Mr Berenson’s Venice

Sixty-three years ago, at the age of 29, Bernard Berenson published the first of his essays, with their accompanying lists of pictures, on the Italian Renaissance. Now the Venetian lists, the latest descendants of that first volume, begin the monumental edition with which his life-work culminates, an edition which is also the most magnificent of tributes to him. Mr Berenson’s lists, in their latest revision, are to provide the basis for a corpus of illustrations there are more than 1,400 for the Venetian School alone which will reproduce something like a quarter of the immense amount of material left to us by the painters of the Italian Renaissance. The result is endlessly valuable and interesting: the Venetian volumes are surely the most important single instrument for understanding Venetian painting that we have. The tool is so good that one is tempted to use it at once for the most interesting purpose of all, to turn it, that is to say, on its author and see how the view of Venetian painting contained in the original essay with which the whole enterprise began looks now, two-thirds of a century after.

Mr Berenson started with the Venetian School because it meant most to art-loving people. The Venetians, he pointed out, were concerned primarily not with religion but with the natural appetites of men. Moreover, in Venice painting gave pleasure, in itself, like music. Painters dealt with the amenities of life, ‘with refined merry-making, with country parties or with the sweet dreams of youth’. Mr Berenson concluded that Venetian painting ‘thus became the first genuinely modern art’.

He was speaking for his time. The equation of ‘the actual needs of men’ with refined merry-making and the rest does not now seem distinctly modern. Some of his references from past to present as world. The aesthetic method of this great man seems, looking across the centuries, strangely to involve a diminution of man, just because it disposes of the human value which style holds in itself when its consistency reflects the whole of human nature.

Professor Wittkower has studied the artist for a lifetime: he must have forgotten more about Bernini than most will ever know, and it is an achievement that the gulf should be so seldom evident. The positive temper of his writing, as much as the massive learning, is a continual pleasure: reading it calls to mind the writer as we know him on the rostrum, carrying great weight but carrying it athletically, rocking gently on the balls of his feet, intelligently and precisely balanced for the utmost responsiveness as he drives his solid argument along. The publishers, never better than when dealing with sculpture, have risen to the occasion with magnificent new photographs. (Someone has rashly redrawn the eyes of the Anima Dannata.) This is among the best of all the Phaidon books.

Review of Gian Lorenzo Bernini by Rudolf Wittkower, New Statesman and Nation, 17 December 1955