Professional Passions: Art Historians as Collectors in the 20th Century

This thesis systematically investigates the phenomenon of collecting among art historians in the 20th century. Proposing scholars’ collections as a distinctive category, it identifies their peculiar features by asking the following questions: How does an art historian collect? How do art historians engage with their collections? What role do the collections play in the formation of their ideas? In order to answer these questions, this thesis investigates three paradigmatic examples: the collection of Bernard Berenson, that of Roberto Longhi, and that of Kenneth Clark. Exploring the microcosms of these art historians in their role as private collectors, this research sheds light on what is intrinsically characteristic about a scholar’s collection - its tie with the collector’s profession, turning collecting into a ‘professional passion’.

The text is divided in three thematic parts, built upon case studies taken from the three collections. The first part is dedicated to Connoisseurship, the fil rouge that runs throughout the thesis. Showing how collecting becomes an exercise of their collectors’ expertise, as in the case of Berenson and his painting The Virgin and Child with Saint Francis of Assisi and Jerome by Tonino Navaero, when his thoughts on its attribution ‘shifted while looking’ from Lorenzo Lotto (1912) to Close to Lotto (1955); and in the case of Clark’s study of a tondo by Raphael, which he used to illustrate his research approach in an unpublished article. The second part focuses on art historians as lenders to exhibitions, revealing how objects played an active role, accompanying and embodying their collectors’ scholarship, as in the case of Berenson at the Mostra Giottesca (1937), and of Roberto Longhi at the Mostra Bolognese del Trecento (1950) and at the Mostra del Caravaggio e dei Caravaggeschi (1951).

The last part further investigates the inter-relation between objects and scholarship, through the case of Kenneth Clark and his paintings by Seurat, highlighting the relationship between personal collecting and the professional networks in which art historians operated.