Transgressions Installment LXIX

July 2, 1936

Funny school, Villa Cassel. I’m a student there, of course, although there are no formal tutorials or lectures. On the other hand, whenever I am alone with Cassel it is a tutorial, and all the gatherings for meals are in some sense lectures. (One of the countesses looked up from her fish course the other day, saying:?“Should I take notes?”)?I could claim to be—no doubt will claim to have been—something of a research assistant, though only of the lowliest rank; our Cassel is surprisingly rank-conscious, in the old German way of endlessly differentiated aristocratic and bureaucratic titles, also in his sense of his own prerogatives. This mostly comes into play when he wants a book and Anna finds that it has not been replaced correctly. Then we all drop what we are doing and scramble around, reading the endless bookshelves in likely places until it is found, while Cassel rages in his study (noises off). When the book is found Nadine takes it into Cassel, returning to us pale and shattered, sitting at her desk with her head in her hands until she has recovered.

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Nadine says that I will have my own desk in the library in a week or two, and “when you return next year,” I will stay in one of the wisteria-covered villinos in the olive grove!

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I visited the Venus of Urbino at the Uffizi this afternoon, in lieu of other complaisant female companionship. She is supposed to be modelled on Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus in Dresden, which I looked at yesterday in the photograph collection. Giorgione’s Venus is depicted as sleeping out of doors, in one of Giorgione’s dreamy landscapes, her closed eyes at the level of the horizon, her long body forming a more or less straight line from the mid-point of the left side of the painting to the lower right corner. Her head is supported by her bent right arm, while her left hand is curved around her sex. The left leg is straight; the right hooks under it below the knee. Her upper body rests on the ground, the lower on a rumpled white satin sheet. In the photograph the sheet is much brighter than her body. Titian’s Venus also has the head on the left, feet on the right, but she is a completely different kind of girl, obviously one of Titian’s courtesans. In place of the horizontal lines and curves of Giorgione’s background (which includes one of the characteristic reversed S roads leading to a farmhouse or castle in the upper left background), the background of the Titian is composed of strong verticals:?a dark curtain closing the left one-third of the upper half of the painting, behind the figure to a point just at her sex, then a window with a pillar dividing it into two unequal parts, then hangings with vertical borders covering the remainder of the walls of the room containing the figure. Where Giorgione’s Venus is sleeping alone in her field, Titian’s has as companions two women servants in the room behind her and a small sleeping dog on her bed. She is not horizontal, but propped up by white pillows on a red couch and turning to stare at the viewer with a very matter-of-fact (perhaps business-like) expression under her elaborately arranged golden hair (Olympia). All the light in the picture is concentrated on her creamy thighs. Her right hand holds a bouquet of pink roses (matching her pink mouth and nipples), her left, with the fingertips, like those of Giorgione’s Venus, curve into her sex, the smallest finger accented with a black gem. Giorgione’s Venus is deeply asleep; Titian’s is only too awake.

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After which I went for a long walk along the river to smooth my ruffled feathers.

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July 4, 1936

Yesterday an invitation arrived from I Tatti, inviting me to tea on the occasion of “our national day.”?There is much information exchanged between the villas on their respective hilltops. I wasn’t very surprised, then, that the car that came for me this afternoon was Cassel’s Rolls Royce, which created a sensation in the street outside the pension. (“Venite. E una Ro-Ro.”)??I Tatti is similar to the Villa Cassel, but somewhat smaller. I was left in a small ground-floor reception room to study the perfectly selected paintings in the dim light, then, when called for, joined the others waiting for our host. Cassel was there, and a woman perhaps mid-way between us in age, with masses of black hair, whom Cassel introduced as his “Viennese cousin”; a professor from Harvard whose name I missed, and the usual collection of French, Polish and Italian aristocrats, introduced by title (“Count Alessandro Contini-Bonacossi”), Christian name (“Eduard”) or English nickname (“Billie”). After the introductions, Berenson entered, stage left, and did a formal round of handshakes, bows and kisses. He is very small, with thin white hair and a carefully trimmed beard. He wore a suit of a color which I suppose is called “dove-grey,” with a flower in the lapel, and exquisite handmade shoes. I was placed next to Cassel’s cousin, who enquired whether I knew her “Aunt’s son, Victor” in Cambridge, at which point I realized that she was, of course, a Rothschild. The conversation began as general, but quickly settled into a duet, or a duel, between Cassel and Berenson, who discussed Cézanne’s use of geometric figures in his landscapes in relation to similar works of the Florentine quattrocento. When they finished there was a round of polite, or ironic, applause and Cassel, finding himself holding a glass of sherry, proposed a toast to “the great Republic.”?All too perfect. As we were leaving, Berenson’s secretary, Nicky, invited me to lunch in two days time.

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July 7, 1936

I went this morning to the Palazzo Medici on the Via Cavour, Cosimo de’ Medici’s townhouse and office. It looks like a bank, which I suppose is natural, as it was at one time a kind of proto-bank and has provided a model for bank buildings ever since. It is three stories high, each story less tall than the one below, with the sheathing diminishing upward from massive rustication to smooth stonework. The effect is as if there were a villa planted on top of a fortress, perhaps along the lines of the Castel d’Angelo as it then was. The inner courtyard is a quiet, perfectly proportioned space; each arch of the arcades describing about 150 degrees of a circle from one monolithic Ionic column to the next; medallions above designed by Donatello from antique gems:?the Renaissance’s appropriation and perfection of the spirit of the classical world. The predominant tone is grey, with tan walls within the arcades. After this the chapel, the Cappella dei Magi, is a riot of color and pattern, its floor covered in nearly Arabic geometrical designs in brown, white, black and grey marble and the walls with frescos of the Magi by Benozzo Gozzoli. On the east wall there is the Procession of the young King Balthazar (supposedly the eleven-year-old Lorenzo de’ Medici); on the west wall there is the Procession of the old King Caspar (Patriarch Joseph of Constantinople?). The foreground of each is dominated by the red of the hats of the crowd in the procession, while the backgrounds are white stone and clouds, green meadow and trees and blue sky. The background mountain landscapes, especially that on the east wall, are built up as if projected to size from fractured pieces of some hard stone, and filled with amusing detail of hunters, exotic trees and birds. Distance is indicated by diminishing size, but everything is sharply in focus, right up to the windows of the castle at the vanishing point. It is as if a Burgundian illumination had been perfectly expanded into a fresco. The Filippo Lippi altarpiece, unfortunately, is now in Berlin. The copy in the chapel would remind one of it if one has been to Berlin, I suppose. There is a real Fra Filippo Lippi Madonna in the Gallery upstairs. The manuscripts in the library are overwhelming:?Dante, Petrarch, Machiavelli, Galileo, etc., etc.

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Berenson’s ancient Fiat, when it came to fetch me a bit after noon, caused little comment at the pension. (“Venite. E una putt-putt.”)?We drove out toward Settignano, turned into this drive rather than that, and were back at I Tatti, where I was deposited to await the one o’clock gong announcing lunch. I tried to summon up some suitably Proustian reflections, but failing, simply flipped through the pages of a copy of the Burlington Magazine that I found there until, hearing the gong, I followed the sound of people coming in from the library to the salone where we all stood more or less in a circle sipping vermouth. There was the secretary, Nicky; the librarian, Alda; an Oxford undergraduate studying Siennese altar pieces; a Florentine couple, the Marchese and Marchesa Serlupi Crescenzi and a Hungarian Countess. The Oxford fellow and I played the usual game of “whom do you know” until the arrival of Berenson, who shook hands and bowed his way around our circle. When we went into the dining room I was placed between Nicky and Alda, which was a relief, as unlike the Countess they speak English. Nicky, especially, was eager to get & give gossip about Cassel. I couldn’t give much, except to say that he was brilliant & generous; she made up for the poverty of my contribution with a disquisition on his family tree and financial arrangements. The family had apparently early on decided that he would be hopeless as a banker and settled an income upon him to keep him away from the business. At first they thought this would be relatively inexpensive. Then they found that an art historian could spend money as quickly as a gambler on the bourse.

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At an appropriate moment, Nicky looked across to Alda and they each brought others into the conversation until it became general. After a few moments of this they quieted their partners and Berenson began a soliloquy, weaving together reminiscence and philosophy into a masterpiece of seemingly spontaneous eloquence. As a favor to me, he expressed some thoughts on Giorgione:?“Look closely at those in the Uffizi. If you study them you will see the influence of Carpaccio.”?I promised to do so. “But,” he added, “The mystery of Giorgione is quite impenetrable.”?He then spoke, amusingly enough, about brilliant conversationalists, which inevitably led to Wilde. He said that in the 1890’s he regularly dined alone with Wilde, on which occasions Wilde’s various masks would ever so slowly be set aside. But when there were others present, he had to play “Oscar.”?During one Season in London, Berenson and his wife happened to meet Wilde at various dinner tables five nights in a row. On the fifth night Wilde said:?“Now you have exhausted my repertory. I had only five subjects of conversation prepared this week & have run out. I shall have to give you one of the former ones. Which would you like?”?They chose one and he performed it. I thought this fair enough:?he sang for his supper.

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After lunch we went out to a kind of loggia, overlooking the garden, where we had coffee and more conversation. The Countess chatted about other Countesses, the Oxford undergraduate about Oxford types. At about three Nicky announced it was time for Berenson’s siesta and called the chauffer to take me back to town.

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July 8, 1936

Cassel, of course, wanted to know all about my visit to Berenson. When I said that he had talked about Oscar Wilde, Cassel guessed that it was the story of the five dinners. Berenson and Wilde are two of a kind, he said, the former’s repertoire as highly crafted but no more infinite than the latter’s.

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Cassel said that the key to Berenson was that he had been born poor with no place in society and found that he could remedy both problems by ?“coining” his aesthetic judgments. His wealth was an accident, really, as he had not set out to make a fortune, wanting just enough an income to be free to pursue his studies. But he found that the Boston society people who had taken him up as a beautiful and amusing boy, and who had then paid for his education, were also willing to pay, and pay much, for his signature on an affidavit of authenticity. Having received very large sums from Mrs. Gardner (“and other favors,” interjected Nadine), he found that he liked the life they made possible and became addicted to that level of income. Then Mephistopheles appeared in the person of “Lord” Duveen (Cassel’s quotation marks around the title were audible) and Berenson was trapped. To this day he is anguished about it. Nadine said that it was “Stupid to be ‘anguished’. Everyone works for Duveen, even Sybil Romilly once worked for him. In any case, Berenson can afford to have scruples on his ￡10,000 a year.”??I wanted to ask, but didn’t, what it was that Sybil had done for Duveen.

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Instead, feeling that I had missed a piece of the argument, I asked why Berenson should be “anguished” by the fact that he had made his own money. In Vermont, that is what you are supposed to do. “But not, I think, in the Boston of 1890,” Cassel said. There and in the circles in London which Berenson fancied, money was supposed to come from your grandfather, like your furniture and suits. “Like Gerald’s,” interjected Nadine, right on cue, not quite winking. Cassel ignored her. “His patrons thought, when he was a boy and they loved him, that they had discovered a young Goethe. Later, when he was successful, they slandered him as a mere dealer in old pictures.”

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“You forget,” said Nadine, “How he was able to compensate, in terms of social position, by his marriage. Poor Mary gave him the entrée to English society.”?

?“Of a sort.”?

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“Yes, of a sort, but it is a good connection, the gentry intelligentsia:?the Stracheys and Russells and the Stephens.”?

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Cassel, wanting the last word, said:?“The connection with Lord Russell did him no good in Boston.”

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As I was leaving Villa Cassel Nadine asked whether I was comfortable at the pension and whether I had met anyone interesting. I said that I was comfortable and had met no one other than the proprietors.

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?“No young ladies?”?

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“Not yet.”

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#Florence #historicalfiction #1930s #arthistory