The Profession of Memory

This chapter, “The Profession of Memory,” examines the influence and practice of Berenson's form of connoisseurship and considers how the appearance of leisurely art appreciation was maintained by commerce. Berenson was a deeply conflictual figure. On the one hand, he was the leading authority on the attribution of Renaissance painting, employing the “scientific connoisseurship” of Giovanni Morelli (1816–91) with great success. As Carlo Giznburg has noted, this methodology treated painterly gestures as “clues” that revealed the identity of the artist; however, Berenson's attempts to explain this technique in reference to the erratic works of Lorenzo Lotto were a famous disaster. On the other hand, Berenson was considered by many to be a charlatan, who engaged in secretive art-world dealings with American patrons, including Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840–1924) and John D. Rockefeller Jr (1874–1960), and the notoriously unscrupulous dealer Joseph Duveen (1869–1939). Exhausted from hours spent in museums, Berenson's highly trained memory was subject to one of the most paradoxical of modern technologies – a photographic archive.