Quotes by Bernard Berenson

“The painter can accomplish his task only by giving tactile values to retinal impressions.””

“[Describing his house:] It is a library with living rooms attached.””

“It was accompanied by the conclusion not based on seeing, on observing, but on exasperation and on the preconceived assumption that the squalid, the sordid, the violent, the bestial, the misshapen, in short that low life was the only "reality.””

“. . . In these scenes, and one can cite many others, compared with Rubens (whom, I repeat, I take for the supreme "baroque" painter), Caravaggio is emotionally restrained, bare, severe, more like an archaic Greek or Quattro-cento Florentine. He does not attitudinize, gesticulate and "look worlds". Far from suggesting the theatrical, he seems to avoid being as dramatic as the subject requires. Nor is he ever emphatic. Yet he can penetrate depths that Rubens never fathoms. . . . far from being inventor or foster-father of the "baroque", Caravaggio deserves to be regarded as the most anti-baroque artist of the XVIIth century.””

“After sixty years of living on terms of intimacy with every kind of work of art, from every clime and every period, I am tempted to conclude that in the long run the most satisfactory creations are those which, like Piero's and Cézanne's, remain ineloquent, mute, with no urgent communication to make, and no thought of rousing us with look and gesture. If they express anything it is character, essence, rather than momentary feeling or purpose. They manifest potentiality rather than activity. It is enough that they exist in themselves.””