Bernard Berenson: The Making of a Connoisseur - Hardcover

Samuels, Ernest

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674067754 ISBN 13: 9780674067752

Publisher: Belknap Press, 1979

Synopsis

Critic, arbiter of taste, renowned authority on Renaissance painting and oracle to millionaire art collectors, Bernard Berenson was the most formidable presence in the art world for more than thirty years. Four decades of his life are unfolded in this compelling book.

About this title

About the Author:

Ernest Samuels is Franklyn Bliss Snyder Professor of English, Emeritus, Northwestern University.

Review:

This is a life filled with extraordinary people...Collectively they made the 1890s outrageously exciting, and the Berensons, in their relentless quest for recognition and security, serve as the perfect mirror. Samuels turns the mirror deftly, through Boston, London, Florence, Oxford, Vienna, and Chicago, pausing briefly in the boudoir, lingering in the golden hills of Tuscany, relentlessly reflecting the social scene...Samuels brilliantly captures it all. A remarkably absorbing and lucid biography of Berenson's early career. The book does full justice to the verve and excitement of Berenson's connoisseurship. Berenson has an ideal biographer in Samuels. Impeccable in method, strong in narrative skill, Samuels scants nothing as to place, period or person, and is no less remarkable for inwardness, depth and charity of feeling. A portrait replete with the complex ironies created in the conflicts between vaulting idealism and the harsh necessities of living well...�It� makes clear the tortuous conflicts of his life, and stands as a splendid monument to its author's understanding of the human quandaries of his extraordinary subject and his equally extraordinary wife.

About this edition

• Publisher: Belknap Press
• Publication date: 1979
• ISBN 10: 0674067754
• ISBN 13: 9780674067752
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 516