Madame X, The Consummation of Empire, and The Andes of Ecuador are all considered examples of great American art, but there was little appreciation for these works (or the artists who made them) at the time of their creation. Indeed, the influential art historian and respected connoisseur Bernard Berenson believed that the United States “did not have enough art to make a serious study of aesthetics,” according to scholar Mary Ann Calo in “Bernard Berenson and America.”
Berenson’s opinion represented that of many American elites. Rather than collecting domestic works, people of means wanted art with a richer historical past. They were seduced by the appeal of Europe’s long history of artistic production and its canonical creators.
Epitomizing Thorstein Veblen’s notion of the leisure class, these collectors sought to communicate and cement their social status, in part, through art acquisition. From roughly 1890 through the end of World War II, they collected with gusto, acquiring medieval and Renaissance works in Europe and bringing them to their homes states-side.
But what accounts for the volume of treasures that ended up in museums across the United States? The fascinating story involves scheming art dealers, shifting economic fortunes and religious realities in Europe, as well as the desire to create a tangible personal legacy.
The Connoisseurs behind the Merchant Princes
Although art historical writing had flourished since Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists, art consumers of the nineteenth century were particularly reliant on the expertise of the artists and art enthusiasts who published and became authorities on specific subjects. They needed guidance on what was best to buy.
As Manfred J. Holler and Barbara Klose-Ullmann posit, the American taste for medieval and Renaissance art was bolstered, in part, by James Jackson Jarves. An American art critic based in Florence, Jarves enjoyed privileged access to works and documents from the Renaissance era. In his essay “A Lesson for Merchant Princes,” from Italian Rambles, published in 1883, Jarves encouraged Americans to follow in the footsteps of the fifteenth-century banker and prominent Florentine Giovanni Rucellai and invest their fortunes in art.
In Rucellai’s eyes, there were three key reasons to become a patron: to honor God, to honor one’s city, and to secure one’s immortality by means of cultural legacy. These aspirations captivated a small sector of affluent Americans.
While they couldn’t commission original artworks from Renaissance masters, these would-be patrons could fashion themselves as “merchant princes,” according to Holler and Klose-Ullmann, and build collections as extensive as those of the Medicis before them. Americans, they write, “liked the idea of legitimizing their immense wealth by spending some of it on art, thus demonstrating and legitimizing their importance and power.”