Old Masters, New World

by Cynthia Saltzman

  Meanwhile, he kept Isabella Stewart Gardner abreast of his progress. By the time he wrote to her from Vienna on the Fourth of July, 1888, she had already bought paintings by Whistler and had her portrait painted by Sargent. He let her know he shared her interest in art and her sensibility as an aesthete: “I know no plea­sure equal to that I get from pictures, from great Venetian pictures. It is like the plea­sure I have when I come across a wonderfully beautiful line of verse, or when I catch a strain of infinitely tender melody.”

  In 1889, Berenson informed Gardner he would spend a third year abroad, sponsored now by Edward Warren, a Boston friend and collector. Soon after, Gardner, apparently disappointed with his progress as an author, stopped responding to his letters. Berenson had not communicated with her for five years, when on March 11, 1894, he purposefully sent her a copy of The Venetian Paint­ers of the Re­nais­sance. “I venture to recall myself to your memory,” he wrote. “Your kindness to me at a critical moment is something I have never forgotten, and if I have let five years go by without writing to you, it has been because I have had nothing to show that could change the opinion you must have had of me at the moment when you put a stop to our correspondence.” He promised to send her “two or three other books in the course of the next two years.”

  Berenson’s gift to Gardner of the small book with a gondolier embossed in gold on its cover immediately reestablished their correspondence. Gardner’s response conveyed an intense interest in him and his work. “I write immediately to thank you for the remembrance, and to hope that, if we go to Eu­rope this summer, I may see you and talk over the book, the paint­ers, and in fact many things,” she wrote. What certainly drew Gardner (who had already spent two summers in Venice) to Berenson’s book was his claim that Venetian painting was “the most complete expression in art of the Italian Re­nais­sance.” He made his case strictly on aesthetic terms, celebrating the visual splendor of the art of Venice, evaluating its achievement on the ­art-­for-­art’s sake criteria that Gardner embraced. “In Venice, there had long been a love of objects for their sensuous beauty,” he argued. In his view, Venetian pictures, even religious images, “seemed intended not for devotion,’nor for admiration,’but for enjoyment.” The Venetians, he concluded, “perfected an art in which there is scarcely any intellectual content what­ever, and in which colour, ­jewel-­like or opaline, is almost everything.”

  More importantly, Venetian Paint­ers gave Berenson the credentials to help Gardner fulfill her ambition to buy Old Master paintings. The book catapulted Berenson to the forefront of the field of Italian art and launched him as the first American “connoisseur.” In Venetian Paint­ers, Berenson boldly put forth a list of the ­thirty-­four artists (Bellini, Carpaccio, Giorgione, Titian, Lorenzo Lotto, ­etc.) who in his opinion constituted the Venetian school and attempted to identify every single surviving picture they had painted. With this list, Berenson threw down the gauntlet before the reigning experts in the field, Joseph Arthur Crowe, an En­glish journalist, and Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle, an artist and connoisseur, who had published a series of books together, including A History of Painting in North Italy. In an attempt to bring new rigor to the field, Berenson trimmed the absolute number of genuine Venetian pictures accepted by Crowe and Cavalcaselle. In the case of Titian, they claimed the artist painted over one thousand pictures. Berenson slashed the number to 133. Crowe and Cavalcaselle “laboured under terrible disadvantages, because most of their work was done at a time when traveling was much slower than it has now become, and when photography was not sufficiently perfected to be of great ser­vice,” Berenson wrote. ­Attributing pictures had become “something like an exact science,” he contended, thanks largely to photography, which produced accurate ­reproductions of paintings located all over Eu­rope. Berenson emphasized that he had seen ­face-­to-­face all the paintings he discussed, except for a few in Saint Petersburg. Berenson’s Venetian Paint­ers advanced the study of Re­nais­sance art and brought attention to the field. By winnowing paintings, he gave collectors new confidence in the market and in their ability to find authentic pictures; in reducing the number of Venetian paintings, he raised the prices of those that made the cut.

  To compose his list of Venetian paint­ers, Berenson explained he had practiced the “scientific connoisseurship” of Giovanni Morelli, an Italian politician who in his efforts to cata­log and record the paintings in Umbrian churches and protect them from foreign buyers had developed a system of analyzing and classifying Old Master pictures. Trained in anatomy and medicine in Germany, Morelli argued that a paint­er’s par­tic­u­lar style was revealed not in a picture’s central passages but in peripheral ­details—an ear or a ­hand—which ­were produced quickly and unselfconsciously.

  By allying himself to Morelli, Berenson automatically set himself in opposition to Wilhelm von Bode. Angry with Bode’s purchases of Old Masters in Italy, Morelli had published an inflammatory text challenging the attributions of the Italian pictures in the galleries of Berlin, Dresden, and Munich, three of Germany’s most prestigious museums. In 1891, Bode fought back in the En­glish Fortnightly Review, denouncing Morelli as a “quack doctor,” and mocking his method for its “air of infallibility.” The tone of Bode’s attack reflected the high stakes involved in the attribution of paintings at this time. “Connoisseurship” had become an embattled line of work and disputes between experts on whether a painting was or was not a Raphael or a Rembrandt had financial implications and involved, as Jaynie Anderson writes, “the politics of acquisitions between competing nations and their developing national museums.” But connoisseurship was more art than science, and a century later the identity of many Old Masters remains elusive, their attributions fluid and controversial.

  What distinguished Berenson from Bode and other Eu­ro­pe­an experts who held posts at museums or universities was his choice to operate in­de­pen­dently. He had to rely for his income on his writings and on fees earned advising collectors. When his sister suggested he work as a teacher, he protested. “Who that is wealthy is in­de­pen­dent in America nowadays, teachers [are] absolute slaves to headmasters, clerks bondsmen to employers, Harvard professors crouching before an Eliot [the university’s president].” If Berenson wanted income, he also yearned for social position, a less tangible attribute but one he could gain as a professional connoisseur. When Berenson first told Gardner of his plans to become a connoisseur, he acknowledged his ambition to make money off his expertise. “I shall be quite quite picture wise then, not unlearned in the arts, perhaps they will enable me to turn an honest penny.” On the surface, his idea seemed logical enough. As art scholarship and the art market ­were evolving, connoisseurs assumed multiple roles, acting as counselors to museums and private collectors, but also as brokers, involved one way or another in the buying and selling of art. Bode was often compensated indirectly for the advice he gave collectors with donations of art to the Berlin museum. But Berenson knew that he would undermine his reputation as a disinterested expert if it was learned that he profited from the pictures he authenticated and attributed. In public, he distanced himself from the art market, so as not to threaten his ­hard-­won identity as a scholar and gentleman.

  By 1894, Berenson had cut his dark hair short. His hairline had receded and he had a long, elegant forehead, and a dark, neatly trimmed beard. With age, his features and appearance continued to grow more refined. In a ­black-­and-­white photograph of 1903, he posed in a pale, ­double-­breasted suit, leaning against an antique sideboard, with a cigarette in his hand and a Florentine Madonna on the wall behind him. Not only did the American immigrant dress the part of an affluent gentleman, but he constructed a persona of a cosmopolitan aesthete and glamorous expatriate. He moved to Fiesole, an ancient town, in the ­olive- and ­cypress-­covered hills above the city of Florence, and spent much of his time traveling.

  In 1891 Berenson had begun a complicated love affair with the ­twenty-­ seven-­year-­old Mary Smith Co
stelloe, a ­free-­thinking, ­strong-­willed intellectual from a Philadelphia Quaker family, the sister of Logan Pearsall Smith, his Harvard friend. Mary had a relaxed ­Anglo-­Saxon beauty. She had studied at Smith College and the Harvard Annex (later Radcliffe College) and was married to Frank Costelloe, an Irish barrister. They lived in London and had two daughters. By 1893, Mary had left Costelloe and their daughters in En­gland and had moved to a ­house close to Berenson’s in Fiesole, joining his mission to track down Old Master pictures in Italy. Ambitious for Berenson, Mary contributed to his books, pushed him to publish, and championed his method. Writing in the Atlantic under the name Mary Logan, she argued that Berenson “should be able to classify Italian paintings with the accuracy of a botanist in classifying plants.” In fact, Venetian Paint­ers had begun as an essay of hers, but she agreed to omit her name as its coauthor.

  Berenson steadily built his reputation as an authority on Italian art. He quickly followed Venetian Paint­ers with three other books: Lorenzo Lotto, in 1895; The Florentine Paint­ers of the Re­nais­sance, in 1896; and The Central Italian Paint­ers of the Re­nais­sance, in 1897. Later, scholars would judge his 1903 Drawings of the Florentine Paint­ers his most ­important work. In 1897, he rattled the field again, when in a pamphlet about a London exhibition of Venetian pictures from En­glish private collections, he claimed that many attributions ­were wrong. “To Titian, for example, ­thirty-­three paintings are ascribed,” he explained. “Of these, one only is actually by the master.” Eigh­teen other works were labeled “Giorgione.” Berenson dismissed all but ­one—a ­drawing.

  Bernard Berenson, age ­thirty-­eight, in 1903 at the Villa I Tatti, posing as the connoisseur that he was, in front of a Re­nais­sance Madonna.

  Bernard and Mary Berenson in England in 1901, a year after their ­marriage.

  In 1900, after Frank Costelloe died, Mary and Berenson married. They leased property called “I Tatti” with a stone ­house, a barn, a small chapel, and a beautiful view in Settignano, close to Fiesole. The villa demanded extensive renovations, which he immediately began. In 1907, the Berensons bought the villa and expanded it, surrounding it with formal gardens. At I Tatti, they entertained often. Berenson’s expatriate ­life—his books, his photographs, his ­travels—cost him increasing amounts of money.

  Otto Gutekunst

  What Berenson failed to reveal to Isabella Stewart Gardner when he sold her the En­glish Botticelli was that he had not dealt directly with its own­er, Lord Ashburnham. In fact he obtained the painting through Otto Gutekunst, a ­German-­born dealer with P. & D. Colnaghi & Co. Ltd., at 13-14 Pall Mall East, a prestigious London gallery that had been established in the eigh­teenth century.

  New to the field and without capital, Berenson relied on Eu­ro­pe­an dealers, particularly Otto Gutekunst, to find canvases that he could offer to Gardner. A restless opportunist, Gutekunst (whose name appropriately means “good art” in German) recognized that the United States was the most promising market for Old Masters and he exploited Colnaghi’s ties to the British aristocracy to pursue pictures in En­gland that would appeal to Americans. Starting with the purchase of the Botticelli, Gutekunst became Berenson’s silent partner in shaping Gardner’s collection, and a critical source of extraordinary Eu­ro­pe­an pictures.

  About the purchasing of paintings, Bernard Berenson kept Gardner, as much as he could, in the dark. He didn’t fully explain how or where he acquired pictures and let her believe he had tracked them down himself. In 1897 Berenson admitted that he had gotten hold of a Velázquez and a van Dyck through Colnaghi, but he minimized the London dealer’s work. In Berenson’s letters to his patron, Otto Gutekunst’s name simply ­doesn’t appear. Although lacking scholarly credentials, Gutekunst became an experienced connoisseur and buyer of Old Master pictures, and Berenson seemed to have complete confidence in his judgment and “eye.” In October 1900, Berenson tried to persuade Gardner to purchase a small Raphael, which Gutekunst had described to him in a letter. Berenson pretended he knew the picture well: “So golden clear is the colour, so dainty the feathery trees.” Gutekunst was glad Berenson “offered Mrs. G the little Raphael,” but added: “The only pity is that you never saw it, for it is such a… little gem!”

  From the start, Gardner gave Berenson credit for helping to create her collection and he took it; in fact Gutekunst played at least as important a part. The author Colin Simpson, harshly but not inaccurately, described Gardner’s collection as “a monument to a combination of talents: Gutekunst’s…scholarship, Bernhard’s salesmanship and Isabella’s ­good-­natured ­self-­indulgence and credulity.” Later, when Gardner and Berenson had become cultural legends, Gutekunst would die in obscurity.

  By 1895, Otto Gutekunst was thirty years old and handsome, his face ­well-­proportioned, his dark eyes deep set beneath a prominent brow and a forehead framed by neatly combed dark hair. He was a knowledgeable and talented art ­dealer—an expert in the northern Eu­ro­pe­an schools of painting. Berenson and Gutekunst had met through Jean Paul Richter, a German connoisseur living in Florence. In Gutekunst, Berenson found a level of expertise in Old Masters that matched his own and a knowledge of German, Flemish, and Dutch painting that complemented his ­command of the Italian Re­nais­sance. “We are very anxious to know if you are convinced of its genuineness,” Gutekunst asked Berenson in 1900 about a Correggio, whose photograph he had sent. In turn, he wrote Berenson about a panel painting “that most people would call a Holbein,” and informed him that Christoph Amberger in fact painted the picture. In a moment of intellectual seriousness, Gutekunst expressed his love for the art of his native ­Germany—calling the portraits of Hans Holbein and Albrecht Dürer the “children of my fancy & longing.”

  Like many art dealers, Otto Carl Heinrich Gutekunst had been born into the trade, the son of Heinrich Gutekunst, who ran a Stuttgart auction ­house specializing in drawings and prints. Gutekunst was presumably trained by his father, and soon after moving to London in 1885, he and a Belgian dealer, Edmond Deprez, opened a print gallery, at 18 Green Street, St. Martin’s Place. In 1894, Gutekunst and Deprez ­were invited by William McKay to become partners in Colnaghi, a highly respected fixture in the London art market, and in need of new blood.

  Colnaghi had a long and illustrious history. It had been launched by Paul Colnaghi, the son of a Milan attorney, who in 1784 went to work for the Paris print seller Anthony Torre and within four years had ­acquired the dealer’s London branch. Colnaghi thrived as print publisher whose clients included the prince regent, who became George IV. Under Paul’s son Dominic Colnaghi, the firm (P. & D. Colnaghi) continued to flourish. In his 1824 “Picture Galleries of En­gland,” William Hazlitt described the gallery as “a capital ­print-­shop…a point to aim at in a morning’s ­walk—a relief and satisfaction in the motley confusion, the vulgarity of common life.” Two de­cades later, the gallery appeared in William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, when Becky Sharp “went to Colnaghi’s and ordered the finest portrait of [King George] that art had produced, and credit could supply.”

  By the time Gutekunst joined Colnaghi, the firm had plunged into the Old Master market. William McKay had become acquainted with Wilhelm von Bode, and may have brought Gutekunst into the gallery in part to help them correspond with the Berlin museum director in German. (McKay’s letters to Bode written in German are in Gutekunst’s hand.) Bode was one of Colnaghi’s most important clients. He seemed happy to give opinions on attributions and to make introductions to Eu­ro­pe­an collectors, in exchange for market intelligence and the first refusal on pieces he wanted. While Gutekunst was trying to sell Lord Ashburnham’s Botticelli through Berenson to Gardner, the Colnaghi dealers negotiated the sale of the nobleman’s ­Rembrandt—a double portrait, Anslo and His Wife, to Bode in Berlin, where it became one of the museum’s most celebrated pictures.

  The letters Gutekunst wrote Berenson provide a rare view into the workings of the fin de siècle international art market.
They reveal a gregarious, shrewd, confident trader who prided himself not only on his art expertise but also on his honesty and loyalty, and who valued Berenson as a colleague and friend. As rising demand boosted the prices of Old Masters, Gutekunst spoke of his work in the art market as though he ­were engaged in a ­high-­stakes, often amusing, game. He was too busy in London to leave, he wrote Berenson. “Can’t you arrange to be ­here in September & October when I have nothing to do & could quietly go about with you, incognito, & see many collections you don’t know & lay foundations for new schemes and plans of battle?” He thrilled at the thought of getting his hands on valuable pictures. Everything seemed possible, everything for sale, and he was one of the very few who had an eye on the source of supply and, thanks to the position of his firm, the ability to tap it.

  The dealer and the connoisseur ­were exact contemporaries, both exiles in adopted countries, and shared a love of pictures. Gutekunst often employed a jocular, familiar, mocking tone, addressing Berenson by 1894 as “My dear boy” or “Carissimo Bernardo.” He also constantly gave Berenson advice, playing the part of the experienced dealer, counseling a naive and uninitiated connoisseur. “It seems to me people only want what they cannot get,” he wrote, “those things that can be got being too comparatively easily within their reach. The best plan with them is therefore generally to put certain things as problematical; and difficult to get, so as to make them eager, or to at least interest them.”

  Gutekunst envied Berenson his residence in the Florentine hills. “Spring must by this time be making its glorious entrance into Toscana!” he wrote. He often complained about the stress of the business. “I am driven mad with work & worry & very tired. I can scarcely write.” Without fail, he closed his letters with a reference to his “beloved” wife, Lena Obach, the daughter of a Swiss art dealer who worked in London, to whom he referred as “the Countess.” They had no children.