Bernard Berenson and the Twentieth Century.

If a doctrinal air has hovered over the Anglo-American history of Renaissance art in Italy, Bernard Berenson's reputation has had more than a little to do with it. In her even-handed explication of his relation to the art and art criticism of his time, Mary Ann Calo has stood back from the critical fray attending Berenson's legacy, and from his spirited and aphoristic prose, to reflect on the context and the intellectual moment of his thought. In analyzing Berenson's changing critical outlook, introduced in the course of his essays on Italian painting ("The Four Gospels"), she has illuminated its formative place in "aesthetic modernism", and linked this outlook, by way of contradiction as much as by consistency, with his later, contentious antipathy to the art of this century. Here, his intellectual shortness of breath (to use his own phrase) combined with an increasing, and increasingly personal, pessimism about contemporary politics and society; the promising implications of his early, eloquent sensibility were then taken up by modernist critics such as Roger Fry for whom Berenson had been a mentor. Calo's thesis is an important one: that Berenson was an essential contributor to the language of formalist art criticism and to the avant-garde climate surrounding the emergence of non-representational art. This is not, in itself, an original thesis (one thinks of Paul Barolsky, for example), but its accessible, systematic, and opportune elaboration here, following the course of a mercurial career, make this a suggestive and insightful chapter in the history of art theory.

Calo traces the critical tenets of Berenson's theory sequentially, beginning with the works on Italian art up to 1907. Berenson set himself up in opposition to reigning Ruskinian values by his aestheticism, his theory of sensations, and by his Morellian leanings - his "new art criticism." Coeval and consistent with The Venetian Painters (1894) and Lorenzo Lotto: An Essay in Constructive Art Criticism (1895) was his then radical taste for modern French, plein-air painting. Together, the books reveal Berenson's attempt to link modernity with the past - with positivism, on the one hand, and individualism on the other. Subsequently, Morellian formalism became subsumed in appreciation which, in its turn, became a loose theoretical framework. Calo emphasizes Berenson's friendships with artists, such as Hermann Obrist, Egisto Fabbri, and Adolf von Hildebrand. They disputed the degree to which subjectivity was at stake while The Florentine Painters (1896) was underway, sending Berenson in pursuit of a theory of universal standards, such as tactile values, material significance, and, famously, "life-enhancement" - the pleasure only art could give. In The Central Italian Painters (1897), he associated Umbrian "space composition" with this quality, proposing that "ideated sensations" are the product of tactile values and movement, and developing the misunderstood distinction between "illustration" (representation) and "decoration" (formal elements): a distinction that would lead to the modernist dichotomy of form and content. It is here, however, that Berenson, always in a dialogue with himself, forced an opposition between interpretation and visual analysis at a time when formalism had become a modernist position. Leonardo became, by association, a negative paradigm for the modern artist, one who fell short as an illustrator and who was too much absorbed in technique. Berenson's modern theoretical stance gave way to an acrid, anti-modern "posture"; we are left with the image of someone struggling to maintain his youthful beliefs in the face of the new challenge to mimesis.

Calo has sensitively drawn the picture of a theory in search of a theorist; despite his ambitions, the Olympian connoisseur never fulfilled his intellectual hopes. She hints at several extremely important aspects of his role as a conduit of European philosophy which demand more sustained attention. One of these, allied to his preoccupation with decline, is the degree to which Berenson's moral aesthetic requirements, although restricting his vision of modernity, alluded to those very same Germans whom he disdained yet assiduously read. That Berenson has often been characterized as a "humanist", finally, is linked more to his lifestyle and to his attachment to the human form in art than to any Renaissance definition. For him, the figure was an ideal but fixed template set into the pictorial landscape, rather than an active and mutable interlocutor with the past.

MEREDITH J. GILL University of Maryland, College Park