Michele Dantini’s essay is issued in the Pesci d’Oro series, with which Electa is celebrating its eightieth anniversary. It is devoted to Bernard Berenson (1865-1959), the art historian who provided the impulse for the publishing house’s first publications in the postwar period. The book explores his militant interests in contemporary art, the lesser-known aspects of his achievement, forgotten or deliberately repressed by critics after his death, together with his contribution to the formation of a modernist taste.
In focusing on Berenson’s contemporary interests, his close ties with literature and the public profile of his achievement, Dantini moves between different planes, each relating to a particular aspect of Berenson’s multiple personality, and picks up many broken or torn threads.
The result is a new and convincing portrait that suggests original lines of research, and will stimulate further contributions to come. It reinstates Berenson in the role he deserves in the Italian and European culture of the first half of the twentieth century, and restores the many repressed and forgotten ideological aspects of his work. Longhi’s great Italian success and his ambivalent appreciation of Berenson also played a part in progressively obscuring his importance as a “militant” critic and transforming him into a simple “predecessor” of Longhi.
In the reconstruction of this history, in addition to the editorial essay, the Pesce d’Oro series offers an anthology of texts, some by Berenson, others by artists, historians, critics and social scientists, often unpublished, translated for the first time into Italian.
Dantini’s text shows the influence that Berenson exerted on Italian culture both in the period between the two wars, within “aristocratic-liberal” anti-fascism; and, later, during the Resistance and in the years of Reconstruction. In this period he himself suggested the importance in art of the relationship between Ancient and Modern and outlined an “identity” forged by the rejection of any form of totalitarianism and centered on the cultural heritage and patrimony of the peninsula.
The Pesci d’Oro series is the celebratory version, established to mark Electa’s eightieth birthday, of the Pesci Rossi series. The Pesci d’Oro are distinguished from the other series by the gold colour of the covers, in the most illustrious tradition of art books, and by the way they engage with both the heritage and the future, with the aim of retracing the publishing house’s roots and suggesting its future directions.