THE PURSUIT OF "IT"

It was a morning in early summer. A silver haze shimmered and trembled over the lime trees. The air was laden with their fragrance. The temperature was like a caress. I remember . . . that I climbed up a tree stump and felt suddenly immersed in Itness. I did not call it by that name. I had no need for words. It and I were one.

CRITIC Bernard Berenson, now a vigorous, sharp-tongued 89, has been pursuing what he calls "it" ever since that early boyhood experience. The chase has led inward more often than outward, and resulted in a brilliant, harmonious and fruitful life. The "it" of Berenson's dreams has nothing to do with the kind Clara Bow popularized; it stands for self-immolation in a world of beauty. Many people experience "it" only on rare occasions--when carried away by music, a great painting, or a declaration of love--and accept it as an undeserved gift. Berenson strives for it every day, and finds it often. Berenson's achievements both reflect and enhance his personality. Not the least of them is his villa, nestled in the Tuscan hills near Florence. Berenson moved into the place at the turn of the century, remodeled it into a connoisseur's ideal. Over a 20-year period he bought paintings and sculptures to adorn his villa, built up one of the finest collections in private hands (see color pages). Tastes & Aspirations. "My house, I trust, does express my needs, my tastes and aspirations," Berenson once wrote. "It is a library with living-rooms attached. These are both spacious and comfortable yet with a touch of old Italian severity that might depress the happy victims of our 'interior decorators.' " The collection softens and warms the austere elegance of the house as Berenson intended; each art work was bought purely for the villa. "Indeed," says Berenson, "I have always disclaimed being a collector. Such a one loves to compete, to get the better of the seller, to gloat over the object as a scalp or trophy..." The prize of Berenson's trophies is Sassetta's Glorification of St. Francis (overleaf), which he found in a Florentine junk shop. "I saw it in a basement," he recalls, "where I went looking for kitchen chairs, and I asked them to put it in my carriage. They were going to cut it up the next day ; it was good wood for painting little copies of Fra Angelico angels." Berenson got the Sassetta for less than $500. Its present value? "Five hundred thousand dollars wouldn't buy it now." Another Berenson favorite is Bonsignori's Apollo and Daphne, which he calls "very typical of poetic thought. Apollo thinks he is catching Daphne, but what he catches is the laurel tree." He bought Giotto's Friar from a pushcart dealer, considers it "very impressive Giotto --earnest, intellectual and God-fearing." Boccatis' Madonna, he says, "has a certain candor of feeling and beauty of composition and a wonderful sky lighting up a romantic landscape. The little angels are offering rose petals to the Madonna as they do now all over Italy on Corpus Christi Day." Burning & Scratching. In serene and honored old age. Berenson seems very far from being a competitive sort, but he fought his way up. His parents were Jewish emigrants from Lithuania to Boston. Young Berenson burned to be a writer, attended Boston Latin School, and started to work his way through Boston University. Then he caught the eye of a dashing socialite named Isabella Stewart Gardner, who helped send him first to Harvard and then to Europe. "Mrs. Jack" was starting to collect paintings for what later became Boston's Gardner Museum, and she rightly guessed that Berenson could learn to advise her well. Soon, in the warm air and sculptured hills of Tuscany, Berenson began to find "it" with increasing frequency. Immersed in the works of the great Italian painters, he scratched up a living by taking tourists through the museums and churches of Florence at 1 lira a head. He recalls a terror of being knifed by the local guides, but that did not stop him from feeling ecstasy before the masterpieces of the Renaissance. In 1894 he published the first of his four famed guides to Renaissance art (later reissued as Italian Painters of the Renaissance), whose steady sale soon made him prosperous. Six years later he moved into his villa and settled down to the serious business of his life: connoisseurship. Berenson's mind overleaped the customary barriers of 19th-century art criticism. He was not content merely to record, or appraise, or even interpret. Instead, he analyzed what he saw, and thus helped raise art scholarship to a new plane of exactitude. Berenson confirmed, by close study, that every artist's picturemaking is as personal as his handwriting. Even if the painter works in a strict tradition, his personal touch will appear in small things: the way he paints ear lobes, or hair, or crosshatches a shadow. By familiarizing himself with Italian Renaissance art down to such details, Berenson became the reigning expert on the subject. His overriding idea--that art must be experienced to be appreciated, that the viewer should try to lose himself in the beauty of the picture--has liberated many of his readers from the cold bonds of snobbism and artificial art-loving. Self & Non-Self. Today Berenson's nickname, "B.B.," is as familiar to the art world as B.B.D. & O. is to admen. His villa has become a must for American tourists in Italy. Lucky visitors are entertained at tea, where the conversation ranges from English through French, German and Italian to classical Greek, and from Giorgione to gardening or the low state of modern art.* His parties begin and end right on time, for Berenson plans his days precisely. From the moment he straps on his wristwatch (prewarmed by his butler to body temperature) to the time he stretches out for the night "with just the right pillows to support head and neck and shoulders, and the crisp cool sheets," he moves in a world of carefully controlled enjoyment. Pain and trouble are avoided whenever possible, as if there were something sinful about them. He keeps looking out for the moments of immersion in beauty which are "it," the purpose of his life. "I wonder," he wrote recently, "whether art has a higher function than to make us feel, appreciate and enjoy natural objects for their art value? So, as I walk in the garden, I look at the flowers and shrubs and trees and discover in them an exquisiteness of contour, a vitality of edge or a vigor of spring as well as an infinite variety of color that no artifact I have seen in the last sixty years can rival . . . Each day. as I look, I wonder where my eyes were yesterday." Then, in a different mood, he confesses: "Now I am in the decline of my eighth decade and live so much more in the people, the books, the works of art, the landscape than in my own skin, that of self . . . little is left over. A complete life may be one ending in so full an identification with the notself that there is no self left to die."

* Berenson went out of his way to praise Cezanne as early as 1897, but sees small merit in the more recent "moderns." His explanation of the decline: the fiercely competitive and undiscerning art market. It takes as long to learn to draw skillfully, Berenson believes, as to become a doctor, and "how many youngsters today are willing to spend that long preparing themselves?"

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