Kenneth Clark

by James Stourton

  * * *

  *1 Founded in 1866, the Burlington Fine Arts Club was where connoisseurs and art collectors gathered and mounted exhibitions. Its premises were originally opposite Burlington House (hence the name) in Piccadilly, and in Clark’s day at Savile Row.

  *2 Alois Riegl (1858–1905), Austrian art historian whose masterpiece Spät-Romische Kunst-Industrie was to greatly influence Clark. Heinrich Wölfflin (1864–1945), Swiss art historian who taught in Germany, writing major books concerned with form and style in Renaissance and Baroque art.

  *3 ‘Jane’s father was a very charming man, but completely idle. Jane was fond of him and indulged him, but he was a non-stop talker, which became rather a bore to us all. Fortunately she found a way of sending him off to South Africa where he became secretary of the bowls club in Durban, and no doubt could always find a wretched listener.’ Clark to Meryle Secrest, 27 August 1973 (I Tatti).

  6

  BB

  [Berenson] wanted to respond to works of art as part of an overall experience of life, and he hoped to describe this experience, in all its complexity, as the unifying element in the history of man’s spirit.

  KENNETH CLARK, ‘Aesthete’s Progress’1

  The story of Kenneth Clark’s relationship with BB is one of enduring love and ambivalence. ‘The character of Mr Berenson,’ as he once wrote, ‘was like the sharp ridge of a mountain running from east to west. If you stood on the south side it was fascinating and, in his own words, life-enhancing. If you went onto the north side there were aspects that made one very uneasy.’2 Clark generally experienced the south side of the mountain, but at the time of his arrival at I Tatti Berenson was at the peak of his influence in the art world, and success had made him bombastic and opinionated; the north side often loomed. The fundamental difficulty was that Clark’s presence at I Tatti was based on a misunderstanding. Berenson viewed Clark as an assistant who would undertake the revision work on Florentine Drawings, a project that was as necessary as it was daunting. But Clark, who was unlikely to be anybody’s assistant for long – as Mary Berenson soon realised – saw himself as a collaborator.

  Berenson’s remarkable story has often been told. Born in 1865 to a Jewish family in Lithuania and brought up in Boston, he was an autodidact whose education took place in the public library and at Boston and Harvard Universities. His early interests were in Oriental languages and literature. It was not until he went to Italy that he changed direction and began his lifelong study of Renaissance artists. Berenson fell in love with Italy, and poor as he was, travelled from one dusty village church to another in pursuit of his work. It was in a café in Bergamo that he had his famous epiphany to dedicate himself to connoisseurship, with ‘no thought of a reward…we must not stop till we are sure that every Lotto is a Lotto, every Cariani a Cariani’; he conceived his life as a sacred mission.

  Connoisseurship has taken some hard knocks since Berenson’s time – indeed, partly because of the financial rewards it brought him – but it has always been necessary to know who painted what, and this was especially so in the undeveloped field in which Berenson began to operate. He was building on the foundations of Crowe and Cavalcaselle,3 and above all Giovanni Morelli, who had begun an analysis of the ‘handwriting’ of Italian artists. Morelli had studied comparative anatomy in Germany, and began to apply a similar scientific method of classification to the study of painting, through attention to details such as hands and drapery, in what critics called the ‘ear and toenail school’. Berenson became the most famous practitioner of this approach, although he emerged as a singular kind of art historian. While British writers such as Walter Pater might describe works of art in literary terms, and Germans might attempt to analyse them, Berenson used his encyclopaedic knowledge to create accurate ‘lists’ of the corpus of Italian Renaissance artists. With the publication of these lists, and the influential introductory essays that went with them, Berenson’s opinion became almost Holy Writ amongst dealers and collectors. Their appearance coincided with the unprecedented exodus of art from Europe to America, and Berenson’s imprimatur was considered the most likely to be accurate in a field of speculative guesswork.

  In 1900 Berenson had married Mary Costelloe, who came from a Philadelphia Quaker background. With what Clark called her ‘Chaucerian common sense’, Mary considered nothing more important than a home, stability and outward signs of success. Where her husband was exquisite, secretive and cerebral, Mary was large, impulsive, trusting and energetic. Clark described them together: ‘Mr Berenson was small and nimble and the sight of them walking together in the hills reminded me of a solicitous mahout directing the steps of an elephant.’4 Mary always needed money, initially to enlarge I Tatti and later to subsidise her children by a previous marriage. She strongly encouraged BB to use his talents commercially, although neither of them could have foreseen how lucrative this would become. The retainers and commissions he earned from art dealers, especially the ebullient Joseph Duveen,5 for authenticating paintings made BB a rich man. Duveen was the most successful of all art dealers, by dint of his access not only to the sellers in Europe, but more importantly the buyers in America, which gave him a paramount position in that extraordinary transfer of art across the Atlantic – facilitated by Berenson’s passport.

  The most visible manifestation of the Berensons’ new affluence was the development of the gardens and the library at I Tatti. The interior of the villa still contains large, beautiful white rooms with touches of damask that set off BB’s extraordinary collection of Renaissance paintings. The house remains comfortable rather than luxurious, a perfect retreat for a humanist scholar. At the heart of the house, and its main point, was the sombre library which some thought was BB’s finest achievement; it is one of the best collections of art history books anywhere. Eventually I Tatti became as famous as its owner – the two became synonymous – and as Clark wrote: ‘There are many more spectacular villas in Italy but none have played a greater role in the cultural life of Europe – and the United States – for over half a century.’6

  The Berensons enjoyed a princely train de vie at I Tatti, with the support of a large staff. Every day distinguished or merely rich visitors would be invited up for lunch, while those of lesser importance came for tea. The responsibility for the guests would rest with Nicky Mariano, whom Clark described as ‘one of the most universally beloved people in the world’. Nicky – ‘half Neapolitan and half Baltic baron’ – had originally been hired as BB’s librarian and secretary. Many people fell in love with her, but she reserved herself for the Berensons, and never lost their adoration. She was the living embodiment of Berenson’s favourite phrase, ‘life enhancing’. Clark once said that the most genuine thing about BB was his love for Nicky. She oiled the wheels of life at I Tatti while Mr and Mrs Berenson pursued emotionally chaotic lives in different directions.

  Mary especially liked clever young Englishmen; before Clark arrived, her sister Alys Russell had already introduced Lytton Strachey, Maynard Keynes and Geoffrey Scott to the Berensons. Scott was the author of The Architecture of Humanism (which was already a major influence on Clark’s temporarily set-aside book on the Gothic Revival), and was to become a central figure in the Anglo-American Florentine world. Mary fell in love with this homme fatale, who became entrusted with much of the architectural work at I Tatti, while his partner, the architect Cecil Pinsent, oversaw the design of the formal garden. This contained box hedges and pebble mosaics, with cypress walks and ilex groves beyond. Both men were party to many of Mary’s fanciful schemes – often accomplished in BB’s absence, and the cause of Jehovah-like rages. Added to this ménage was Mary’s brother Logan, who had his own room at I Tatti and remained a sardonic observer. Logan’s occasional funny stories would be dismissed by BB with, ‘Dear me, what a smutty old clown Logan is becoming.’ Another key member of the court was Umberto Morra,7 a scholarly young literary friend whose anti-fascist views made him especially welcome, and who was to become a lifelong friend
of Clark, and almost a son to Berenson. Finally, visitors included BB’s numerous girlfriends, the most significant of whom was the exotic siren who ran the Morgan Library in New York, Belle da Costa Greene. BB would write to her with the same frequency with which Clark would later write to his own girlfriends.

  The dependency on art dealers that underpinned the economics of I Tatti is generally credited with having distracted Berenson from writing ‘the great book’. He left behind some brilliant fragmentary writings, including propositions about the nature of our responses to works of art with his ‘tactile values’, but the ‘lists’ with their introductory essays, especially The Drawings of the Florentine Painters, remain his most important art historical legacy. According to Clark’s view, Berenson’s disillusionment with his life choices was very evident by the 1920s, and he spoke surprisingly rarely about art. Clark wondered if distaste for the means of earning a living had not in some way put Berenson off the Italian Renaissance, for he studied – and talked about – almost everything else. His conversation at meals was customarily a monologue on history or literature. Typically, he might summarise the decline of Classical art, the rise of the Persian epic, the early history of the Scythians, and offer a warning about the evils of fascism. But it was on his afternoon walks, without a grand audience to show off to, that Berenson was at his best. Then he would talk about nature with a sensitivity which reminded Clark that underneath he possessed the soul of a poet, who had lost his way.

  Why did Berenson take Clark on? A handsome, clever Oxford acolyte was always welcome, but there was a specific task in mind. As Clark put it, ‘During these years collectors, dealers and students of art history were all clamouring for revised lists, and I don’t see how Mr Berenson could have refused them.’8 The ‘lists’ were by now very out of date, and a standing reproach to BB’s own revisions and reputation; someone was needed to do the groundwork. The revised lists and the accompanying text would be much less fun to compile than the originals – no pilgrimages to fragrant valleys north of Bergamo, but instead a mass of dubious photographs: ‘Those photographs!’ said Clark. ‘They were like a plague of flies which descended on I Tatti, driving everybody mad.’9 Berenson proposed that Clark simply go and browse in the library, but the practical Mary set him to work on Giovanni Bellini. Soon, however, he abandoned browsing and started in earnest on the revision of Drawings of the Florentine Painters. Graduating from the I Tatti library to the Gabinetto dei Disegni of the Uffizi, he found dozens of drawings not in the ‘lists’, but when he took his notes back to BB ‘he was not much interested. He had done his work fifty years ago, and did not want to be reminded of it.’*1

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  Clark fitted well into I Tatti. BB found him ‘thorough and painstaking’, and ‘genial and loveable always consumed with intellectual passion’.10 Mary wrote to her family: ‘It is quite moving to see how Kenneth admires B.B. Nothing is lost on that boy, he is so marvellously cultivated that he can follow intelligently almost every path that B.B. opens.’11 Clark did everything he could to be useful. I Tatti was much more than an education in art for him. Florence became an emotional centre for the rest of his life, and BB a father figure. At I Tatti Clark found for the first time a family and a community to which he felt he belonged. Many years later he wrote rather wistfully to Janet Stone, ‘Celly*2 rang from Litton Cheney12 and said “we are a little community”, which gave me a pang, I would so much love to be a part of it. Perhaps I was part of the community of I Tatti, but never since.’13 Charles Bell had been right to warn of the virulence Berenson expressed at every meal about friends and colleagues, especially Roger Fry, but Clark found this merely tiresome.

  Soon after his arrival at I Tatti, Clark accompanied the Berensons with Nicky on a tour of Italian galleries. There were several adventures: in Milan he encountered Diaghilev; in Treviglio he was arrested for stealing a church treasure; in Brescia BB’s shawl was stolen and returned after a priestly appeal from the pulpit; and in Padua they were entertained, to BB’s pleasure, by ‘a very great lady’, the Countess Papafava. The local museums could be a trial, with their talkative curators and endless galleries of second-rate pictures. Clark probably sympathised with Mary’s frustration as BB spent hours poring over unattributable paintings of the late Middle Ages that added no value to their enterprise. However, the trip was aesthetically important for Clark. He began to glimpse BB’s early fascination with the unpredictable Lotto, and was awed by ‘the intolerable confidence of Titian’. But it was Giotto in Padua that made the most lasting impression. Confronted with the greatest storyteller in Italian art, Clark saw the pitiful limitations of ‘significant form’ and ‘tactile values’.*3 In Parma, looking at Correggio, Clark describes ‘another moment of vision which was to lie dormant in my imagination…a realisation of the ecstasy of martyrdom, which came to me before Correggio’s picture of S. Placidus and S. Flavia. It was the moment I became capable of writing the chapter on the Counter-Reformation in Civilisation.’14

  Mary Berenson mysteriously left the party to disappear back to I Tatti. On their return the reason became apparent. She felt that the unpretentious architecture of I Tatti needed something more assertive, and had instructed Cecil Pinsent in BB’s absence to install a central clock on the garden façade. Berenson’s invariable reaction to Mary’s follies was to faint, take to his bed and demand their removal, but it was usually too late. Her elevated clock is still there, and much admired.

  All the inhabitants of I Tatti were puzzled by Clark’s romantic life – or the seeming lack of it. Mary had hoped he might marry one of her granddaughters, BB that he would find a great lady in Florence, but the suspicion dawned on the household that they had misunderstood his proclivities, and that Clark was drawn to boys. Mary, with her usual naïve optimism, decided that he should move out of I Tatti to share a house with the obviously gay Cecil Pinsent. ‘Driven into a corner by this bizarre proposition,’ Clark relates that ‘I had no alternative but to come out with the truth, “Mary, I want to get married.” ’15 This announcement, made in December, pleased nobody, as it would change the fragile dynamic of the I Tatti court. It was the end of the apprenticeship as the Berensons had conceived it, with Clark as the solicitous, ever-available bachelor.

  Clark claims that after this conversation with Mary he wired Jane, asking her to marry him and proposing a date, 10 January 1927 – which suggests that they already had an understanding on the subject. She immediately wired back her acceptance. Mary, with her strong sense of family, set about finding a house that would be suitable for them when they returned together as a married couple. Clark wrote to John Sparrow announcing his arrival in England, but made no reference to the wedding. This was characteristic of his peculiar attitude to the event: ‘I shall be living at St Ermins for a few weeks trying to finish the Gothic Revival. Probably Jane will be living with me, but you must try not to mind that. I have a morbid dread of living alone out here.’16 He left I Tatti after Christmas, and all that BB said when he went to say goodbye was ‘I don’t mind.’ But he did, and he felt that Clark had betrayed him.

  Clark had disengaged from C.F. Bell to work at I Tatti, and by marrying Jane he had taken the first step towards independence from Berenson. Although he came to have doubts about BB, Clark was always clear about his debt to him. He said it best in the Sunday Times piece he wrote on Berenson’s death: ‘His fear of pedantry made him unwilling to give the generations of young men who frequented I Tatti any sort of formal instruction. But I think we were his pupils: for at almost every meal, and on those unforgettable walks, our eyes were opened and our minds were filled. At first we might resent the hard knocks administered to local gods. But as we came to realise that neither Oxford nor Bloomsbury nor Cambridge Mass. had established the ultimate boundaries of civilisation, we found ourselves entering a larger inheritance. We were educated as few young men since the Renaissance…for we learned to think of civilised life as catholic and apostolic…and we came to believe that love of art is o
nly a part of the love of life. I owe him more than I can say and probably much more than I know.’17

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  Clark’s wedding was one of the oddest events he ever described. After leaving I Tatti, instead of going home to see his fiancée or help with arrangements, he went to Rome. The closest he got to a stag night was his last dinner in Rome, in the company of Lytton Strachey, the orientalist Arthur Waley and his partner the dancer and critic Beryl de Zoete. He arrived in London on the eve of the wedding, organised by Jane’s mother, who had been supplied with his draconian instructions: no wedding dress, no bridesmaids, no reception and no church. He wanted the ceremony to take place in a register office, but Jane and her mother insisted on a church. It is perfectly possible that Clark had never actually been to a wedding before. The dismal event took place at St Peter’s church in Eaton Square. Clark gave as his occupation ‘art critic’, the one thing he had assured his father he would not become. His former travelling companion Leigh Ashton was best man, and the few guests – consisting mostly of Clark family servants – dispersed after the service. The bride and groom had lunch alone with his parents at the gloomy St Ermin’s Hotel.

  Clark described the event to Mary Berenson: ‘We were married in a hideous church – not even Gothic Revival. But it only took fourteen minutes, so I can’t grumble. Everyone seemed satisfied except the pew opener who refused to believe that two such drab and youthful people could be bride and bridegroom. No organ, no champagne and only half-a-dozen handshakes: I call that a success.’18

  Whatever was he doing? Clark claims that it was his mother’s Quakerish fear of ritual that overcame him, but why did Jane – who loved all the things he denied her on her wedding day – put up with this? There is no clear answer. Clark could certainly be selfish, as Mary Berenson divined, and Jane was probably still in awe of his family.