Art History Reviewed V: Bernard Berenson's 'The Drawings of the Florentine Painters Classified, Criticised and Studied as Documents in the History and Appreciation of Tuscan Art, with a Copious Catalogue Raisonné', 1903

• Autores: Carmen C. Bambach
• Localización: Burlington magazine, ISSN 0007-6287, Vol. 151, Nº 1279, 2009, págs. 693-696
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • The writer analyzes Bernard Berenson's book The Drawings of the Florentine Painters Classified, Criticised and Studied as Documents in the History and Appreciation of Tuscan Art, with a Copious Catalogue Raisonné, first published in 1903 and reissued in greatly revised, expanded editions in 1938 and 1961. By 1903, Berenson had entirely reformed the study of early Italian drawings, imposing a unified method of critical inquiry over a cacophony of inconsistent attributions. The chief success of his method was the principle of objective, precise visual comparison of works. Judgments can be made about what he got wrong, but these can be made precisely today because of historical hindsight on a field that he largely founded. If one considers the huge body of works that he analyzed and wrote about, his ratio of discoveries and of convincing attributions is simply astounding, whether for a connoisseur of his time or of today.