Bernard Berenson, Lionello Venturi and the Italian Art Critic: An Introduction to Epistolary (1907-1957)

Abstract

The formation of the Italian art critic takes place during a complicated inter-war period marked by socio-cultural difficulties generated by the fascism politics. Two protagonists of this scenario were Bernard Berenson, an American who establishes his address in the famous Villa I Tatti and devotes himself to the Italian Renaissance, and Lionello Venturi, who introduced the method of art criticism through an anticlassical perspective, opposed to the academic orthodoxy. The Berenson-Venturi epistolary presents more than a hundred letters exchanged between them over the course of fifty years. This material offers an introductory analysis of the subjects contemplated in them. Connected by their common interest in Venetian art, Berenson and Venturi will find in each other not only friendship, but also fundamental intellectual support for who have never ceased to feel a foreigner in Italy and also for the Italian himself, who has always had to face his own countrymen to promote his ideals of modernity. The epistolary is an interesting source for studies on the relationship between Renaissance and modern aesthetics in the scenario of the formation of Italian art criticism.