How honest was Bernard Berenson?

When the great Jewish-American art expert Bernard Berenson died in 1959, he had acquired the status of a sort of sage. He was the relic of a prewar culture that had vanished. He was an embodiment of the idea of connoisseurship that had at once given birth to a great boom in art collecting and yet that was, by the end of his life, being superseded. When Berenson embarked on the career that would see him widely accepted as the world’s foremost authority on Old Masters, the painters of the Italian Renaissance were barely regarded in the US. He died — at 94 — in the age of Andy Warhol.

The very span of his life gives his story resonance. Born Bernhard Valvrojenski, the son of a Jewish tin-peddler in the Pale of Settlement in Lithuania, and having grown up in Boston, he ended up living, as it seemed, the life of a wealthy Renaissance gentleman in Italy — though only narrowly did he and his art collection survive fascism and the second world war.

He was a prodigiously sociable man — a captivating conversationalist and hugely attractive to women. Both he and his wife Mary put it about like mad, though she didn’t always get her man. Of Geoffrey Scott, with whom Mary was at one point infatuated, Lytton Strachey wrote:

He remains a confirmed sodomite and she covers him with fur coats, editions of rare books and even bank notes, all of which he accepts without a word and without an erection.

Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde stroll in and out of this story, as do Bertrand Russell, Marcel Proust, Maxim Gorky, André Gide, Jean Cocteau and Cole Porter. And at the other end of things we meet Kenneth Clark, a Berenson disciple, as well as Hemingway, Steinbeck and the young Ray Bradbury.