Exhibit honors influential Harvardians
The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies (Villa I Tatti) in Florence, Italy, has announced a new online exhibition, “Berenson and Harvard: Bernard and Mary as Students,” opening June 4. In 1884, when Bernard and Mary Berenson first arrived at Harvard, neither could have imagined that 17 years later, as newlyweds at Villa I Tatti, they would transforme the study of Italian Renaissance art. At the core of the exhibition on the I Tatti website are rare and unpublished materials about these early years, including Mary’s “Life of Bernard Berenson,” Bernard’s application for a Parker Fellowship, his senior thesis on “Talmudo-Rabbinical Eschatology,” and the 19 essays, reviews, poems, and short stories he published in the Harvard Monthly. The interests of both students, especially in psychology, Arabic poetry, and aestheticism, had a profound impact on their later scholarship, and on Bernard’s extraordinary fame as a public intellectual. The early writings...