The Connoisseurs: Kenneth Clark and Federico Zeri

In one of his Rumpole of the Bailey episodes, John Mortimer QC put the following words into the mouth of a litigant in a case concerning works of art and specifically paintings: “I have confounded the connoisseurs!”

Expert opinion about the authenticity of pictures is notoriously fraught with difficulty and division. Although the particular issue was not authenticity as such, Australia saw a celebrated instance of the problems surrounding opinions about the forms and merits of artworks in the litigation brought in 1944 by other competitors against the award of the Archibald Prize to Sir William Dobell for his portrait of fellow artist Joshua Smith. There have been many other examples and instances from time to time. Journalists have a field day commenting upon such cases and often lampoon the various opinions proffered. However, it has long been recognised that true expertise in regard to the authenticity and merits of works of art almost inevitably involves at least some element of “connoisseurship”. This acquired professional knowledge or skill about pictures, or works in other media, tends rather to be dismissed by some these days; but there is no doubt that it exists and it is important, not only in the forensic field for litigation, but also taking a major place in art history.

This article considers three of the most celebrated connoisseurs of the twentieth century: Bernard Berenson (1865–1959) and two of his most famous protégés, Kenneth Clark (1903–83) and Federico Zeri (1921–98). Clark is familiar to us as “Lord Clark of Civilisation” (as he was once described), his television series Civilisation: A Personal View being a high point in itself and an important beginning in the counter-movement for retrieval of the cultural tradition of the West against the many forces seeking its disintegration. Clark had an important influence on the development of art in Australia, by his encouragement of our artists exhibiting in London, by his advice on the National Gallery of Victoria’s collecting under its Felton Bequest, and by his visit to Australia in 1949 to consult about the NGV’s collection and its plans for a new gallery.

Zeri is less well known to Australians, but he was a formidable figure on the art and cultural heritage scene, in Italy and internationally, from the 1950s until his death in 1998. Both had sat at the feet of Berenson at his Villa I Tatti in the hills above Florence; and although Berenson’s legacy has been tarnished somewhat by his deep involvements with Lord Duveen’s picture dealership,[1] he remains a highly significant figure in art history during the last century. In a sense, Berenson and his disciples represent one school or view of the history and appreciation of the art of painting, that of connoisseurship; as contrasted to the method of “iconographical” analysis championed by the great Erwin Panofsky and reliant more upon images and other attributes. Berenson’s students typically often later fell out with him or criticised his views, but nevertheless there is no mistaking his enormous influence upon them. Whilst Clark was usually careful not to attack his old mentor or his methods, Zeri as he grew older became increasingly critical of Berenson’s positions—perhaps it was easier for an Italian countryman to do so than for Clark, who was ultra-urbane and nothing if not diplomatic. Berenson constitutes a fascinating study in himself and his development.

This is not the place to recount all of Berenson’s interesting history, as the focus is upon Clark and Zeri, who, if not exactly his epigones, were the two most remarkable connoisseurs who benefited from his tutelage. Berenson was born in Lithuania, and his family emigrated to the United States and settled in Boston, where he received a good education. He attended Harvard University, majoring in Literature including Dante’s works, but also taking elective courses in the art history of the Medieval and Renaissance periods, under Charles Eliot Norton. He was much influenced by Walter Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance. Funds from Isabella Stewart Gardner and other Boston benefactors enabled him to travel to Europe in 1888, where he married Mary Smith in 1900 and they leased the Villa I Tatti at Settignano outside Florence. They later bought and extended it to accommodate Berenson’s growing library on art history and their private collection of paintings.

Berenson’s scholarly reputation was established by a series of major essays and books including Venetian Painters of the Renaissance (1894), Italian Painters of the Renaissance, Italian Pictures of the Renaissance, Florentine Painters (1896), Central Italian Painters (1897) and North Italian Painters (1907). These works, later reprinted sumptuously by the Phaidon Press, remain Berenson’s main monument, apart from his villa and library, which he bequeathed to Harvard. Despite many criticisms of Berenson and academic revisionisms, these books are still significant works, representing milestones in Western civilisation. Along with the superb large posthumous volume on Berenson’s own art collection,[2] edited by his last assistant Nicky Mariano, they are duly treasured by genuine art historians and bibliophiles internationally.

In 1895 Berenson published the essay “The Rudiments of Connoisseurship (A Fragment)” in which he attempted to set out a “scientific” basis for his practice of connoisseurship. He focused on the basic elements or materials for connoisseurship as being: contemporary documents; tradition; and the works of art themselves. He states the important qualifications and cautions to be exercised with respect to all of these materials; and he notes the especial difficulties about verifying ostensible signatures and dates and the doings of forgers. Whilst recognising that it can have a place, he is circumspect about any tradition, oral or written, with regard to any particular works of art. He discusses in some detail all the particular elements such as the parts of the body, the head and the face, as typically painted by various Italian artists of the Renaissance, for instance; and their relative merits and demerits as tests of the veracity of artistic authorship. He also gives attention on the same basis, and with like qualifications and cautions, to matters such as draperies and architectural details seen in pictures under consideration. Berenson meant what he said when he chose the title “Rudiments of Connoisseurship (A Fragment)”, and indeed he ends by saying that he has not even really discussed the more mysterious and controversial “Art of Connoisseurship”, apart from touching upon the important question of the true connoisseur’s “Sense of Quality” as the ultimate test in addition to all the other more formal or mechanical elements.

He says: “The greater the artist, the more weight falls on the question of Quality in the consideration of a work attributed to him.”[3] Much has been made of Berenson’s discussions elsewhere of what he described as “tactile values” discerned in and from the artworks; and many have dismissed this as just another way of Berenson trying to explain what can be regarded as ultimately subjective views about pictures. However, it is clear that Berenson and his disciples, Zeri in particular and Clark to some lesser degree, despite their differences with Berenson as time went by, adhered to a process of connoisseurship that started first with objective or formal elements, but added also judgments based on factors like the “Sense of Quality” attained by real connoisseurs. In a way, one can adapt here the layman’s old saw about art, “I know what I like”, but the genuine connoisseur does, in addition, know a lot about art, to the requisite level to detect this quality. One can verify this for oneself by reading Looking at Pictures with Bernard Berenson,[4] now the most accessible collection of Berenson’s writings on pictures and with generous colour plates of the paintings discussed in the selections from his texts and Berenson’s famous “Lists”. The photograph of the almost blind Berenson listening with rapt attention to Yehudi Menuhin’s violin performance in 1959 is in itself evidence of the monument that Berenson had become. Despite his faults and small vanities, here was a relic from the reign of Queen Victoria and the era of Abraham Lincoln, of Pius IX and Walter Pater—an international treasure. Clark and Zeri continued this legacy even longer.

Sir Kenneth Clark, later Baron Clark OM CH, was Surveyor of the King’s Pictures in the 1930s and as Director of the National Gallery in London supervised the safe hiding of the Gallery’s Old Masters collection underground in Wales during the Second World War. He was active in British television from the 1930s and is best known for Civilisation. His many published scholarly works of art history include The Gothic Revival (1928), Leonardo da Vinci: An Account of his Development as a Artist (1939), Piero della Francesca (1951), Landscape into Art (1949), The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (1956), Florentine Painting (1945), Looking at Pictures (1960), Ruskin Today (1964), Rembrandt and the Italian Renaissance (1966), Animals and Men (1977), What is a Masterpiece? (1979) and Feminine Beauty (1980), as well as his formidable Catalogue of the Drawings of Leonardo in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle (1935) in addition to a book on those Drawings (1968/69, with Carlo Pedretti). He attended Winchester College and Trinity College, Oxford, where he was initially attracted by John Ruskin’s works and also read Walter Pater’s essays on the Renaissance. Even apart from the Civilisation series which made him world famous after 1968, it is clear from the above list of publications that Clark “had the goods” as a scholar and an art historian. Indeed, it was this body of written work and curatorship, combined with certain innate qualities of personality, that made him a natural teacher and expositor on television, which enabled and fitted him to succeed in high degree as the West’s then pre-eminent cultural interpreter.

Clark first became part of Berenson’s circle in 1925, an event he described in the earlier of his two books of autobiography as follows: after noting that the works of art at Villa I Tatti “were arranged with an air of finality, so that they are still in the same places today”, Clark wrote:

Then came an awkward moment when Mr Berenson asked me, “Does Charlie Bell still think I am a charlatan?” Fortunately, before I could answer, Mrs Berenson called down the steps that it was time to leave for Vienna, and we all walked up to see him off. He selected a more imposing hat … and advanced towards the door, where a huge Lancia car, containing Mrs Berenson, her maid and Parry, his chauffeur for fifty years, was panting for his departure. Just after passing the bronze Egyptian cat he stopped, put his hand on my arm and said, “I’m very impulsive my dear boy, and I have only known you for a few minutes, but I would like you to come and work with me to help me prepare a new edition of my Florentine Drawings. Please let me know.” [5]

In her biography of Clark, Meryle Secrest notes that in fact Clark had already formed a dislike for Berenson as being “arrogant”, but a key opportunity had knocked and after some debate with his parents he accepted the offer.[6] Whilst that collaboration did not work out well, Clark spent a lot of time over the next two years with the Berensons, accompanying them to Paris where, at the Louvre, Berenson was received like royalty and the officials took down famous pictures and removed the glass for him to inspect directly, with Clark at his side, works like Giorgione’s Fête Champêtre.[7] Although Clark shifted his focus to his book on Gothic Revival and work with Leonardo’s drawings, his two years with Berenson were influential and laid important foundations for Clark’s later career as an art historian.

From an Australian point of view, we remain indebted to Clark for his contribution to the development of the National Gallery of Victoria and his encouragement and patronage of Australian artists such as Sidney Nolan and Arthur Boyd, which had an important effect in the 1960s. Clark also had a major role in the formation of the NGV’s collection of European pictures, in his capacity as London adviser to the Felton Bequest. In a pre-echo of later criticism of Clark, the jaundiced view of the tetchy Australian art critic J.S. MacDonald was, “What has Sir Kenneth Clark ever said to advance the cause of Art?”[8] In retrospect, having regard to the Civilisation series, MacDonald’s swipe at Clark now seems even more ludicrous than it was in 1949. Clark had advised the NGV to acquire Poussin’s Crossing of the Red Sea in 1948, which still is the most significant European picture in any Australian public gallery.

Clark pioneered television programs on art topics, and yet another echo of his Berensonian training in connoisseurship showed in his two publications, with introductions and notes, of collections of detailed photographs of works in the National Gallery collection, One Hundred Details from Pictures in the National Gallery (1938) and More Details from Pictures in the National Gallery (1941). These large-format books were unusual for their time and seem to have been in part the fruit of Clark using opportunities offered by war-precaution storing of the pictures in Wales both to record them photographically (many works in war-torn Europe had been destroyed by aerial bombing, if not looted by the Nazis) and also to offer the public an examination of details in a manner reminiscent of Berenson’s attention to formal elements.

Inevitably, as the decades have passed, the prickings and cuts of academic criticism and revisionism have had their effect on Clark’s standing in the view of those influenced thereby. This was evident in some negative or “qualified” reviews of the exhibition devoted to Clark’s achievements held at the Tate Gallery in 2014. However, he still has his defenders among art history scholars, among the culturally literate, and especially among the wider general public, who have always shown an affectionate regard for what Clark did for us all in his Civilisation series.[9] It was never intended, nor ever pretended, to be any definitive history of Western art. Its subtitle made it clear it was but “A Personal View” and Clark readily conceded that he was unable to include the art of Spain and had to jettison a proposed thirteenth episode, which would have dealt with the great age of Classicism and Painters such as Nicolas Poussin. He also conceded that the series had other limitations, largely due to what he styled the “canonical” requirements of the television series format. It was a tour de force enlivened by having been filmed and then telecast in quality full colour.

Clark’s career and life and his worldwide fame through Civilisation stand in considerable contrast to that of his fellow Berenson protégé Federico Zeri, who was much more of a maverick and outspoken personality, whereas Clark, despite a privileged wealthy background, was rather more “conformist”—although one might say that their differences perhaps largely reflected well-recognised cultural contrasts between Italy and Britain in the middle and the later decades of the twentieth century. Clark was not infallible in his connoisseurship. He made several “mistakes”, even in acquisitions for his private collection. Even so, it is clear from any fair consideration of Clark’s body of work, including but not limited to Civilisation, that he brought to bear on his scholarship and his public curatorial and expository roles, something which was at once both peculiarly British as well as being very much in the spirit cultivated by Berenson and his notion of connoisseurship. In this sense, until his death in 1983, Clark linked us to Berenson’s world.

Federico Zeri is less well known in the Anglophone world than Kenneth Clark, although Zeri had a considerable presence and following in the United States, due to his many visits there consulting and compiling catalogues of pictures by Italian Masters in US collections. Although Zeri never held any academic post in Italy, he was a towering figure in the field of Italian art history—literally towering, as he was a man of large frame and grand (but not overbearing) presence. He was never precious though, and he could often be impish; he liked practical jokes, such as imitating the voices of others on the telephone. He was outspoken and could be provocative on issues relating to his field and on what he considered as the decline in the standards of care and conservation of the national cultural heritage in his homeland.

After graduating in 1945 in Fine Arts from Rome University, where he studied under Pietro Toesca, Zeri became an official in the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage. His career there did not last long; probably, one suspects, because of the formidable firmness of his views. Of course, real talent is but rarely recognised in any bureaucracy; and even if it is recognised, it is hardly ever appreciated, let alone encouraged. Timeservers and placepersons tend to proliferate, to the detriment of the matters they are supposed to be administering beneficially: Plato’s parable of the shepherd and the flock comes to mind.

Zeri described his first meeting with Berenson at Villa I Tatti in 1943 thus: “With the impassive coldness of an ivory idol or a Tibetan sage, Berenson received me for a preliminary audience, lasting from 16.32 to 16.54 precisely.” Anna Ottani Cavina adds:

although brief, the meeting did, however, prove memorable, and Berenson recalled it in his Diari. Young Zeri, who was undoubtedly the candidate of choice from [Roberto] Longhi’s circle, later became the only Italian art historian to be invited to the exclusive club at I Tatti.[10]

Zeri moved on to become Director of the Galleria Spada in Rome in 1948, and it was from this period that his career and his fame took off. Zeri’s graduate thesis was on Jacopino del Conte, the Roman Mannerist painter, then regarded as obscure, but now recognised as quite important. He followed this up with a detailed major catalogue of the Spada collection published by Sansoni in 1954. After that:

Zeri’s career path followed that of the independent art historian, although he never lost his critical conscience with regard to the protection of art and the close ties between works and their contexts. His interest in rediscovering minor areas of art production led to the philological and historical revival of forgotten artists, lost pictorial series and an entire legacy previously overlooked by scholars. From 1948 on, Zeri published extensively on the subject in a clear, terse style, in the tradition of art literature in the English-speaking world, even borrowing from the language of science. This certainly went against the more allusive and literary Longhian style in fashion in Italy at the time. His first trips to Paris and London between 1947 and 1948 brought him into contact with leading figures in international connoisseurship such as Philip Pouncey, Denis Mahon, John Pope-Hennessy and Frederick Antal. Zeri later confessed owing a great deal to Antal for his interest in the relationship between art and society.[11]

Zeri was later a trustee of J.P. Getty’s Art Museum at Malibu.

In 2013, Maurizio Canesso wrote thus of Zeri and his methods:

Connoisseurship is about much more than just solving the difficulties of attribution, encompassing a far more wide-ranging and diverse body of expertise. Faced with the inherent conundrum of the work of art and the question it poses, connoisseurship is about setting the work in its country of origin, its historical context, a school, a milieu; it is about dating it accurately, about penetrating the secrets of a distinctive iconography. Federico Zeri’s bold statement remains just as relevant today as when he first made it: “However modest it may be, a simple, well-founded attribution represents a tangible achievement—something entirely alien to most of the chatter with which we are assailed on a daily basis.” Because Zeri had the connoisseur’s “eye”—a skill he put into practice in the greatest institutions of Europe and the United States, as well as for many private collectors. His bibliography, which includes many museum catalogues, reflects his conviction that “to be an art historian, you have to be a genuine expert”. [Hence] his practice of the art of connoisseurship lent dynamism and vitality to the market for old masters paintings …[12]

Pierre Rosenberg, a member of the French Academy and honorary president of the Louvre, had this to say of Zeri:

Federico was capricious, unpredictable, sometimes moody. He loved to fool around and was the type of character you rarely come across in life. His personality often overshadowed the great art historian he was, an exceptional “eye”, an unparalleled “attributionist”. He was much more. Those who used to go to [his home at] Mentana and who now visit the Federico Zeri Foundation in Bologna (which thanks to Anna Ottani Cavina, is dedicated to him) take stock of his work, which has become indispensable to all those who are interested in, among others, the Italian Primitives, still lifes, and in painters of battles (but also fakes and forgers) … Correctly identifying a painter is, alas, no longer fashionable in some academic circles, whether in France or elsewhere. The discipline strives to be more ambitious, more interpretative, more intellectual. For visitors … collectors and curators, artlovers and curious onlookers alike, however, the right name is essential. Federico Zeri “detexted” false attributions. He loved beautiful paintings from all schools and from all countries.[13]

Rosenberg’s point about the way much of contemporary art history and criticism “strives” for such wider “goals” is indeed part of the problem, as discussed by Dr Tronn Overend in these pages in his articles on “What is Art?” (Quadrant, May and June 2014 and January-February 2015). With Zeri, we are still in the world of the genuine art historian and scholar, a species one hopes is not yet extinct, as some may wish it to be.

The story is retold by Anna Ottani Cavina[14] about Zeri’s having found photographs of three of the four missing and untraced panels of the celebrated Trionfo della Castita taken from an old Italian painted marriage chest, inside a cookbook Zeri purchased at a small bookshop in Greenwich Village in New York in 1963. It is a typical example of the serendipity that is well known to book collectors and browsers the world over, but also a testament once again to Zeri’s famously all-seeing “eye”. One pauses here to note that such magical inclusions simply do not occur in “e-books”; and to recall the cartoon of a teenager wearing a baseball cap backwards asking a bow-tied Antiques Road Show expert “what it might have been used for”—the item on the table being a book!

Books in his vast library accumulated over a lifetime were central to Zeri’s work and his skill. As they had been to Berenson, to Zeri his books as much as his mental visual recollections were one part of the business of his scholarship. The other was the indispensable actual view. That is not to say that art scholars may not also greatly benefit from what contemporary computer technology makes so abundantly available in terms of images and ready comparisons of works all around the world. Nor was Zeri a priggish or narrow scholar—at home amongst his pictures he deliberately set a few modern “kitsch” objects to provide due contrast.

It is useful to note Zeri’s views on the use of photographs in art historical scholarship and on the issue of colour quality where applicable. Enclosed with the book Federico Zeri et le Connoisseurship (Paris Tableau, 2013, kindly supplied to me by Mr Michael Shamansky of New York) the DVD by Eduardo de Gregorio entitled “L’Occhio” is a fifty-five-minute conversation between Zeri and Pierre Rosenberg. Rosenberg rather playfully subjects the great man to a sequence of “eye” tests—presenting Zeri with a series of black-and-white photographs of artworks and seeking his instant opinions thereon. Zeri stated that he preferred good clear and sharp black-and-white photographs, saying that colour renditions in photographs were unreliable and likely to mislead. It is obvious from Rosenberg’s reactions on the film that he had no doubts as to the efficacy of Zeri’s method of connoisseurship in the case of such identifications and also the cogency of his views. As with Clark, Zeri made his mistakes but did not shrink from admission.

The photographic archives kept by Zeri, which now lodge at his Foundation in Bologna, constitute perhaps the largest single collection of such photographic records of the time. His mentor Berenson had also amassed an enormous collection of photographs of Italian pictures of the Renaissance, and these are now with Harvard’s Villa I Tatti Foundation. There is something old-fashioned about reliance upon such photographic images today. Yet, for all the ready access online to vast collections the world over, scholars still need to view the “works in themselves” as Berenson had insisted; but we must remember that although Zeri lived on into the age of the internet, Clark and Berenson worked at a time when photographs were an important way of making reasonably ready comparisons with pictures widely dispersed internationally. Even on the iconographical level alone such photographic records remain of considerable importance.

Happily, there exists a colour film of the 1998 Ceremony and Conversazione at the University of Bologna when it conferred an honorary doctorate upon Federico Zeri. This film discloses a lot about Zeri, both the scholar and the personality; at once modest in demeanour but ebullient in tone when speaking on the art history and cultural heritage issues about which he was passionate, in the very best and old sense of that now much-abused word. Whilst he could be a difficult character, it is a reproach to the Academy in Italy that he was not given a Chair in Fine Arts many decades before—although late in life he did come close to being made the Italian Minister for Fine Arts and Heritage. His Italian television appearances made him at least as well known to his countrymen as Lord Clark became to the peoples of Britain and the wider Anglosphere. These were not only by way of the occasional interview or panel show appearances; there were also a whole series of television broadcasts on particular artists and works of art, and even one dedicated to Zeri’s opinions about the restoration of the Sistine Chapel ceiling frescoes. Many of these presentations are readily available on YouTube.

Few today will credit any notion of apostolic succession in the field of art history or in any other field of scholarship, if only because fewer believe in human inspiration, let alone in divine revelation. However, if we can recognise an apostolic succession of connoisseurship, then Clark and Zeri are important figures, not merely because of their contact long ago with Berenson at Settignano, but also because of what they made of the careers which their contact with Berenson initially assisted them to launch. Clark reached an international audience at a pivotal time during the last century. In Zeri’s case, it was widely recognised that he was the only one among the young aspirant Italian art historians whom Bernard Berenson took into his closest circle at Villa I Tatti. Zeri was our last remaining major link with Berenson’s profession of connoisseurship.

In addition to his expertise on Italian Old Master pictures, Zeri was a great collector of, and leading authority on, ancient marbles and inscriptions. At his home in Mentana, designed by the architect Busiri Vici, he formed one of largest private collections of marble antiquities in private hands, including many examples of ancient inscriptions he set into walls. These are now all part of the Zeri Foundation, administered with the University of Bologna. It is interesting to hear Zeri speak about the indispensable need for tactile knowledge when assessing the art and quality of sculptures—and, of course, this is seen again in Kenneth Clark’s last gesture in the final frames of his Civilisation series, where he fondly caresses the curves of a small piece of sculpture by Henry Moore. Federico Zeri was as much of a figure in Italy as Clark was elsewhere, and they shared the common heritage of Berenson’s influence. Berenson died in 1959, Clark in 1983 and Zeri in 1998. We are now nearly two decades beyond their epoch, yet Berenson’s contribution flourished for most of the twentieth century personally and through them. Now, it is rather as Sir Thomas Beecham lamented about singers: “There are some good basses, but I find none of the Great Basses as we once had.” So, here and there, some few keep up the art of connoisseurship, but the general drift in the fine arts is into broader speculations and “theory”.

One does not want to be too much of a Jeremiah in these matters, but on sitting back and fairly considering the works and achievements of these three great twentieth-century connoisseurs of the art of the West and particularly its Italian central branch, as it were, we must concede that the world is the poorer for their eclipse. The contemporary obscuring of what they stood for is not a good sign for a civilisation which is now once again under siege. The greatest of the historians of Western art and civilization, Jakob Burckhardt of Basel, warned us as long ago as the 1890s that it be attacked in our epoch, just as it was previously attacked, by forces of manipulated self-loathing within, and evils without.

A due attendance to the genuine strengths of our Western cultural heritage, rather than to the things which distract and detract from it, and indeed the decadence and the lack of focus which positively traduce it, is an important source of our abilities to survive and overcome these forces. As Clark noted several times in his Civilisation series, the decline of a great civilisation usually begins with a waning or crisis of confidence in itself, which its enemies exploit, whilst the populace merely diverts itself.

In the fine arts, as in other things, we need knowledge of the fundamental elements, with an ability to discern quality and the genuine from dross. A key “intellectual” move by those who seek to level the West from within has been to speak in abstractions instead of the concrete. Thus, it is no longer an “art gallery” but an “exhibition space”; and hence the content within can likewise have little or no connection with the subject matter of genuine art. A similar exercise takes place daily in all fields and areas of activity, where the very notion of an established canon is thus abandoned.