It is practically impossible to serve the muse without dealing with Mammon. That is what Bernard Berenson learned and accepted early in his long and lucrative association with Joseph Duveen, the enterprising head of an international gallery whose customers included most of the world's leading collectors. Berenson, born in 1865 in the Lithuanian ghetto-village of Butrimonys, emigrated to Boston, attended Harvard and eventually became the expert on Italian Renaissance painting. For three generations, until his death in 1959, he reigned as a kind of aesthetic Pope. From his "Vatican," a Tuscan villa known as I Tatti, he issued monographs, criticism and...
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