Edith Wharton’s story about the collection of Italian paintings owned by James Raycie had a bitter-sweet ending. The collection that was frowned upon during Raycie’s lifetime was reevaluated years after his death and judged to be one of the most beautiful collections of Italian primitives in the world. If Wharton had Walters in mind, her story was prophetic. Forty-five years after Walters’s death, his collection of Italian paintings was given a similar redemption.
In 1962, the Walters Art Gallery engaged Federico Zeri, one of the world’s most renowned connoisseurs of Italian Renaissance painting, to write a comprehensive catalogue of the gallery’s Italian paintings. Zeri initially was puzzled by the collection. He characterized it as “mysterious,” and he observed that most of the artists were “obscure.” He leveled his most biting criticism at the absence of any scholarly catalogue. It was, he stated, a “tremendous mistake.”1 Zeri, like the staff of the museum at that time, was unaware that Walters had engaged Berenson many years earlier to study the collection and to write a grand, illustrated catalogue. He was also oblivious to the fact that Walters, based on Berenson’s advice, had published an important, interim catalogue in 1915. By the time Zeri undertook this project, both Walters and Berenson were dead, and Zeri had no one to turn to for any firsthand account about the details of their relationship.2 The documents that evidenced Berenson’s impact on the Walters collection of Italian paintings would remain buried in the archives of the Villa I Tatti and the Walters Art Museum and unknown to scholars for many years to come.3
In 1976, Zeri completed his catalogue. Although he never discovered the records that would detail the relationship between Walters and Berenson, he was able to intuit that Berenson’s advice was instrumental in refining and improving the collection.4
Zeri also found something of much more lasting importance. It was that the Walters’ Italian paintings, although without the fanfare associated with masterpieces by Raphael, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Caravaggio, and Titian, had a character that was unique to American art collections. Like a collection assembled by a noble Italian family for a private galleria, the Walters collection, according to Zeri, constitutes a homogeneous ensemble of Italian artists of every period “offering a balanced and uninterrupted survey of the history of Italian painting.”5 As an American collector who styled himself as a Renaissance prince, and as a connoisseur who helped to transform the collection, both Walters and Berenson would have rejoiced upon reading those words.