Bernard Berenson
Bernard Berenson was born on June 26, 1865, in Vilnius, and he later became a citizen of the United States. Those two facts alone sketch a life that crossed considerable geographic and cultural distance, from Eastern Europe to the broader world of American intellectual life that he would eventually enter.
He attended Boston Latin School, then Boston University, and then Harvard University, building the foundation for a career that took in writing, art history, art criticism, and connoisseurship. He also worked as an art collector, giving a practical dimension to his analytical pursuits. His languages — English, German, Italian, and French — reflect the range of cultural contexts he moved through as a critic and historian.
Berenson died on October 6, 1959, in Florence, the Italian city where his life came to its close. That final detail, a man born in Vilnius ending his days in Florence, captures something of the geographic sweep that defined his long career as an art historian, critic, collector, and writer.
Quotes by Bernard Berenson
All of the arts, poetry, music, ritual, the visible arts, the theater, must singly and together create the most comprehensive art of all, a humanized society, and its masterpiece, free man.
Consistency, commonly thought of as a good thing, requires you to be as ignorant today as you wre a year ago.
Art is mind and heart and touch as much and more than it is mere instrument, technique – without which however it cannot exist at all.
There are two futures, the future of desire and the future of fate, and man’s reason has never learned to separate them.
We usually meet all of our relatives only at funerals where somebody always observes: “Too bad we can’t get together more often”.
All we really want is otherness, tossing from side to side, and greeting every toss with shouts of welcome, and of contempt for the previous toss
Governments last only as long as the undertaxed can defend themselves against the overtaxed
It makes me happy to encounter goodness, love of work, humane intelligence, and people no matter at what kind of job, be it ever so humble, or ever so exalted, who do it well and con amore.
The ultimate justification of the work of art is to help the spectator to become a work of art himself.