Volume 34, Number 15 · October 8, 1987
Fanning the Gemlike Flame
By Rosemary Dinnage
Bernard Berenson: The Making of a Legend
by Ernest Samuels, with the collaboration of Jayne Newcomer Samuels
Harvard University Press (Belknap Press), 680 pp., $25.00
Are biographies running away with themselves? Bernard Berenson, an art connoisseur whose writings are not much read any more, has been the subject of two biographies before this one, has been written about three times in this journal, and now appears again in the second and final volume of the authorized biography—nearly seven hundred pages long. Perhaps the answer is that biography is no longer the official tribute to rare genius but a form that examines life through the medium of one person's story—to some extent taking over territory that used to belong to the essay. If there were documentation enough and the biographer were skillful enough, any one person's life might serve. For those who like biography as a medium for examining feelings and actions and ideas (I do), these seven hundred pages will not be too long; for others, they well may be.
Review, 3136 words
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