Forty years before Henry Walters brought the Massarenti collection to America, the cultural channel between Italy and the United States was opened by James Jackson Jarves, an adventurous intellect of the first order who became this country’s earliest connoisseur, collector, and promoter of Italian Renaissance paintings. For thirty years during the second half of the nineteenth century, Jarves lived in Italy, serving briefly as America’s vice-consul to Florence, writing extensively about Renaissance art, and collecting a significant number of paintings by Italian masters, including Gentile da Fabriano, Antonio del Pollaiuolo, and Domenico Ghirlandaio. As if engaged in a scavenger hunt, Jarves’s discovery of Italian masterpieces, according to his own account, involved “miles upon miles of wearisome staircases; dusty explorations of dark retreats; dirt, disappointment, fraud, lies and money often fruitlessly spent” and, on one occasion, the purchase of an entire gallery of two hundred paintings to obtain nine that were worthwhile.1 This, of course, was what Henry Walters, in purchasing the Massarenti collection, hoped to avoid.
Jarves’s collection of Italian paintings was exhibited from 1860 to 1863 in New York, initially at the Institute of Fine Arts and then at the New-York Historical Society. (The Metropolitan Museum of Art did not open until 1870.) Although initially greeted by the American public with skepticism, Jarves’s collection ultimately was acquired by the Yale School of Fine Arts in 1873, where it remains today. Thereafter, Jarves returned to Italy and purchased fifty-four additional Italian paintings, including paintings by Guido Reni and Filippo Lippi, which were sold in 1884 to Liberty Holden of Cleveland and today reside at the Cleveland Museum of Art.2
Jarves’s influence on America’s nascent interest in collecting Italian paintings in the 1870s and 1880s was primarily marked not through the exhibition of his own collection of art but through his writings. In 1883, Jarves wrote “A Lesson for Merchant Princes,” an essay expressly addressed to the wealthy, upper-class businessmen of America, whom he flatteringly characterized as “princes” and compared, in their “social distinctions . . . and riches” to fifteenth-century Florentines.3 In his essay, Jarves proposed that America’s merchant princes should seek to emulate the life of Giovanni Rucellai, a wealthy Florentine merchant who, following the scholarly advice of Marsilio Ficino and with the political blessings of Cosimo de’ Medici, personified the best ideals and values of the Italian Renaissance. According to Jarves, Rucellai was a sagacious, cosmopolitan, and socially engaging patron of the arts. He resided in a palace that was a veritable museum, containing pictures by Filippo Lippi, Verrochio, Uccello, and Veneziano. But most importantly, according to Jarves, Rucellai used his wealth, his influence, and his love of art for the public good, employing the famous architect Leon Battista Alberti to construct beautiful structures throughout the city of Florence, including the façade of Santa Maria Novella. In concluding his essay, Jarves offered to the new “Merchant Princes” of America the following advice:
If we are to build up on American soil cities like Florence, world-renowned for art and science even more so than for commerce, we must breed merchant princes cultured like Rucellai, and [become] deeply imbued with his maxim, that it is pleasanter and more honorable to spend money for wise purposes than to make it.4
It is not known whether Henry Walters actually read “A Lesson for Merchant Princes” or was familiar with the life of Rucellai, but the pattern of Walters’s interests and activities aligned so closely to the idealized life of that Florentine prince that Walters likely was influenced, albeit indirectly, by him.
America’s fascination at the turn of the century with the Italian Renaissance was also kindled by the poetic writing of Walter Pater. In his essays on Botticelli, Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Winckelmann, which appeared in his book, The Renaissance, Pater wrote that the importance of the Renaissance was not as a static event in cultural history marked by time and place but as a moveable spirit that could resurface again and again wherever curiosity combined with a love of beauty.5 Although written for a literary audience in England, Pater’s book was embraced in the United States by connoisseurs, collectors, and other lovers of Italian art. In 1888, Bernard Berenson recommended the book to his client Isabella Stewart Gardner, writing to her that “many a midnight, in coming home, I took up The Renaissance and read it from cover to cover.”6 Under the spell of Pater’s ideas, Berenson left Harvard to study under Pater at Oxford and to become one of Pater’s most prominent disciples.7
While Jarves was the pioneer and Pater the laureate of the Gilded Age phenomenon of wealthy Americans collecting Italian art, Bernard Berenson, more than anyone, became its principal evangelist. Using his extraordinary intellect, impeccable scholarship, and entrepreneurial skills, Berenson convinced wealthy Americans to embark on a shopping spree for Italian Renaissance paintings that would last for a generation.8 By the 1890s, the center of the commercial world had shifted from London to New York, and European art dealers, like Duveen and Wildenstein, opportunistically opened New York offices to capitalize on the potential for new business. The burgeoning wealth in America during this period coincided with an economic depression in Italy, resulting in an increased availability of Italian Renaissance art that was placed on the market by financially strapped Italian families. Bernard Berenson, who was by then the preeminent connoisseur of Italian Renaissance paintings, shrewdly took advantage of this situation. While writing four volumes on the Italian painters of the Renaissance (The Venetian Painters of the Renaissance, The Florentine Painters of the Renaissance, The Northern Italian Painters of the Renaissance, and The Central Italian Painters of the Renaissance), which deferentially have been referred to as his “Four Gospels,” Berenson adopted the goal of converting America’s cultural landscape into a vast repository for Italian Renaissance painting.9 More specifically, he wrote that his “mission was to send [to the United States] as many Italian works of art (and incidentally others too) as I could persuade collectors to acquire.”10
Berenson developed three sources for finding and then facilitating the transfer of hundreds of Italian Renaissance paintings into the collections of his wealthy American clients. The first source comprised untold numbers of Italian runners, middlemen, and dealers who scoured the churches and estates in the Italian countryside in search of old paintings and who brought their findings to the Villa I Tatti on virtually a daily basis.11 Second were Berenson’s acquaintances in the English and other European aristocracy who owned desirable Italian Renaissance paintings and, in light of the active American market and escalating prices for these paintings, were quite willing to part with them for the right price. The third source comprised international dealers in Italian Renaissance art, principally the London dealer Colnaghi and Company, with whom Berenson was associated from approximately 1896 to 1906, and Joseph Duveen, with whom Berenson was closely tied from approximately 1912 to 1936.
By the turn of the century, Berenson’s reputation as the foremost scholar of Italian Renaissance art was well known by wealthy Americans who were attracted to the prospect of owning Italian old-master paintings. His essays on Italian painting reportedly were in the libraries of Henry Walters, Isabella Stewart Gardner, and Peter Widener, who all eventually numbered among Berenson’s elite clientele.12 To capitalize on his reputation and to attract American millionaires to purchase Italian paintings through him or to seek his valuable imprimatur regarding the paintings’ authenticity, Berenson offered not only his knowledge and sophistication but also a variety of social and intellectual enticements. Berenson would invite clients to visit him and be wined and dined at I Tatti, his elegant, thirty-acre estate outside of Florence. To American millionaires like Walters, this amounted to a very special occasion—an opportunity to hobnob with members of European royalty and other luminaries, like the writers Edith Wharton and Marcel Proust, the art historians Roger Fry and Kenneth Clark, the economist John Maynard Keynes, and the American jurist Learned Hand; to participate with a small group (usually eight) of such intellectually gifted dinner guests in discussions that ranged from art to literature, philosophy, ethics, history, and politics; to linger in Berenson’s beautifully manicured garden or stroll with him along the pathways lined with cypress and pine in the hills of Settignano overlooking Florence; to pause in his library and browse through the volumes Berenson had read or written and to gaze at his remarkable collection of photographs of Italian Renaissance paintings; and, with Berenson’s personal guidance, to examine the paintings he collected and made available for sale.13 As described by one visitor, “To be with him was to realize, once for all, what was meant by the art of looking.”14 Berenson was well aware of the exhilarating, spiritual effect that the atmosphere of I Tatti had on his guests. He once stated that “this house has a peculiar effect on people . . . It makes them behave as if they were in church.”15
Berenson also would visit the collections of his clients in America, differentiating the great from the mediocre paintings and identifying the rank copies that should be discarded. Like a magician with a magic wand, Berenson would approach a painting, stare intently at it, tap its surface, and, after a pause pregnant with anticipation, disclose the name of the artist.16 Despite such displays of legerdemain, Berenson’s colleagues and patrons knew that the real basis for his attributions was, as Roger Fry once observed, “a summing up of innumerable aesthetic judgments on the work in question . . . [and] all the aesthetic experience that has led up to it.”17 Invariably, Berenson’s visits concluded with his suggestion that the overall quality of the collection could be improved by acquiring paintings from him. To reinforce this promise, Berenson would refer favorably in his essays and books to the paintings purchased by collectors from him.18 Finally, he would offer to help his potential clients compile and publish catalogues illustrating the paintings in their own collections, which would include his description and, by implication, his valuable endorsement of them.19
To augment this marketing campaign, the dealers favored by Berenson would return the favor by publicly praising Berenson’s extraordinary visual knowledge and the value of obtaining his imprimatur when purchasing a painting. For example, Joseph Duveen purportedly counseled his clients to “never buy an Italian picture without a Berenson approval! Never!” Thus, by combining his knowledge as a connoisseur of Italian art with his sophisticated, entrepreneurial talent, Berenson became, as David Alan Brown has observed, the greatest “connoisseur-dealer” of all time.20
Berenson’s first American patron was Isabella Stewart Gardner. “If you permit me to advise you on art matters,” Berenson proposed, “it will not be many years before you possess a collection of almost unrivalled—of masterpieces, and masterpieces only.”21 Between 1894 and 1903, Gardner, based on Berenson advice, spent over one million dollars and acquired from either the London dealer P. & D. Colnaghi & Co. or directly from the owners of the paintings a succession of Italian masterpieces, highlighted by Titian’s Rape of Europa, a painting that originally was commissioned by Philip II of Spain and that was famously copied years later by Rubens. Gardner’s acquisition of Titian’s painting is credited with generating a groundswell of interest among America’s new millionaires in purchasing Italian Renaissance art.22
Berenson, like other art connoisseur-dealers at that time, had a legitimate right to be well compensated by his clients for the use of his knowledge and service in obtaining and/or authenticating old-master paintings. Despite the absence, at that time, of any codified standards governing the relationship between the purchasers and the connoisseur-dealers of cultural property,23 Berenson’s clients had a correlative right implicitly derived from common law to expect Berenson to act in good faith and to deal fairly with them. Early in his career as a connoisseur-dealer, Berenson began to breach this fundamental obligation. Without informing his clients, Berenson clandestinely began accepting and later requesting compensation from the dealers to whom he referred his clients. This practice began in the 1890s when Berenson began accepting from the art dealer Colnaghi a share of the profits obtained from the sale of paintings that Berenson had recommended to Gardner.24 Although Berenson was indebted to Gardner for helping to launch his career, he was not candid with her about this conflicting arrangement. Troubled by rumors of Berenson’s double-dealing and concerned that Berenson was overcharging her, Gardner placed these issues squarely before Berenson in a letter: “They say (there seem to be many) that you have been dishonest in your money dealings with people who have bought pictures.”25 Berenson was able to dodge this attack and retain Gardner’s patronage by disingenuously blaming any discrepancies related to pricing on Colnaghi.26 The conflicts that threatened Berenson’s relationship with Gardner foreshadowed the ethical conflicts that arose in his later dealings with Walters.
When in the early 1900s Gardner’s patronage of Berenson began to decline, Berenson and his wife Mary embarked on a six-month tour of the United States with the aim of enticing America’s new millionaires to purchase Italian Renaissance art and to rely upon Bernard Berenson as the quintessential guide for doing so.27 From October 7, 1903, to March 15, 1904, the Berensons visited New York, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C., meeting with cultural leaders, including the trustees of the Metropolitan Museum of Art; dining with bankers, industrialists, and the ranking members of America’s moneyed aristocracy; and examining the art they had collected. The Berensons were aghast at the Dutch landscapes and French Barbizon school paintings that populated private and public collections in the United States at that time.28 They privately felt that the paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art represented a “vast collection of horrors.” They visited the Walters collection of French paintings in Baltimore (the recently purchased Massarenti collection was in a warehouse in New York at the time) and similarly concluded that there were “horrors everywhere.” And after viewing the paintings in the collection of Peter Widener in Philadelphia, Mary Berenson wrote that they were the “rottenest we have yet seen.”29 To avoid alienating these potentially important clients, Bernard Berenson at that time diplomatically refrained from expressing his critical opinions about the art they collected.
The Berenson’s venture into the potentially lucrative art market of the United States was for them an unqualified financial success. Midway through their tour, Mary Berenson predicted that, “with so many fish biting at our hooks, it will be odd if we don’t haul some to shore.”30 Her prediction was on target. In Philadelphia, Bernard Berenson successfully courted John G. Johnson, who shortly thereafter became a major client. While in Philadelphia, he met Peter Widener, who, along with his son Joseph, joined the ranks of Berenson’s clients in 1914 and whose great collection was later given to the National Gallery of Art. While in New York, Berenson cultivated William Laffan, who was a highly influential advisor to J. Pierpont Morgan and other powerful members of New York’s cultural elite and who, in 1910, was instrumental in obtaining for Berenson the patronage of Henry Walters. As if to punctuate the success of Berenson’s mission to America, in March 1904, the Ehrlich Galleries of New York mounted the first commercial exhibition of Italian Renaissance paintings in this country. This “novel” exhibit, as described in the New York Times, reflected the influence of Berenson and indicated that “the pendulum seems to be swinging again towards the old Italians.”31 Looking back on Berenson’s mission to America, Ernest Samuels, Berenson’s principal biographer, has observed that “the American tour made [Berenson] the most widely known expert in Italian Renaissance art that the world had seen.”32
Unlike other wealthy art collectors who were eager to gain the acquaintance of Bernard Berenson during his trip to the United States in 1903 and 1904, Henry Walters initially kept his distance. Walters did not seek Berenson’s advice when purchasing the Massarenti collection of Italian paintings in 1902. And when Berenson visited the United States in 1904, Walters did not invite him to inspect this collection, which, at the time, was warehoused in New York. Nor did he personally greet Berenson and his wife, Mary, when they visited the Walters Gallery in Baltimore in February 1904. Perhaps he had heard rumors, already circulating in the art market, about the unethical, dark side of Berenson and the growing list of people who disliked him.33 Or, as has been speculated, Walters might have heard that Berenson had already seen the Massarenti collection in Rome and had expressed his disapproval of it.34 As we shall see, it was not until 1909, after Walters opened his Italianate art gallery in Baltimore and publicly displayed for the first time his Massarenti collection, that Walters and Berenson became personally acquainted.