Bernard Berenson

Some get on very well, some are the same person, and others are always making rude remarks about one another.

I think Panofsky didn't believe in connoisseurship, and Bernard Berenson, in a rash moment, said that Panofsky was the Hitler of art history, which is incredible, but shows how angry he was at the time.

Let's begin by talking about connoisseurship in the Renaissance.

Okay, so there's a sense in which serious collecting began or began again in the Renaissance because there had been plenty of collecting in classical antiquity as indeed in other cultures, China in particular.

It's got to be there.

He quoted something else, the title of a book by the critic Bernard Berenson about Piero della Francesca, The Ineloquence of Art.

There's something about that title, Hugo told me.

The fact that there is more force in controlled passion than in exuberant passion.

And what is remarkable with the history is when you start looking at history, coincidences become less and less.

So although Hildebrand was a neoclassical sculptor, he set up a studio in Florence where a series of art historians from, uh, Wolfland to Abby Warburg to Bernard Berenson came through.

So he had this core of German speaking art historians, and it seemed that his book was very influential.

And if you follow that, uh, strain of German art historians, you come to Panofsky and his famous perspective as symbolic form of 1927, which really becomes the institutional basis for thinking about pictorial space.