The Sydney J. Freedberg Lecture on Italian Art: Bernard Berenson and Lorenzo Lotto

November 2011 - Carl Brandon Strehlke, adjunct curator, John G. Johnson Collection, Philadelphia Museum of Art. In 1895 Bernard Berenson (1865-1959), American art historian and connoisseur, published a long-awaited monograph on Renaissance painter Lorenzo Lotto; it was Berenson's first statement about the then relatively new science of connoisseurship. Toward the end of his life Berenson remembered that since writing that book, in which he had tried to regulate every knowable mood of an artist, he had almost never again "taken creative interest in the private, biological, and sociological lives of painters." As part of the Sydney J. Freedberg Lecture on Italian Art series, recorded on November 13, 2011, at the National Gallery of Art, Carl Brandon Strehlke explores why Berenson selected Lotto as an artist and as a subject for a study that he described as "an essay in constructive art criticism."