehmann, Rosamund 245, 288, 357, 360, 391, 532, 536 Lehrs, Max 15–16 Leicester Galleries, London 45 Leigh,Vivien 301, 302, 306, 369, 444, 538 acting career 304, 359, 412 illness 357, 359, 376–7, 391, 394 at Richard III film premiere 420 Leningrad, Russia 176 see also Hermitage Museum Leonardo da Vinci 36, 547 accuracy of BB’s Drawings of the Florentine Painters 498 BB’s article on 147 BB’s revision of Florentine drawings 178 book collection of 75–6 drawing in Holford sale 34 drawings in Ashmolean Museum 99 Henry (Bogey) Harris’s bequest to Ashmolean 334 inaccurate attributions in nineteenth century 498 KC sends photographs of Virgin of the Rocks to BB 179, 181 KC’s commission to catalogue Windsor Castle drawings 57–8, 60, 73–4, 76, 81–2, 85, 87, 90, 104 and information for BB’s list 106–7, 117, 119 publication of catalogue 109, 110, 111, 117, 150, 165, 166, 168, 169, 199

573

KC’s lectures and book on 164n, 168, 193, 196, 214, 215, 217, 233 Milan exhibition (1939) 213, 216 Pollen’s Virgin and Child with Cat drawing 50 Wilton House Leda and the Swan after 216, 218 Windsor drawing and Woolbeding Manor fountain 395, 396–7 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim: Laocoön 329 Lévesque, Georges-Henri 461 Lewis, Sinclair 322, 376, 532 libraries as source of drawings 39, 42 Libya: BB and Nicky Mariano in 386, 388, 414 Licinio (?Bernardino Licinio) 73 Liechtenstein Collection 298, 405, 451 Life and Letters (magazine) 108, 109, 151 Lindsay, Norah 304 Lindsay, Tom 393 Linklater, Eric 385 Lippmann, Frances 375, 442, 531 Lippmann, Walter 61, 214, 245, 301, 319, 340, 375, 442, 496, 531, 532 Lisbon KC and Piero della Francesca altarpiece 266, 268, 271 KC’s visits 246, 248, 309–10 Listener,The (magazine): KC’s articles for 153, 204, 205, 206, 207 Liverpool: Walker Art Gallery 105 Llewellyn, Sir William 124 Lloyd, Christopher 121n Lockinge House, Berkshire 38 Lockov (unidentified person) 181 Lofroth, Naima 252 London homes of KC see Albany; Capo di Monte; Old Palace Place; Portland Place; St Ermin’s Hotel; Tufton Street; Upper Terrace House London University KC’s lectures on art 93 see also Courtauld Institute of Art Long, Huey Pierce, Jr 463 Longhi, Roberto 335, 345n, 357, 521, 532 Lorenzetti, Pietro 264, 266, 502 Loria, Arturo 283, 440, 533 Lothair Crystal 364, 365 Lothian, Marquess of see Kerr, Philip Lotto, Lorenzo 315, 393 BB’s book on 365, 366, 377, 409, 434–5, 508, 536 exhibition in Venice (1953) 393, 436 Louvre, Paris BB and KC’s research in 23 BB visits in 1930s 185 BB visits with KC in 1950 332 Correggio’s virtue and vice allegories 38 KC on Conseil du Louvre 280, 302, 330, 331, 437, 440–1

Index

and Sassetta Madonna and Child and other purchases 439 KC and Jane’s post-war visits to Paris 263, 302, 397, 419 KC supervises exhibition of British pictures in 194 new galleries and Beistegui collection 397 Lubbock, Percy 322, 533, 538, 544

Macbeth (unidentified person) 36–7 MacCarthy, Desmond 32, 108n, 109, 155, 511, 533 McCarthy, Mary 460 MacColl, D. S. 167n MacDonald, Ramsay 55, 124 Machiavelli, Zanobi: BB’s article on 335 Mackay, Clarence 130, 149n, 150, 154, 160, 484 Maclagan, Eric 64, 155, 167n, 188, 196, 216–17, 533 McLaughlin, Martin 316n Macmillan, Harold 381 Madrid, Spain: KC and Jane in 136–7, 139, 460 Mahon, Denis 451, 533, 541 Malaguzzi Valeri, Francesco 81, 85, 107 Malcolm of Poltalloch, John 410 Mallet, Lady 374, 392 Mallet,Victor 374, 534 Malraux, André 437 Malta: Caravaggio and BB in 414 Manchester: City of Manchester Art Gallery 451 Mancini, Domenico 321, 357 Manning, Robert 546 Manod Caves, Blaenau Ffestiniog 221, 222, pl. 29 Mantegna, Andrea 68, 152, 451 Marcantonio Raimondi: Il Morbetto engraving after Raphael 76, 90 Marchi, Marcello 269n Marchig, Giannino 229, 250n, 534 Marées, Hans von 503 Margheri, Clotilde 318, 320, 534 Mariano, Nicky (Elizabeth) 25, 26, 49, 51, 53, 64, 70, 110, 138, 269n, 315, 353, 509, 510–11, pls 18, 20 and death of BB 467 and KC’s memorial address at Palazzo Vecchio 468 in England 48, 60, 65 friendship with KC and Jane concern for Jane’s health 310 first impressions of KC 4 as godmother to Colin and Colette 326 KC’s first impressions of 10 and visit to I Tatti in 1940s 262n health 11, 203, 302, 303, 371, 374, 386, 419, 421 on Morra’s friendship 490–1

574

personal and professional relationship with BB 4, 23, 63, 91, 107, 131, 172, 200n BB’s reliance on in later life 386, 387, 434, 467, 469, 476 concern over KC’s capabilities as BB’s assistant 47n and death of Mary 240 and Harvard institute at I Tatti 204, 496 selection of diary entries for Sunset and Twilight 480 praise for KC’s The Nude 433 travels with BB 102, 135, 165, 213, 295, pls 4, 6 Asia Minor (Turkey) 195 France 24, 286, 331, 332, 333 in Italy 5, 284 Libya 386, 388, 414 North Africa 58, 61, 101 Rome visits 101, 134, 207, 226, 235–6, 240, 249, 265, 273–4, 286, 287, 388, 392, 397 Syria and Palestine 60 Venice 175, 248, 290, 312, 388, 403–4, 419 Vienna 133, 137 wartime difficulties and travel restrictions 226, 227, 228, 230–1, 250 Markevitch, Igor 239, 355n Martin, Emily 514 Martin, Robert 514 Martini, Simone 359 Masaccio Sagra drawing 338, 339 and Santa Maria Maggiore panels 335, 348, 350, 351, 357 Maso di Bianco 251 Masolino and Santa Maria Maggiore panels 335, 348, 350, 357 Massey, (Charles) Vincent 455–6 Massigli, René 301, 441, 444, 455 Massine, Leonid 194 Master of Città di Castello 170, 171 Masterpieces of English Painting exhibition in US (1946–7) 245, 249, 259–60n, pl. 34 Matisse, Henri 333, 422, 439 Matteo di Giovanni 77, 78, 82 Maugham, William Somerset 534 Cakes and Ale 83 KC and Jane’s friendship and visits 246, 323, 324, 370, 372, 388, 419, 420 Max Planck Society 44n Mecca and Covent Garden lease 243 Medici Society 77 Meiss, Millard 350, 535 Melanesian art and culture 307 Melani, Emma 387, 467 Mellon, Andrew 548 Mellon, Paul 548

Index

Methuen, Paul Methuen, 4th Baron 124 Metman, Louis and Madame 194, 195 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 424 BB and role of director 97 KC’s visits 342, 406, 426–7 Verrocchio’s Measured Drawing of a Horse 38 Meyer, Eduard 92 Meyrick, Sir Samuel Rush 410 Michelangelo BB’s article and complexity of attribution 173 Crucifixion of St Peter 161 drawings in Ashmolean Museum 99 drawings at Windsor Castle 74, 81–2, 85, 88 The Entombment in National Gallery 210 German scholarship on 373 and BB’s Drawings of Florentine Painters 20, 151, 152 Oppenheimer drawing (later in KC’s collection) 36n, 162, 163 Palestrina Pietà 209–10 Milan Caravaggio exhibition (1951) 345–6 KC and Colette visit 400–1 Leonardo da Vinci exhibition (1939) 213, 216 Mildenhall treasure 362 Millet, Jean-François BB’s opinion of 422, 423 KC’s lecture on 420, 421, 422, 426 Milliken, William 376 Ministry of Information: KC’s wartime films 222–3 Mitford, Mary Russell 207n Modern British Pictures from the Tate Gallery (touring exhibition in Europe, 1946–7) 261n Modigliani, Ettore 55, 108n Molyneux, Edward 305, 535 Monckton, Walter 438, 535 Monet, Claude 446 Monroe, Marilyn 441n Montesquieu, Robert de 472 Montreal, Canada: KC and Jane’s visit 461–2 Moore, Henry 126, 224, 225, 246, 304, 504 as close friend of KC and Jane 289–90, 296 Paris exhibition (1949) 321–2 visit to I Tatti and BB’s views on 289–90 Moorhead, Alan 241, 264, 465n, 535 Moorish architecture in Britain 69 Moravia, Alberto 59, 61, 76, 82, 171, 172, 173, 490, 535 Morelli, Giovanni 62, 63, 472, 497, 498, 499, 508, 536 Morgan, J. P. (John Pierpont) 536 Morgan, John Pierpont (Jack) (Birbo Morgo) 97, 251, 406, 424, 536

575

Morra, Maria Teresa (née Bettini) (Lucia) 491 Morra, Count Umberto viii–ix, xi, 26, 138n, 147, 292, 489–93, 511, 535, pl. 7 and anti-fascist movement in Italy viii, 59, 490–1, 491, 492, 511 appearance and Anglo-Saxon character 492–3 family and background 491 friendship with Berensons 88, 110, 131, 170, 171, 203, 258, 260, 305, 324, 371, 431, 467, 489–93 first meeting with BB 489–90 lasting friendship and stays with BB 492–3 travels in Italy 134 travels in Spain 59, 60, 492 friendship and correspondence with KC 53, 59, 104, 259, 312, 330, 455 KC on first meeting 492, 511 political role and visit to America 371 Morra di Lavriano, Count Roberto 491 Morshead, Owen 57, 73, 76, 536 Mortimer, Raymond 302, 329, 408, 536 Moscow Art Theatre 457 Moscow, Russia: KC visits 176 Mostyn-Owen, William (Willy) 283, 408, 432, 434, 436, 437, 451, 471, 496, 536–7 Bibliografia di Bernard Berenson 417 Mountbatten, Louis, 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma (Dickie) 462 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus: Cosi fan Tutte in Turin 28 Munich, Germany: KC visits 17 Muntz, Eugene 498, 503 Murray, George Gilbert Aimé 359, 537 Murray, John (Jock) 444, 447 Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris 330 Mussolini, Benito 55, 56, 58, 131, 227, 228, 490

Naples: BB visits 14, 213, 317, 318 Nash, Paul 224 National Art Collections Fund (NACF) 120, 121n, 157n, 158n, 222 Giorgione/Previtali acquisition for National Gallery 126 Givanni di Paolo acquisition for National Gallery 251 KC’s wartime committee work on 223 National Gallery (NG), London acrimonious relations at 123, 125–6 Baker as Keeper of 123, 515 BB on Davies’s catalogue of early Italian paintings 355, 357 composition of trustees 124, 243 KC as Director 100, 123–219, 487, 488, pls 29–32

Index

acceptance of post and state of affairs on arrival 123–5, 136–7, 138, 140–1, 142, 143–4 acquisitions 126, 129–30, 149–50, 177, 179, 181, 186–7, 189, 191, 198, 253 attribution problems 126, 163–4, 186–7, 189, 191 Classical Antiquity in Renaissance Painting (1938) 196 Duveen’s conflict of interest and removal as trustee 129–30 improvements to French collections 146 publication of photographic details of collection 128, 196, 217 re-opening after war and KC’s retirement 243, 248, 253, 255, 256–7 rehanging of collections 128, 150 relationship and social affinity with trustees 124, 125, 144, 177 strained relations with staff 125–6, 192n, 197, 222 trustees and purchase of Giorgione panels 126, 189, 484 wartime acquisitions 253 and wartime committee work on Home Front 222–4, 231, 243–4 wartime and evacuation of pictures 195–6, 221, 222, 231, 233, 303n, 538, pl. 29 wartime exhibition of contemporary art 222, 233–4, pl. 30 wartime lunchtime concerts and display of single paintings 221–2, 233, 234, 253 KC sends photographs of works to BB 128, 148, 149, 151, 152, 156, 159, 160–1, 163, 170, 171, 179, 180, 181, 184, 204, 208, 212–13, 263 KC visits in youth 9 KC’s involvement with later purchases 358, 359, 439, 451 and Santa Maria Maggiore triptych panels 335, 348, 350, 351, 357 Kress donation 548 loss of Rubens’s Portrait of Thomas Howard 464 and Mahon 533 Ruhemann’s restoration methods and results 542–3 National Gallery of Art, Washington DC 343, 422 donations of pictures and collections 424–5 Walker’s career at 341, 375, 420, 423, 424, 425, 548 National Gallery of Canada 455–6 National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh: Poussin’s Seven Sacraments 417–18 National Museum of Antiquities, Edinburgh 398–9 Neri, Dario 325n

576

Netherlands KC and Jane visit 388, 393 KC lectures in 346 Neumayer, Mr 13 New Gallery, London:Venetian Art exhibition (1895) and BB’s review 473, 500, 522 New York KC and Jane visit 135, 210, 211–12, 405–6, 426–7 World’s Fair (1939–40) 198–9n Niccolò da Bologna 265, 267 Nicholson, Molly 305 Nicholson, Simon 305 Nicolson, Benedict 257, 537 as assistant to BB at I Tatti 135, 187, 191n as Deputy Surveyor of the King’s Pictures 210, 216 as editor of Burlington Magazine 289, 290, 307, 537 marriage to Luisa Vertova and family life 283, 420, 437, 449 Nicolson, Sir Harold 79, 82 Nicolson, Luisa Vertova 390, 434, 537 as assistant to BB at I Tatti 283, 302, 386, 536 marriage to Ben Nicolson and family life 283, 420, 437, 449 Noailles, Charles de 186, 333, 336, 537 Noailles, Marie Laure de 186, 194, 336, 537 Norton, Charles Eliot 507, 508 Norton, Robert 80n, 186, 516, 524, 537 Norton, Mrs W. 79–80 Nuremberg Virgin (torture implement) 140 Nuzi, Alegretto 402 Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen 351n

Offner, Richard 342, 537 Ogilvie, Sir Frederick and Lady Mary 206 Oglander, Florence Aspinall 194 Ojetti, Ugo 70, 71n, 538 Old Master Drawings (journal) 89n, 91, 539 Old Palace Place, Richmond, Surrey 57, 61, 65, 71, 72, 73, 74, 80–1, 382, pl. 25 Edith Wharton visits 101, 102 Mary Berenson visits 101, 109–10 on move to Oxford 110 Old Quarries, Avening, Gloucestershire 303n, pl. 33 Olivier, Laurence (Larry) 301, 302, 306, 377, 394, 538 acting career 304, 359n, 412 Colin Clark works for film production company 441, 443, 444 Richard III film premiere 419–20 opera

Index

KC on board of Covent Garden Opera Trust 243–4, 266 KC and Jane’s support for Royal Opera House 244, 279, 296 KC sees Cosi fan Tutte in Turin 28 Wagner and KC’s German studies 15 Oppenheimer, Henry J. 107, 115n, 162, 538 Origo, Count Antonio 533, 538, 540 Origo, Iris (née Cutting) xiii, 264, 269n, 480, 538, 540 Ormsby-Gore, William George Arthur (later Lord Harlech) 124 Ortolano, L’: Three Saints 204 Ottawa, Canada: KC and Jane visit 462 Our Lady of Vladimir Russian icon 176 Oxford KC and Jane’s home in Headington 111 Edith Wharton visits 102 Oxford University awards Honorary Degree to KC 428n BB spends term at 99–100 Clark children at 280 debate on fighting for King and Country 118 KC as Slade Professor of Fine Art 244–5, 249, 258, 271, 289, 293, 295, 325, 513 post-war focus on writing 277–8, 325 resignation from post 321, 323 KC’s Romanes lecture 399, 401, 404n, 405 see also Ashmolean Museum; Clark, Kenneth: as student at Trinity College, Oxford

Paget,Violet (pseud. Vernon Lee) 354, 454, 539 Palmer, Samuel 273, 274 Pancrazi, Pietro 490, 492 Panofsky, Erwin 85, 485, 528, 535, 539, 550 BB’s antipathy towards 127–8, 162 Papi, Robert 460 Paris BB and KC in 286, 328, 330, 331, 332, 333 BB visits in 1930s 185 exhibition of Byzantine art 93–4 KC and Jane visit Edith Wharton 102 KC and Jane’s post-war visits 263, 286, 287, 295, 302, 321, 328, 350, 388, 389, 397, 398, 419 KC on social life in 194, 419 KC’s visits and Conseil du Louvre 285, 286, 302, 330, 331, 332, 336, 437, 439, 440–1 see also Louvre, Paris Paris Peace Conference (1919) 58–9, 509 Parker, Karl Theodore (Charles) 17, 41, 89, 142, 163, 321, 539 Parma, Italy 28

577

Parnell,Val 382 Parry, Mr (BB’s chauffeur) 9, 22, 227, 240, 387, pl. 3 Pasmore,Victor 126 Pater, Walter 99, 321, 472, 486, 495, 498, 502, 529, 539 Sebastian van Storck story 32n Pattison, Mark 104 Paul, Prince of Yugoslavia 120–1, 140, 156–7, 158, 214, 217, 226, 231n, 232n, 336, 551 Paulsen, Friedrich 311 Peake, Sir Charles 362n, 539–40 Pearsall Smith, Alys Whitall see Russell, Alys Pearsall Smith, Hannah (née Whitall Smith, BB’s mother-in-law) 476, 509, 510 Pearsall Smith, Logan (BB’s brother-in-law) 32, 113, 114, 155, 252, 315, 476, 509, 510, 511, pl. 2 as friend of KC and Jane in London 10, 29, 154, 161 literary career and writing critiques of BB’s writing 282, 505 as editor of The Golden Urn magazine 384 friends and followers 521, 546, 547 The Golden Grove 109n letters on English prose 12 reads KC’s The Gothic Revival 37 Reperusals & Re-collections 197–8 Pearsall Smith, Mary see Berenson, Mary Pearsall Smith, Robert (BB’s father-in-law) 509–10 Percival, Elizabeth 227 Perkins, John Bryan Ward see Ward-Perkins Perry, Rachel (née Berenson, BB’s sister) 509 Perugia: Fontana Maggiore 334 Phaidon Press 277, 283, 349, 407n, 427, 434–5 Philadelphia Museum of Art Johnson Collection 341 KC lectures at 286, 336n, 338, 342 Philip of Macedon (Philip drunk/Philip sober) 307, 308n Phillips, Duncan 375, 420, 425, 540 Phillips, Marjorie 375, 425, 540 Phillips Gallery, Washington DC 341–2, 420, 421, 422, 540 photographs and BB’s research as basis of scholarship and research 501 KC brushes up photography skills for assistantship at I Tatti 10, 13 KC sends photographs to BB 297, 336, 362, 364, 390, 398–9, 449 BB reprimands for uninformative photographs 87–8, 89 from his own collection 265–6, 271, 272, 293, 294, 321, 402, 403

578

Index

from National Gallery collection 128, 148, 149, 151, 152, 156, 159, 160–1, 163, 170, 171, 179, 180, 181, 184, 204, 208, 212–13, 263 from Royal Collection 154, 158 lack of photographs of French works 315 photographs ordered from British Museum 36–7 photography and KC’s work KC’s lecture on ‘Art and Photography’ 329, 402, 403 publication of details of National Gallery works 128, 196, 217 Piacenza, Italy 28 Picasso 296 BB’s view of 270, 282, 392 KC’s Listener article on 202, 206, 207 Piccini, Giulia and Emilio pl. 37 Pichetto, Stephen 341, 375, 540 Piero della Francesca BB’s evaluation of 502 BB’s Piero della Francesca or the Ineloquent in Art 281–2, 328, 329, 330–1 in Gualino Collection 27–8 KC and St Augustine altarpiece in Lisbon 266, 268, 271 KC views Rimini fresco in Bologna 324–5 KC’s article on Nativity 153, 154 KC’s plans for paper on 254, 255 KC’s post-war book on 277, 323, 325, 329–30 National Gallery photographic details 163 Saint Michael 9 Piero di Cosimo: KC and The Forest Fire for Ashmolean 120–1, 137 Pinsent, Cecil Ross 13, 251, 269n, 270, 283, 285, 288, 540 Piper, John 126, 226, 334 Pisani, Nicola and Giovanni: Perugia Fontana Maggiore 334 ‘Pisgah sights’ 115–16n Pitt-Rivers, Colonel A.H.L.F. 98 Placci, Carlo 161, 490, 505, 540 BB’s article on 258 Planiscig, Leo 64, 184, 540–1 Poggio al Spino, Consuma, Italy: BB’s house at 22, 24, 63, 155, 170, 211n politics in Italy see Italian politics Pollaiuolo, Antonio del (Pollayuolo) 74, 89, 148, 156, 158, 159, 396 KC’s discovery of Edinburgh drawing in style of 390, 392 KC’s gift of medal to BB 259 National Gallery Martyrdom of St Sebastian 146, 149, 152 Pollen, Arthur Hungerford: Leonardo drawing 50–1

Pollen, John Hungerford 50n Pomfret, Countess of 98 Pooley, Ernest 279 Pope, Arthur Upham 175, 541 Pope-Hennessy, James 343, 541 Pope-Hennessy, John 254, 343, 452, 465, 483, 533, 541 Popham, A. E. 36n, 67n, 162n, 268n Popham, Margaret 380 Popp, A. E. 107, 145, 163 Port Lympne see Bellevue, Port Lympne, Kent Portland, William Cavendish-Bentinck, 6th Duke of 435 Portland Place, London: KC and Jane’s home in 125, 154, 214, 216, 225 Portugal Alan’s student holiday in 291 KC and family visit 246, 248, 249, 265, 285 see also Lisbon Pouncey, Philip 36n Poussin, Nicolas: Seven Sacraments 417–18 Powell, Dilys 380 Poynter, Sir Edward 464, 516 Preston, Stuart 404, 541 Previtali, Andrea 126 Price, Mrs (KC’s landlady in Italy) 27 Pudelko (unidentified contributor to Burlington Magazine) 183 Purcell, Henry: Fairy Queen 90

Quebec, Canada: KC and Jane visit 461, 463

race relations in US 426 Randalls (Rosentahls) and collection 462 Raphael 38, 45, 74, 76, 89–90, 99, 173 KC sends photographs of Ansidei altarpiece to BB 179 KC sends photographs of Mond Crucifixion altarpiece to BB 213 Rasponi, Angelica 368 Rasponi, Anna 368n, 437, 443 Rathbone, Perry 464n Ravaisson-Mollien, Jean Gaspard Félix 213 Ravenna, Italy 429 Read, Herbert 45, 46, 308, 541–2 BB’s writing in English Prose Style 114, 115 Reale Commissione Vinciana and Leonardo drawings 107 Reinhardt, Oskar and collection 297 Reith, Sir John 223 Rembrandt 454 KC’s discovery in Kupferstich-Kabinett in Dresden 16

Index

KC’s lectures on 245, 293, 295, 337–8, 346, 347–8, 349–50 KC’s purchase of Saskia van Ulenborch at NG 198 KC’s Sunday Times article on 447 National Gallery wartime acquisition and display of Portrait of Margaretha de Geer 222, 253n Renan, Joseph Ernest 213 Reni, Guido 451 Renoir, Pierre-Auguste: in KC’s collection 139–40, pl. 28 restorers and restoration practices 534, 540 BB’s low opinion of restorers 484, 500 Duveen’s restoration of Chalandon panels 130, 149 KC on value of work of 500 National Gallery works during wartime evacuation 222 Ruhemann’s methods and results 542–3 Rhinelander, William 97 Ribbentrop, Joachim von 195 Rice, Nolwen see Clark, Nolwen Richard III (film) 419–20 Richardson, Jonathan 486 Richmond, Surrey see Old Palace Place Richter, Jean-Paul 508 Ricketts, Charles 114, 529, 542 Ridley, Sir Jasper 124 Riegl, Alois 93, 542 Rienaecker,Victor 109 Rilke, Rainer Maria 423 Roberti, Ercole 298, 392 Roberts, Laurence 404, 542 Robertson, Ian 109n, 121n Rockefeller, John D. and collection 342 Rodin, Auguste: KC’s lecture on 421–2, 423, 426 Rogers, Bruce 51 Romanes, George John 399n Rome BB and KC’s plans for and visits together 266–7, 363, 364, 365, 367, 369, 370, 397, 398 BB and Nicky Mariano in 101, 134, 207, 226, 240, 249, 265, 286, 287, 388 artistic and social life in Rome 235–6, 273–4 Hotel de la Ville apartment 207, 267 and Picasso exhibition (1953) 392 plans for and visits with KC and Jane 266–7, 397 BB’s book on Arch of Constantine 282, 373, 474 KC and Jane in 60, 266–7, 275, 286, 388, 397 KC’s research for Florentine drawings 42–4 BB’s instructions on 42–3 in nineteenth-century photographs 317

579

Ronald, Sir Nigel 291 Rondinelli, Niccolò 105 Rosenberg, Alfred 212 Ross, Janet (Aunt Janet) 8, 269n, 542, 548, 549 disapproval of KC’s marriage to Jane 21, 26, 27 ill health 12 KC stays with in Italy 14 and first meeting with BB 1, 5, 7 Rosselli, Cosimo 41 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel 421 Rothschild, Mrs Lionel de 208 Rothschild, Max 33 Rothschild family cameo in collection in Paris 93 van Eyck in Frick Collection 406 Rouveyre, Edouard 85, 106, 117 Rouvier, Jean 318 Royal Academy, London International Exhibition of Chinese Art (1935–6) 170, 175 International Exhibition of Persian Art (1931) 85 Landscape in French Art (1949–50) 325 Works by Holbein and Other Masters (1951) 338 see also Exhibition of Italian Art Royal Collection 125 acquisition of Leonardo drawings 57 KC as Surveyor of the King’s Pictures 125, 154, 210, 216, 243 BB’s congratulations and enquiries for research 153 wartime evacuation of paintings 221 see also Windsor Castle and Royal Collection Royal Fine Art Commission 243, 266 Royal Mint Advisory Committee 223 Royal Opera House, London 244, 279, 296, 357 Rubens, Peter Paul 177, 182 Portrait of Thomas Howard 464 Ruffino family 138n, 490 Ruhemann, Helmut 163–4, 542–3 Runyan, Damon 204 Rusk, Ralph 544 Ruskin, John 35, 86n, 99, 502 as connoisseur 486, 495 KC’s gift to BB of Kelmscott The Nature of Gothic 299 and KC’s Gothic Revival writings 11, 244 KC’s inaugural Slade lecture on 271, 272, 321 KC’s introduction to new edition of Praeterita 292, 295, 296–7, 298, 299 KC’s Ruskin Today 278, 514 reading and research for 446–7, 450, 456 photographs of Italy 317 as Slade Professor 244 Ruspoli, Marthe (née Marthe-Marie de Pineton de Chambrun) 186, 543

Index

Russell, Alys (née Pearsall Smith, BB’s sister-inlaw) 34, 111, 112, 476, 509, 510, 511, 547, pl. 2 Russell, Archibald George Bloomfield 34, 37, 38, 67n Russell, Bertrand 511 Russell, John 511 Russia BB considers visit 174–5, 176, 178 KC and Jane visit 176–7 see also Hermitage Museum, Leningrad Rustici, Giovanni Francesco: Woolbeding Manor fountain 395, 396–7

Sabachnikoff, Theodore 106n Sachs, Paul Joseph 59, 89, 102, 204, 543 St Ermin’s Hotel, Westminster, London: Clark family flat in 13, 21, 25, 31, 57 Saliba, Antonio de 399 Salles, Georges 186, 280, 318, 333, 393, 397, 408, 409, 444, 543 retirement from the Louvre 440–1, 442 Saltwood Castle, nr Hythe, Kent 411, 429, 513, 514, pl. 39 and Jane 384, 407, 453, 461 KC and Jane’s purchase and move to 382–4, 388, 400, 401, 402, 404 as KC’s weekend retreat 450 Reynolds Stone’s woodcut of 466 running costs and KC’s television income 457, 464 Salvemini, Gaetano 324, 329, 490 Samson, Major 239 Samuels, Ernest 131 Sanchi, India 430 Sandberg-Vavala, Evelyn 88 Sani, Alberto: BB’s monograph on 282, 325, 331, 348 Santayana, George 12 Sassetta 75, 77, 78, 82 altarpiece panels in Berenson collection 129, 149n BB’s book on 258, 281 KC and purchase of panels for National Gallery 129–30, 149–50, 151, 154, 157–8, 160, 165, 484 Burlington Magazine article on 149n, 158, 159, 164 Louvre Madonna and Child 439 Sassoon, Aline 543–4 Sassoon, Sir Philip 124, 125, 135, 192, 214, 225, 543–4 Sassoon, Sybil, Marchioness of Chomondeley 543, 544 Savile Gallery, London 34n, 45 Saxl, Fritz 196, 288, 289

580

Schiavone, La (Andrea Meldolla) 338 Schuman, Henry 106n Schwarzenberg, Prince Johannes 392, 412, 455 Schwerin, Countess Sigrid Ebba Mariana von 252 Scott, Geoffrey 538, 540, pl. 10 Scott, Sir Walter: Red Gauntlet 9n Scottish Museum of Antiquities 398–9 Sebastiano del Piombo 89, 91, 213 Alnwick Castle fresco 152 Bowood Portrait of a Humanist 161 Raising of Lazarus in National Gallery 148, 149, 151, 152, 156, 159, 160–1 Second World War 121–37 cessation of postal services between Britain and Italy 221, 245, 250, 253, 478 lead up in Britain 195–6, 197, 201–2 evacuation of National Gallery paintings 196, 221, 222, 231, 303n, 538, pl. 29 lead up in Italy and BB’s situation 131, 146, 219, 226–37, 475, 505–6 post-war return to normal life 239–44, 248 Segni, Antonio 395 Serluppi, Marchese 228–9 Seznec, Jean 344 Shakespeare, William: KC’s speech on 412, 414 Shannon, Charles 542 Shapley, Fern 375, 544 Shellal (Shallal) mosaic 309 Sicily: BB’s Viaggio in Sicilia 417 Signorelli, Luca 101 The Circumcision in National Gallery 213 School of Pan 16n Simony, Count Reynald de 252 Simpson, Colin 483 Singer, Hans Wolfgang 16 Sitwell, Edith 84, 262, 263 Sivas, Turkey 195 Slade, Felix 244 Slade Professorship see Oxford University Slade School of Art, London 244 Smith, (Arnold) John Hugh 80, 187, 544 Smith, Pearsall see Pearsall Smith Snow, C. P. 434 Solario, Andrea 271, 272 Sospel, France: Golf-Hotel 11n, 25, 27, 86, 92, pl. 3 Spain Berensons travels in 59, 60, 66, 69, 70 KC and Jane in Madrid 136–7, 139, 460 Prado exhibition in Geneva (1939) 215 Spender, Stephen 204 Sprigge, Cecil 385, 544 Sprigge, Sylvia: biography of BB 385, 403, 452–3, 454, 544–5 Staedel Museum, Frankfurt 68 Stamp Advisory Committee 223

581

Index

Stark, Freya 264, 274, 310, 324, 374, 398, 467, 545 Steegman, John 462 Steegmuller, Francis 294 Steinmann, Ernst 43, 44, 173–4 Steinmeyer, Fritz 68n Stephen, Adrian 511 Stephen, Karin (née Costelloe, BB’s step-daughter) 165, 510, 511–12 Stoclet, Adolphe 68, 545 Stoop, Mr and Mrs Frank 28–9, 230n Stourton, James 109n Strachey, Barbara see Halpern, Barbara Strachey, Giles Lytton 114, 510, 545 Strachey, Rachel (Ray) (née Costelloe, BB’s stepdaughter) 510 Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire: KC and Jane on official visit 412–13, 414n Strong, Arthur 47, 67n Strong, Eugenie 67n, 167n Stryzgowski, Josef 46n, 308n Stubbs, George 442, 443, 444 Sudbourne, Hall, nr Orford, Suffolk 361n Suez Crisis (1956) 442n Suida, Bertina (later Manning) 546 Suida, William 341, 545–6 Summerson, John 334 Sunday Times,The KC’s articles on paintings in 382, 445, 447, 453, 460 KC’s ‘The Sage of Art’ article on death of BB 468, 472–7 request for KC to write obituary of BB 468 Sutherland, Graham 126, 224, 225, 246, 432 Sutherland, Kathleen 225, 246 Sweden KC’s wartime lectures 223, 248 see also Gustaf Adolf, Crown Prince of Sweden Switzerland Alan Clark’s home in Zermatt 453 see also Geneva; Zurich

Tate Britain, London: archive of KC’s papers xiv–xv Tate Gallery, London 146 Modern British Pictures from the Tate Gallery touring exhibition (1946–7) 261n Tatti see I Tatti, nr Fiesole, Italy Taylor, Francis 496 Taylor, Jeremy 109n Tel-el-armena see Amarna, Egypt Television Act (1954) 379, 381 Teniers, David, the younger 186, 187 Thomas, (Martha) Carey 140, 512 Thompson, F. W. 67n

Tiepolo, Giovanni Battista 34, 346, 347 Times,The 70th birthday letter for BB 167 on Exhibition of Italian Paintings 67n KC’s view of 118, 196 obituaries of BB and KC xii, 468 Tintoretto 89, 189, 409 Titian 272, 338 and Allendale Adoration controversy 129 BB visits Venice exhibition (1935) 175 Europa in Isabella Stewart Gardner Collection 464 KC on Titians in Louvre 419 KC visits Berlin galleries 16 St Margaret and the Dragon 139 Venus and Cupid with a Lute Player in Fitzwilliam Museum 86 Toesca, Elena Berti 338 Toesca, Ilaria 339–40 Toesca, Pietro 43, 44, 62, 63, 93, 106, 236, 546 Toft, The, Bournemouth: Clark family home 7n Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio 376 Tolnay, Charles de 145, 546 Toronto: Royal Ontario Museum Far Eastern collection 464 Torrigiano, Pietro 390, 399 Toscanini, Arturo 17 Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de 347 Toye, John Francis 338 Tradescant Collection and Ashmolean Museum 97–8 Trevelyan, George 310 Trevelyan, Julian 310, 546 Trevelyan, Robert (Trevy) 26, 88, 110, 172, 264, 310, 505, 511, 546 Trevor-Roper, Hugh 247, 324, 511, 526, 546–7 Trewin, Ion 140n, 325n Tucci, Giuseppe 235 Tufton Street, Westminster, London: KC’s house 21, 24, 35, 57, 65 Tura, Cosimo 217 Turin, Italy 27–8 Turkey BB visits Asia Minor with Nicky Mariano 195 see also Constantinople Turnell, Martin (Turrell) 340 Tyler, Royall 93, 187, 188, 517, 547 Tynan, Kenneth 359n

Uccello, Paolo BB’s evaluation in Lists 502 KC’s study of and lectures on 296, 342 The Hunt in the Forest 120–1 Umberto I, king of Italy 491

Index

Updike, John 479, 483–4 Upper Terrace House, Hampstead, London 246–7, 280, 287, 382, 388, pl. 38 Upton House, nr Tetbury, Gloucestershire 225, 234 Utrecht Psalter 364, 365

Valeri, Francesco Malaguzzi 81, 85, 107 Valéry, Paul 206 Vallombrosa see Casa al Dono, nr Vallombrosa van Gogh see Gogh,Vincent van Vanni, Lippo 263, 265 Vasari, Giorgio 41, 259n, 335, 486 Vatican State 58 Vavala see Sandberg-Vavala, Evelyn Velasquez 215 Las Meninas 445, 454 Venetian art BB visits Titian exhibition (1935) 175 KC visits Berlin galleries 16 New Gallery exhibition (1895) and BB’s review 473, 500, 522 Veneziano, Domenico 390n, 392 Veneziano, Jacometto see Jacometto Veneziano Venice 17 BB visits with Nicky Mariano 175, 248, 290, 312, 388, 403–4, 419 and Biennale exhibition and Chinese exhibition 403 Bellini exhibition (1949) 312, 314, 346 KC and Jane visit and view Tintoretto exhibition 189 KC and Jane’s post-war visits 286, 312, 314, 362, 388, 389, 393, 419 Lotto exhibition (1953) 393, 436 Veronese exhibition (1939) 213, 232 see also Venetian art Venturi, Adolfo 81, 166, 547 Venturi, Lionello 547 Veronese, Paolo 86, 146, 148, 149, 213, 232, 409 Verrocchio, Andrea del 395, 396 BB’s Italian article on 136, 137–8, 147 drawing in V&A 41, 147 Measured Drawing of a Horse 38 Versailles, Paris 440–1 Vertova, Luisa see Nicolson, Luisa Vertova Vicentino, Andrea 105n Victor Emmanuel, king of Italy 56 Victoria and Albert Museum, London Hilliard exhibition 271, 272 KC’s research for Florentine drawings 41 Verrocchio drawing 41, 147 Vienna BB’s cure and dental treatment in 190 KC and Jane visit 64, 183

582

Mary Berenson’s stay in sanatorium 167, 169–70, 172 Villa Gamberaia, Settignano 269 Villa La Fontanelle, Careggi: BB and Nicky Mariano’s wartime refuge 228, 229, 239–40, 248 Villa Maser (Villa Barbaro),Veneto, Italy 448–9 Villa Medici antiques 418–19 Villino, Il, Corbignano, Italy pl. 14 KC and Colette stay at 399 KC and Jane’s residence at 39, 40 KC stays at in early 1950s 351, 352, 353, 354, pl. 37 Vivarini, Bartolomeo 298 Voigt, Georg 74

Wagner, Richard: and KC’s German studies 15 Waley, Arthur David 300, 301, 547 Walker, John 8n, 134, 200n, 250, 254, 260, 337, 340, 543, 547–8, pl. 19 on BB’s approach to advisory work in art market 483 career at National Gallery of Art in Washington 341, 375, 420, 423, 424, 425, 548 on friendship between BB and KC 479 on Giorgione panels in National Gallery 189n introduces Rush Kress to BB 366, 367 on KC’s relations with staff at National Gallery 126 proposed as director of Harvard institute at I Tatti 59, 424, 496 visits BB at I Tatti 61, 172, 200n, 204, 350, 394, 467 visits KC and Jane in England 393, 455 Walker, Margaret 455 Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool 105 Wall Street Crash (1929) 58 Wallace Collection, London 528 Walpole Society, The 90 Walton, Susana, Lady 419–20, 437, 443, 444 Walton, Sir William 193n, 225, 226, 244, 419–20, 437, 443, 444, 548 War Artists Advisory Committee 223–4, 233, 488 Warburg, Abraham (Aby) 24, 60, 128, 278, 427, 485–6, 548, 550 Mnemosyne Atlas 44n Warburg Institute, London 288, 289, 364, 365, 427, 495 Ward-Perkins, John Bryan 274 Warren, Earl, Chief Justice of the United States 426 Warren, Edward (Ned) Perry 99, 507, 508 Washington DC cherry blossom festival 375

Index

KC’s visits and lectures 341–2, 343, 420, 421–2, 423–7 The Nude lecture series 278, 280–1, 287, 348, 373, 375–6, 377, 388 see also National Gallery of Art, Washington DC Waterfield, Caroline (Lina) 8, 9, 542, 548–9 Waterfield, Gordon 21, 49, 549 Waterhouse, Ellis 77, 78, 82, 123, 257, 549 Watteau, Jean-Antoine 460 Waugh, Evelyn: Brideshead Revisited 2 Weiss, Bianca 230–1 ‘Welsh Dam Disaster’ and KC’s father’s business 8, 478 West, Eddy Sackville 225 Westbury, Lord xiv Westminster, Loelia, Duchess of 313 Westonbirt Arboretum, Gloucestershire 31n Wharton, Edith 269n, 509, 517, 524, 533, 537, 544, 547, 549–50 BB’s friendship and visits in South of France 22, 24, 60, 61, 69, 78, 79, 101, 102, 112, 113, 116, 133, 134, 165, 180, 185, 186 Hyères as haven for reading for BB 83–4 initial froideur and successful second meeting 56–7 Wharton reads from autobiography 117 death 131, 188 distressing events with household staff 121 illness 169, 170, 187 KC and Jane’s friendship with 57, 61, 79, 83, 113, 135, 142, 169, 188 as godmother to Colin and Colette 116, 193n library bequeatheed to Colin Clark 193 visits at Hyère 86, 92, 133, 180 visits in Paris and Sainte-Brice house 94, 102, 133, 134, 187 Wharton visits in London 157 Wharton visits in Oxford 102 Wharton visits in Richmond 101, 102 visit to Italy and I Tatti 60–1, 134, 161–2 Whitall Smith, Hannah see Pearsall Smith, Hannah Whiteley, John 121n Whitman, Walt 511 Whittemore, Thomas 175, 550 Wickhoff, Franz 308n Widener Collection: BB and published catalogue 281

583

Wilde, Johannes 36n, 162n, 183, 184, 294, 550 Wilde, Oscar 99, 472, 486 Wildenstein, Georges: BB advisory role with 241–2, 248, 482 Wilder, Thornton 330, 417 Williams, William Emrys 279 Wilson, Sir Horace 201–2 Wilson, Woodrow 58 Wilton House, Wiltshire: Leda and the Swan after Leonardo 216, 218 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim 354, 495 Wind, Edgar 464, 550 Windsor Castle and Royal Collection 395 BB and KC’s Florentine drawings research 22, 23, 24, 38, 41, 52, 73, 81, 84, 85 KC’s commission to catalogue Leonardo drawings 57–8, 60, 73–4, 76, 81–2, 85, 87, 90, 104, 106–7, 109, 111, 117, 119, 150 Witt, Sir Robert Clermont 55, 67n, 167n, 359, 550 as National Gallery trustee 124, 126, 144 Wittkower, Rudolf 288n, 289, 316, 531, 551 Wolff, Addie see Kahn, Addie Wolff, Gerhard 229 Wölfflin, Heinrich 15, 82, 495, 551 Woolbeding Manor, West Sussex: Rustici fountain 395, 396–7 Woolf,Virginia 230n, 435 World War II see Second World War Worth, Irene (Harriet Abrams) 391, 392, 417, 551 acting career 373–4, 417, 465 friendship with KC and Jane 408, 409, 419 and visits to BB 406, 407, 470, 471 Wrightsman, Jayne 425

Yale University: KC delivers Ryerson Lectures 164n, 193 Yashiro,Yukio 10 Yeats, W. B. 94, 141, 142, 145, 156, 263, 501 Yugoslavia see Paul, Prince of Yugoslavia

Zahle, Eric 261 Zurich: exhibition of Lombardy art (1948–9) 298

584