Page "Bernard Berenson" Paragraph 7

In 1907 he published his The North Italian Painters of the Renaissance, where he expressed a devastating and still controversial judgement of Mannerist art, which may be related to his love for Classicism and his professed distaste for Modern Art.

His early works were later integrated in his most famous book, The Italian Painters of the Renaissance ( 1930 ), which was widely translated and reprinted.

He also published two volumes of journals, " Rumor and Reflection " and " Sunset and Twilight ".

He is also the author of Aesthetics and History and Sketch for a Self-portrait.

His beautiful residence in Settignano near Florence, which has been called ' I Tatti ' since at least the 17th century, was willed to Harvard at his death and became The Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, a research center offering a residential fellowship to scholars working on all areas of the Italian Renaissance.

It houses his art collection and his personal library of books on art history and humanism, which Berenson regarded as his most enduring legacy.

A spirited portrait of daily life at the Berenson " court " at I Tatti during the 1920s may be found in Sir Kenneth Clark's 1974 memoir, Another Part of the Wood.

' During WW2, barely tolerated by the Fascist authorities and, later on, by their German masters, Berenson remained at " I Tatti ".

When the frontline reached it at the end of the summer of 1944 he wrote in his diary, " Our hillside happens to lie between the principal line of German retreat along the Via Bolognese and a side road ... We are at the heart of the German rearguard action, and seriously exposed .".

Remarkably, under his supervision the villa remained unharmed.

Also unharmed was the bulk of his collections, which had been moved to a villa at Careggi.

However, Berenson's Florence apartment in the Borgo San Jacopo was destroyed with some of its precious contents during the German retreat from Florence.

Another memoir with personal reminiscences and photographs of Berenson's life in Italy before and after the war is Kinta Beevor's " A Tuscan Childhood " York: Vintage Books, 2000 ; c. 1993.