Autumn Leaf

A complete life may be one ending in so full an identification with the notself that there is no self left to die.

--Bernard Berenson

At 94, the great "B.B." had been failing for more than a year. Visitors to his exquisite villa near Florence reported that he seemed curled up on himself, listless, sere, like an autumn leaf in the boisterous wind of death. Last week Berenson's surviving sister, his doctor and his longtime companion, Nicky Mariano, were at the bedside, trying to ease the ancient connoisseur through a painful throat infection. Smoothing his pillow, Nicky asked if Berenson was all right. Unable to reply, Berenson nodded and drifted off to sleep, and death.

Ascetic in Reverse. He had been one of the world's best talkers, in all the major tongues of the West. Whistler's butterfly with the scorpion tail perfectly described Berenson's conversation: light, colorful, quick, acid. His books (Italian Painters of the Renaissance, Rumor and Reflection, etc.) are comparatively second-drawer Berenson, but they will live. They reveal an elaborate, prickly mind, of melancholy cast. Berenson's chief object was to lose himself in what he saw and liked. Brought up on Walter Pater and inspired by Charles Eliot Norton at Harvard, he practiced and preached self-immolation on the altar of beauty.

Berenson's kind of sacrifice required a lot of money. It meant extensive travel to look at art: it meant building an art library of close to 50,000 volumes together with a now priceless art collection. It required many servants, researchers, a Tuscan villa with a vast formal garden in which to "taste the air." Hearing that he had his watch warmed to body temperature by the butler every morning before he strapped it on his wrist, impatient folk inclined to dismiss Berenson as a lucky hedonist. But he was really an ascetic in reverse who worked untiringly at sipping the ephemeral sweetness of things. His garden drew from him a typically overtrained, anxious and caressing response: he found the lichen "as gorgeous as an Aztec or Maya mosaic," and the moss "of a soft emerald that beds your eye as reposefully as the greens in a Giorgione or Bonifazio."

Riches in Failure. Ber enson earned every one of his pleasures and treasures, has bequeathed his villa with its library and collection to Harvard as a center for Italian art studies. The son of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants to Boston, he got his education (Boston University and Harvard) on scholarships, was sponsored by Boston's Mrs. Jack Gardner, whose collection he largely formed. Before the turn of the century he had made his fame as an art expert when he audaciously announced that about 75% of the Renaissance paintings in a major exhibition in London were either copies or attributed to the wrong artists, weathered the storm of protest and made his judgments stick.

His principle of expertise has since become standard. Instead of depending on historical documents or intuition to identify a work of art, Berenson searched systematically for clues to each major artist's style. Picture making is at least as personal as handwriting, and Berenson be came the one universally acknowledged authority on the personal styles of the Renaissance masters, the way Da Vinci painted an ear, how Botticelli treated lace. This made him an invaluable consultant to collectors and dealers (notably Lord Joseph Duveen) who were glad to pay him handsomely for his advice, his warnings and his recommendations.

His fortune made, expertise palled on Berenson. "I cannot rid myself of the insistent inner voice," he wrote, "that keeps whispering and at times hissing, 'You should not have competed with the learned nor let yourself become that equivocal thing, an expert' . . . The spiritual loss was great and in consequence I have never regarded myself as other than a failure."

Society thought otherwise. At the near by church of San Martino a Mensola, the funeral ceremony for the man who was born a Jew was conducted by a priest of the Catholic faith he quietly adopted in middle age. Pope John XXIII sent a special benediction and Florence a special honor guard to walk in the funeral cortege. At week's end Berenson's body lay in state awaiting burial in the garden chapel of his villa, where for so long and so steadfastly he upheld the standards of excellence in a hurrying world.

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