Mary Berenson

Germantown, Pennsylvania, 1864 – Villa I Tatti, Florence, Italy, 1945

Mary Berenson, a scholar of Italian Renaissance art, was the wife of Bernard Berenson (BB), who she often assisted in his research, writing, and buisness affairs. She was born Mary Smith, the daughter of two well-known Quaker preachers Hannah Whitall and Robert Pearsall Smith. She attended Smith College from 1882-1884 and the Harvard Annex (later Radcliffe College) for one year, 1884-5. She left the US to marry Irish barrister and political hopeful B.F.C. "Frank" Costelloe in 1885, which also necessitated her conversion to Catholicism, against the advice of her family. Mary and Frank had two daughters, Rachel (Ray), born in 1887 and Karin, born in 1889. Mary's family followed her to England shortly afterwards and became deeply involved in social, literary and cultural circles. In 1890 BB was introduced to Mary through a mutual friend, Gertrude Hitz-Burton. Having already become unhappy in her marriage, Mary followed BB back to the continent to study art under his tutelage. She eventually left her husband and lived in Italy and travelled with BB. A year after Frank Costelloe's death in 1899 Mary and BB were married in Italy (December 1900), in a small chapel on the estate of Villa I Tatti, the house in which the couple moved in and where Mary and BB spent their lives.

Mary initially became involved in the women's movement in England and America, and continued in her political activities, making speeches and helping her first husband with his campaigns for office. After meeting BB, and her studies with him, the focus of her energies shifted, and she also became an art critic. She worked very closely with BB on his projects, as well as publishing substantially on her own. She established herself as an art authority with journal articles and especially a long pamphlet, Guide to the Italian Pictures at Hampton Court: with Short Studies of the Artists, published the pseudonym Mary Logan in 1894. In the same year she played a major role in the writing of the Venetian Painters of the Renaisasance, which listed BB as the sole author. In 1908 she published a small article, "A Tentative List of Italian Pictures Worth Seeing," and in 1938, the book A Vicarious Trip to the Barbary Coast.

See Mary Berenson's publications in HOLLIS (all records with Mary Berenson in author fields)

See the entry on Mary Berenson in the Dictionary of Art Historians.

See an article on Mary Berenson in the Harvard Magazine.