This week a new digital resource launches from I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies. “The Letters of Belle da Costa Greene to Bernard Berenson,” created in partnership with the Morgan Library & Museum in New York City, documents the epistolary relationship between the formidable librarian and director of the Morgan Library, Belle da Costa Greene (1879–1950), and the art historian and I Tatti founder Bernard Berenson. The project has been five years in the making and its launch coincides with the opening of the Morgan’s exhibition Belle da Costa Greene: A Librarian’s Legacy.
The new website, developed at I Tatti, features high-resolution images and transcriptions of Greene’s nearly six-hundred letters to Berenson, along with rich metadata documenting the names, places, and subjects mentioned in her writing. The letters capture Greene’s vibrant wit and voice over four decades of correspondence with Berenson, whose letters were destroyed by Greene before her death. Because Berenson asked Greene to include as much detail as possible in her communications, they offer a unique window onto her life and career while illuminating numerous other topics, including art historical scholarship and connoisseurship, the history of collecting, libraries and museums in the early twentieth century, and life during the two world wars. Heidi Ardizzone’s biography of Greene, An Illuminated Life: Belle da Costa Greene’s Journey from Prejudice to Privilege (W. W. Norton & Company, 2007), as well as Deborah Parker’s recently published Becoming Belle da Costa Greene: A Visionary Librarian Through Her Letters (I Tatti Berenson Green series - Officina Libraria, 2024), both draw heavily on Greene’s letters to Berenson.
Fourteen different transcribers have worked on the letters, including project co-founder Daria Rose Foner, now Assistant Vice President on Old Master Paintings at Sotheby’s, as well as skilled undergraduate transcribers from Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania.
Project co-founder and director Philip S. Palmer, one of the Morgan exhibition’s co-curators, remarked that “users of our website will be captivated by Greene’s letters, especially their style, vibrancy, and humor. Many of the Belle Greene quotes we use in our exhibition come directly from these letters, which are extraordinarily rich and capture Greene’s personality so well.”