New York has lost the chance of a generation and at one blow Baltimore has raised herself far above all other American cities by the purchase of the collection of Don Marcello Massarenti of Rome . . . a collection that will make our Metropolitan Museum look silly and place the Walters Museum in Baltimore on a level with the great public museums of London, Paris and Berlin.
—The New York Times, May 11, 1902
Loaded with 275 crates containing seventeen hundred works of art that related to twenty-five centuries of history, culture, and archaeological treasures, including Roman and Greek sculpture and more than nine hundred paintings, 520 of which were purportedly by Leonardo, Raphael, Titian, Caravaggio, and other Italian masters, the British steamship SS Minterne, on the morning of July 12, 1902, sailed into the New York harbor, as if on a mission to refashion the culture of America in the style of a Renaissance prince. All of the art aboard the ship had been purchased by Henry Walters, the wealthy, well-cultivated, and socially prominent president of the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad, from Don Marcello Massarenti of Rome, who had amassed the collection over the course of fifty years while serving in the influential position of Assistant Almoner to the Holy See. Although unloaded in New York City, the massive art collection, consistent with its Italianate quality and antique character, would ultimately be housed in a museum designed in the Renaissance Revival style of a fifteenth-century Florentine palazzo and constructed in Walters’s native city of Baltimore, Maryland.
By the turn of the last century, the Italian Renaissance represented to upper-class society and the new captains of finance and industry in the United States an idealized model of artistic, intellectual, and financial sophistication for translating wealth into culture. Through the acquisition of Italian old masters, the collection of Renaissance-vintage books, and the adoption of Renaissance Revival architecture in the construction of new residences, museums, and libraries, wealthy Americans sought to wrap themselves with the visual symbols and, by implication, the cultural values of the Italian Renaissance.1 In the context of this cultural phenomenon, Henry Walters’s purchase of the encyclopedic Massarenti collection was a significant, groundbreaking event that captured the attention of art connoisseurs on both shores of the Atlantic. It was “an acquisition then unprecedented in the annals of American collecting,” as William R. Johnston, the biographer of William and Henry Walters, has observed.2 And it propelled Henry Walters into the elite circle of America’s millionaires whose patronage of the arts would be described in Medicean terms.
The significance of this event was reflected in its extensive coverage by the New York Times, whose editors apprehended that Baltimore, by reason of the Massarenti collection, would eclipse New York in the firmament of the world’s cultural centers.3 The newspaper coverage began on May 11, 1902, when the New York Times used the following headline in reporting Massarenti’s intent to sell his “wonderful” art collection to Henry Walters:
Titians, Peruginos, Pinturicchios, Paolo Veronese, Tintorettos Among the 1,000 Canvases in the Wonderful Collection
This headline suggests that the names of Italian Renaissance masters resonated in the consciousness of the New York public with a familiarity similar to the names of New York Yankee baseball stars of today. The headline also reflects the fact that the public’s interest was focused on the Italian Renaissance paintings, even though the paintings represented only a fraction of the treasured objects in the Massarenti collection. In a separate editorial, on the same date, the New York Times claimed that the Massarenti collection contained two hundred masterpieces, chiefly of the Florentine and Venetian schools, and opined that it “will place the Walters Museum in Baltimore on a level with the great public museums of London, Paris and Berlin.”
On May 14, 1902, the Baltimore Sun reported that Walters had spent over a month in Rome examining the Massarenti collection but that the deal remained unconsummated because the parties had not agreed upon the purchase price.4 As if buoyed by this news, the New York Times tried to rally New Yorkers to purchase the collection for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, whose collection at that time was devoid of any significant Italian Renaissance paintings. In this regard, the Times, on May 18, 1902, cautioned that “the time is past when Europe can offer great collections of this kind.” And on May 20, 1902, it floated the prospect that New York could still contend for the “great collection which Henry Walters seeks . . . if her rich men are equal to the occasion.”
The effort to entice New Yorkers to purchase the collection was unavailing. On July 13, 1902, in a front page story, the New York Times reported that Henry Walters had finalized his purchase of the Massarenti collection by promising Massarenti to keep the collection intact and that he would pay Massarenti 5,000,000 lire, which was roughly equivalent to $1,000,000 at that time. This price, in the opinion of the Times, was a “great bargain.”5 On the same date, the Baltimore Sun proudly reported that the Massarenti collection was headed for Baltimore with “a portrait by Raphael of himself, [and] a painting by Titian, either of which would add distinction to any collection.”6
As he read these flattering accounts of the Italian masterpieces he supposedly was bringing to America, Henry Walters’s momentary pleasure was undoubtedly shaken by his own, private misgivings about the overall quality of the collection and the likelihood that many, if not most, of the attributions given to the paintings by Massarenti were fabricated, intentionally or otherwise.7 As a result of his education, experience, and cultivation, Walters certainly was aware that the Massarenti collection was infected with a virus of misattributions engendered by the deeply rooted Italian tradition of making endless copies of Renaissance masterpieces. He also undoubtedly was aware that others engaged in the field of Italian old master paintings, like Wilhelm von Bode, the director of the Friedrich Museum in Berlin, and the art dealer Joel Duveen, had previously inspected the Massarenti collection and had summarily dismissed it as a hodgepodge of second-rate imitations.8 As if to guard against the risk that his family’s reputation as art collectors would be soiled by his acquisition of copies and mediocre paintings, Walters, shortly after the collection arrived in the United States, boasted that “there will surely be 25 percent of the collection that I will dispose of because I have better pieces of work of the same kind.”9
Henry Walters’s goal in purchasing the Massarenti collection and placing it in an Italianate gallery in Baltimore was not only to elevate his own stature but also and more importantly to enshrine the memory of his father, William T. Walters, whose fame as a collector of French painting and sculpture and Asian ceramics had already become legendary.10 Shortly after his father’s death in 1894, Henry Walters expressed to friends that one of the most important, remaining goals of his life was to memorialize the achievements of his father by elevating the family art collection to the status of a great public institution.11 When the new gallery opened in 1909, Henry Walters prominently installed above its entrance an elaborate cartouche containing the bronze bust of his father stationed triumphantly upon the cornice of an ancient Roman temple and draped with swags of ornamental leaves, like those used to decorate ancient Roman sarcophagi (fig. 1). Conceived of and dedicated at a time when wealthy Americans vied to be surrounded with the symbols of Italy’s cultural heritage, the cartouche signified that the image of William Walters as a cultural hero would forever serve as the Walters Art Gallery’s coat of arms.
There is within the story of Henry Walters’s acquisition and refinement of the Massarenti collection of paintings a paradoxical tale of attention and inattention spurred by Walter’s passion for collecting but relative indifference to the joy of beholding a painting and becoming emotionally engaged in its visual pleasures. Surprisingly, Henry Walters rarely saw or demonstrated much interest in seeing the Italian paintings he collected. Unlike other contemporary collectors, such as Isabella Stewart Gardner, John G. Johnson, P. A. B. Widener, Benjamin Altman, and Samuel Kress, who lived with their art, Henry Walters acted like a stranger to the Italian paintings he acquired. He kept for himself none of the paintings he purchased from Massarenti. Not a single painting by an Italian Renaissance artist is known to have graced Walters’s elaborately decorated homes in New York City and Wilmington, North Carolina. Rather, they all were destined to be housed in Baltimore in the Italianate museum he built but rarely visited and to be viewed primarily by later generations he would never meet.
When Walters opened his new museum to the public in 1909 and displayed for the first time his collection of Italian paintings, he, like Massarenti before him, pretended that the collection was rich with paintings by Botticelli, Caravaggio, Correggio, Duccio, Ghirlandaio, Giotto, Leonardo da Vinci, Masaccio, Michelangelo, Perugino, Raphael, Guido Reni, Andrea del Sarto, Tintoretto, Titian, Verrocchio, Veronese, and other Italian masters. Among the paintings by these masters, the two that Walters touted most highly were self-portraits allegedly by Raphael and Michelangelo (figs. 2 and 3). If the attributions had been true, these paintings would have crowned the best of collections. Although Walters doubted the accuracy of these attributions, he was willing to sacrifice candor and suspend objectivity in favor of the accolades and fanfare that the names of these famous artists would likely bring to the museum and add to the legacy of the Walters’ name.
FIGURE 1. Cartouche with bronze bust of William T. Walters. The cartouche was placed over the main entrance of the Walters Art Gallery in 1909 at the time of the museum’s grand opening. Photograph by author.
FIGURE 2. Self-portrait at the Age of 25, attributed by Massarenti and subsequently by Walters to Raphael, downgraded and reattributed to the Florentine School, sixteenth century, as Portrait of Raphael. Oil on panel, 24½ × 18½ in. WAM 37.483. The portrait was considered by Massarenti as the jewel of his collection. Walters adopted Massarenti’s attribution, and at the grand opening of the Walters Art Gallery in 1909, Walters proudly claimed that the painting was “Raphael’s own portrait from his own studio.” Photograph WAM Archives.
FIGURE 3. Self-portrait, attributed by Massarenti and subsequently by Walters to Michelangelo, downgraded and reattributed to the Central Italian School, late sixteenth century, as Portrait of Michelangelo. Oil on panel, 25½ × 19½ in. WAM 37.487. Massarenti claimed that this painting was “the only and unique portrait of this master.” In the catalogue prepared for the grand opening of the Walters Art Gallery in 1909, Walters called this painting “His Own Portrait” and claimed that it, like Raphael’s self-portrait, came “from his own studio.” Photograph WAM Archives.
The pretense had its immediate rewards. The New York Times called the Walters collection “magnificent.”12 The museum was hailed as “the greatest gallery in America” and described as a “great temple of art.”13 Walters’s reputation as America’s new Medici soared. His collection attracted the interest of dignitaries across the country, including Bernard Berenson, the world’s leading connoisseur of Italian Renaissance painting, who hoped to add Walters to the illustrious list of American millionaires who had become his clients.
To recruit Walters into his fold, Berenson made an irresistible offer. He proposed to analyze Walters’s massive collection of Italian paintings, to verify the attributions, and to distinguish the good paintings from the bad. Most importantly, he offered to write a handsome and scholarly catalogue that would illustrate and trumpet the virtues of Walters’s important Italian Renaissance paintings and that would be distributed on both sides of the Atlantic for cultured people everywhere to read. Moreover, Berenson offered to provide these invaluable services without demanding any monetary compensation in return.
In essence, what Berenson proposed to lend to Walters’s collection of Italian paintings was his name, a name that was synonymous with scholarship. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the sine qua non of any serious collection of paintings, public or private, was scholarship. This was the quality that the Walters collection of Italian paintings seriously lacked. Despite its fanfare, it was a collection of Italian paintings that had, at best, a fragile provenance, no documented history, and no imprimatur from any recognized authority. It was a collection that violated the cardinal rule espoused by Berenson that “every painting purchased for a . . . great museum should be of overwhelming and indispensable authority.”14 The imprimatur of scholarship was what was missing from Walters’s collection of Italian paintings and what Berenson, more than anyone else in the world, could provide.
Walters, however, was wary of Berenson. Although Berenson’s stamp of approval was invaluable, Berenson was also notoriously unpredictable in how he would grade a work of art. He could bury a painting as easily as praise it. In evaluating Berenson’s offer, Walters had to weigh the pressing need to attach a credible badge of authenticity to his sizable collection of Italian paintings against the risk that Berenson’s assessment, like a boomerang, could do more damage to the collection than good. Walters also understood that the motivation for Berenson’s proposal was not purely academic. Berenson was not only a famous connoisseur but also a profit-driven merchant in culture whose dichotomy of worldly, aesthetic interests and personal, business interests had been known to conflict. Walters understood that Berenson expected him to become his client, to begin purchasing expensive paintings from him, and in this manner to compensate him well, albeit indirectly, for his service. Walters weighed the benefits and potential detriments of Berenson’s proposal for two months before accepting it.
As revealed in their extensive correspondence of more than sixty letters, Walters and Berenson developed a warm and personal relationship that appeared to transcend the harsh realities of the commercial art market. For three years, each spring, Berenson wined and dined Walters at I Tatti, Berenson’s beautiful villa located in the Tuscan hills overlooking Florence. Even for a person as wealthy, cultivated, and worldly as Walters—who was among the richest men in America, who controlled the country’s largest railroad, who was an influential trustee of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, who could go anywhere and buy almost anything he wanted, and who circled the earth aboard his luxurious yacht in search of worldly treasures—to be Berenson’s guest at I Tatti was an extraordinary experience. The rare pleasure of being courted by Berenson at his beautiful Florentine estate was succinctly expressed by Walters in a letter of appreciation: “I really do not believe that I have enjoyed anything more in my life than I did the month spent in Italy last summer.”15
Walters was seduced by Berenson’s charm, extraordinary intellect, connoisseurship, and savoir-faire. He purchased more than thirty Italian Renaissance and Baroque paintings from Berenson, and he promised Berenson that he would be governed by his advice and directions. By the summer of 1912, he had become Berenson’s most active client. But shortly thereafter Berenson’s courtship of Walters ended and their relationship dramatically changed. Behind Walters’s back, Berenson had entered into a lucrative, secret contract with the controversial art dealer Joseph Duveen which required Berenson to offer all first-rate Italian paintings to Duveen and his clients before offering them to other collectors like Walters. The contract, like an invisible fence, restricted Walters’s access to the best paintings in the marketplace. Walters instinctively pushed back. He conveyed to Berenson that he had neither the time nor resources to purchase more Italian paintings from him. He left many of the Italian paintings that had been sold to him by Berenson in the bowels of his gallery uncrated, unseen, and for years unappreciated. He turned his attention to the acquisition of other forms of art from all ages and across all cultures. And his collection of Italian paintings became like a small wave in a vast sea of art that began to inundate his gallery.
In March 1914, when the prospect for continued business with Walters had become secondary to the profits he was obtaining from Duveen, Berenson visited the Walters Art Gallery to complete the mission, undertaken almost five years earlier, of assessing the quality of Walters’s collection of Italian paintings. It was an evaluation that Walters had asked for but painfully would never forget. It illustrated Berenson’s facility to move from the comforting language of flattery expressed when courting a client to the icy criticism of connoisseurship for which Berenson had become notorious when examining the art of a stranger. During the course of one week, Berenson, as if on a mission to exorcise the devil, plowed through the collection of Italian paintings that Walters had purchased from Massarenti, sweeping away countless forgeries of old-master paintings as if they were yesterday’s trash, and changing most of the attributions. “Berenson weeded out right and left,” read one newspaper report.16 In light of Walters’s prior claim that he had acquired a parade of world-class Renaissance masterpieces, Berenson’s contrary assessment was an embarrassing turn of events. It chilled Walters’s interest in venturing much further into the risky market for Italian art. Worse yet, as he revealed to Berenson, it stymied his interest in improving and reopening his gallery to the public during his lifetime. The doubt raised about the quality of Walters’s collection of Italian paintings was compounded two years later when Berenson, in a book about American collections of Venetian art, sharply criticized some of Walters’s paintings. As if indifferent to the harm this would cause to Walters’s reputation as a collector and to the collection itself, Berenson ridiculed several of the Venetian paintings Walters had acquired from Massarenti as being by “tenth rate” artists.17
Although unappreciated by Walters at that time and overlooked by scholars until now, Berenson’s criticism did more than merely cut away at the attributions and the paintings that he believed lacked merit. Berenson transformed the very character of the entire Italian painting collection. What ultimately emerged as a result of his criticism was a collection that had been shorn of pretension and replaced by an array of notable paintings by outstanding although lesser-known artists that effectively conveyed the history of Italian Renaissance and Baroque painting over the course of four hundred years. It was a triumph of scholarship over embellishment, and it established an exacting standard of professionalism that has remained the hallmark of the Walters Art Museum. Today the museum’s collection of Italian Renaissance and Baroque paintings stands as one of the finest of its kind in the United States.18
The story of Walters, Berenson, and the Massarenti collection evokes the pleasures and perils of collecting Italian Renaissance paintings during America’s Gilded Age. It was a time when copies of paintings purportedly by Renaissance masters flooded the market, when the identities of the actual artists were as clouded as the constellations on a stormy night, and when the ethics of the marketplace were as hard to define as the tenets of the Dead Sea scrolls. It was a time when, due to all of these ambiguities, the acquisition of an Italian Renaissance painting, as Walters painfully learned, was fraught with uncertainty and the ancient warning of caveat emptor was implicit in every sale. What bound Don Massarenti, Henry Walters, and Bernard Berenson together was not simply their passion for art and their respective roles in the sale, acquisition, and improvement of the same massive collection of Italian paintings, but their eagerness to capitalize on the ambiguities and risks that were endemic in this cultural field at that time. Just as Massarenti and Walters in succession shaded the truth about the attributions in the collection, Berenson repeatedly danced around the truth involving his own obligation to improve it. He overstated the quality and condition of many of the paintings that he sold to Walters, he pretended to be making progress on Walters’s catalogue when in reality he had placed this project aside, and he concealed from Walters his ethically questionable contract with Joseph Duveen, by which Walters’s interests had been rendered secondary to Berenson’s personal greed.
All of this dissembling took its toll. After becoming painfully aware of the fragility of Berenson’s devotion to his interests, Walters in 1917 formally severed their dealer-client relationship and purchased no more paintings from him. As if to obscure Berenson’s important role in transforming his collection, Walters removed from his library the books that Berenson had authored, retained no coherent record of the paintings he purchased from Berenson, discarded most of the letters he received from Berenson, and scrubbed the Berenson name from the annals of the Walters Art Gallery as if it were a four-letter word. As a result of these actions, scholars until now have been left in the dark about the significant influence that Berenson had on Walters’s collection of Italian paintings.
Toward the end of their lives, both Berenson and Walters looked back with regret on the events that had interrupted their earlier dreams. Berenson, in a highly publicized book of self-criticism, lamented his decision to sacrifice the demands of independent connoisseurship and the loyalty that he owed to his friends and clients for the wealth he acquired through his uneasy alliance with Duveen. Walters regretted his inattention to the collection of Italian paintings that once had been his source of pride. In a will prepared in 1922, Walters expressed his intent to leave his gallery and art collection to the people of Baltimore. It was a bequest of unprecedented generosity. But thereafter Walters did little to nurture the collection he planned to leave behind. He rarely traveled to Baltimore to visit it. When the gallery’s part-time curator died, Walters decided not to replace him. The gallery’s skylights were shrouded in canvas, and, except for a few days each spring, the gallery was left dark, depressing, and ordinarily off limits to the outside world. It began to function more as a depot for the storage of art than as a cultural palace in which to enjoy it. Without the attention of any curator or artistic director, Walters’s gallery and his once revered collection of Italian paintings lost its élan and simply vanished for many years from the consciousness of America’s cultural elite and of art lovers everywhere. Along with the discarded paintings once attributed to Michelangelo and Raphael, Walters’s dream of honoring his father and glorifying the Walters name through the publication of a scholarly catalogue written by Berenson escaped his grasp and, as we shall see, troubled his conscience for years to come.
