Kenneth Clark: Life, Art and Civilisation - James Stourton

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walk to go and have a good laugh at the quadrangle of Keble, which it was universally believed was designed by Ruskin rather than Butterfield.

      With so many distractions, Clark was doubtful about the likelihood of his achieving a first in his finals. He wrote to his mother, ‘you must prepare for a steady second’ – which was in fact what he received. He was sanguine about the result, claiming to believe that ‘I have not got a first-class mind’ – but nobody at the time or since has accepted that explanation. Sligger Urquhart reminded him that John Henry Newman and Mark Pattison37 both got seconds, and Clark reminded himself of Ruskin’s honorary fourth. A consoling Bowra wrote: ‘I am so sorry about the schools. I am afraid it will mean your family driving you into the business and that would be terrible. Otherwise it has no importance as experts always get seconds and journalists usually get firsts … nobody else will think the worse of you for not being officially regarded as a master of a subject which bores you to death.’38 It certainly made no difference to Clark’s career, and if it dented his confidence nobody noticed – but it may have curbed his conceit. He undoubtedly had a powerful belief in his own superior gifts, but this was an early indication that these might not lie in a purely academic sphere. The failure to achieve a first may have had a greater influence on his outlook than was apparent at the time, and he eventually became impatient with scholarship for its own sake.

      At Oxford Clark had addressed himself most effectively to senior members of the university – he had made a deep impression on older men, all bachelors; but he was now about to exercise his Wunderkind charm on somebody as attached to feminine company as himself.

      5

       Florence, and Love

       I come now to the turning point in my life.

      KENNETH CLARK, Aesthete’s Progress 1

      It was an invitation to go to Italy in the summer of 1925 with Charles Bell that was to determine Clark’s future. He later wrote, ‘the idea annoyed my parents “Still going about with school-masters”, but I went’.2 The trip took place at the height of Bell’s infatuation with Clark, and would slowly lead to their disengagement, for in his innocence Bell was to introduce his pupil to another, far more compelling, mentor, whose range and surroundings would captivate him. This seminal encounter would define Clark’s taste and set the trajectory of his career. But it was a grateful pupil who arrived with his distinguished master in Italy for the first time. They stopped at Bologna, where Bell was enough of a Victorian to have a reverence for a school of painting that had suffered an eclipse of taste. It was his eloquent defence, and the knowledge that these great paintings by Guido Reni and the Carracci had been considered as the summit of excellence in the eighteenth century, that forced Clark to make the effort to see their merit, though he never came to love them. As a result he was to be an early encourager of Denis Mahon and the seicento revival of the 1950s.3

      From Bologna they moved to Florence, where they were to stay with the formidable and immensely grand Janet Ross. She had been a great beauty – and allegedly the muse of several Victorian novelists – and now lived alone in the hills above the city, managing her farm. Her villa, Poggio Gherardo, was large, gaunt and uncomfortable. She sat in the middle of a room stuffed with portrait drawings by Watts, and photographs of Tennyson and other Victorian worthies. Whatever first impression she might have made on Clark was dampened by the fact that Bell had fallen very ill on the journey and needed to be supported to bed on arrival. Clark therefore dined alone with this ‘well known terrifier’, fortified by her aperitivo di casa, made from a secret Medici recipe. It was early the next morning on the terrace, observing Mrs Ross supervising her contadini, that Clark first ‘felt that yearning for the long tradition of Mediterranean life, unbroken, in spite of disasters, for over two thousand years that has fascinated northern man since Goethe – dahin, dahin’.4

      The highlight of the journey was to be a visit to Bernard Berenson, usually referred to and addressed by his friends as ‘BB’, at I Tatti, his famous villa near Settignano. Bell held a baleful view of Berenson – ‘He’s really only a kind of charlatan, and all that business of attribution is pure guess-work’ – but to Clark, he was already an idol. Clark’s autobiography is inaccurate about the detail of this most significant meeting, and dramatises the action into one lunch. The facts are as Berenson’s wife Mary wrote to I Tatti’s librarian Nicky Mariano on 12 September: ‘Mrs Ross, Charlie Bell and a handsome Oxford boy were coming to dinner but Charlie is ill and only aunt Janet and the boy are coming.’ The following day: ‘The boy turned out to be a perfect dear. B.B. was enraptured by his intelligence and culture. This morning we walked over to Poggio Gherardo to see Bell and he was worse, and said he was particularly sorry because of his young friend. So I said let him come over to lunch … the chief thing was that B.B. after more talk with him invited him to come and work under himself for two or three years and the young man was enraptured. It all depends on his father who wants him to be a lawyer. He is very rich.’5

      Clark wrote a long letter to his father that corroborates Mary Berenson’s version of events: ‘Aunt Janet and I dined at the Berensons’. I had seen the great man before and had not liked him much. He is very small with tiny wrists and hands, has a large but well proportioned head and a perfect pointed beard. He is always exquisitely dressed and has rather odd … nervous gestures. Intellectually he is far and away the most impressive person I have ever met. His house is amazing; having made masses of money by his books it is perfectly furnished, contains the finest private collection of early Italian pictures anywhere and beautiful Chinese things; he also has the best library of art books in existence all arranged in three enormous rooms.’ Berenson talked exclusively

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