Villa I Tatti
Villa I Tatti, The Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies is a center for advanced research in the humanities located in Florence, Italy, and belongs to Harvard University. It houses a collection of Italian primitives, and of Chinese and Islamic art, as well as a research library of 140,000 volumes and a collection of 250,000 photographs. It is the site of Italian and English gardens. Villa I Tatti is located on an estate of olive groves, vineyards, and gardens on the border of Florence, Fiesole and Settignano.
While guided tours of the gardens are offered, Villa I Tatti itself is not generally open to the public.
History
For almost sixty years Villa I Tatti was the home of Bernard Berenson, the connoisseur whose attributions of early Italian Renaissance painting guided scholarship and collecting in this field for the first half of the twentieth century.The property originated as a seventeenth-century farmhouse given to the expatriate English John Temple Leader in 1854 after being owned by multiple Italian families. In 1900, Bernard Berenson married Mary Whitall Pearsall Smith, who had formerly been married to the British politician Frank Costelloe. Mary came from a liberal Quaker family from Philadelphia, and had two daughters from her previous marriage, but the marriage to Berenson remained childless. The couple moved to I Tatti shortly before their marriage, first renting the property from Temple Leader, and about 1907 buying it outright from Temple Leader's heir, the 3rd Baron Westbury. Under Mary Berenson's supervision, the property was transformed into a Renaissance-style villa with the assistance of the English architect and writer Geoffrey Scott, while a formal garden in the Anglo-Italian Renaissance style was laid out by the English landscape architect Cecil Pinsent. This work was completed in 1915.
Mary and Bernard Berenson envisaged Villa I Tatti as a "lay monastery" for the leisurely study of Mediterranean culture through its art. Bernard was against academic production, specialization, degrees, and what are now called in the Italian academic world "titoli", and instead prized the slow maturing of ideas in tranquil contemplation. He considered his own achievement to lie as much in conversation as in writing.
Berenson died at the age of 94 in 1959 after bequeathing the estate, the collection, and the library to Harvard University. "Villa I Tatti, The Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies", as it was officially named, opened its doors to six fellows in 1961. Since then it has welcomed over 700 fellows and visiting scholars from the United States and Canada, Japan, Australia, and almost all of the European countries.
The Berensons and Harvard
Berenson's esteem for Harvard dated from his youth. He arrived in Boston at age ten as a poor Jewish immigrant from Lithuania. His brilliance was soon recognized and, after finishing the Boston Latin School and completing a year at Boston University, he was supported through Harvard College by wealthier members of Boston society, graduating with the class of 1887. His interests there were in literature and ancient and oriental languages. He trained himself as a connoisseur of early Italian painting by travel throughout Europe and especially Italy, beginning in 1887. As early as 1915, he expressed his intention to leave his house and library to Harvard, and he reaffirmed his intention in 1937, in a letter published in the fiftieth-anniversary volume of his Harvard class. However, Fascism, war, and post-war travail in Italy led Harvard to hesitate, and the bequest was only formally accepted by the Harvard Corporation at the time of Berenson's death in 1959, opening its doors to the first class of fellows in 1961.Green Garden at Villa I Tatti
The garden was created beginning in 1909 by the then young and inexperienced garden designer Cecil Pinsent. Pinsent had been touring Tuscany making topographic drawings of buildings together with his friend Geoffrey Scott. They were both hired to work on I Tatti through Scott's connection with Berenson's wife, Mary. I Tatti was to become a formidable test, through which Pinsent could become a recognized specialist of the formal garden. When the Berensons had acquired the estate five years prior, the property was desolate. Erika Neubauer considers I Tatti "possibly most important garden layout".The Green Garden at I Tatti was Pinsent's first attempt to recreate a garden in the early Renaissance style. It was conceived as an outdoor extension of the house, an unfolding sequence, designed with the open intention of reviving the Italian style The steep slopes were made into terraced "floors" and the walkways and stairways that connect the various floors were paved with mosaics of cobblestones. A large water tank enables "English style" lawns. Tall cypress trees screen the garden and box hedges divide its compartments. In the words of horticulturist presenter Monty Don, " has ruthlessly excluded all colour except green".
About twenty years later, Pinsent would create what would be " last great Italian gardens" when Scott's ex-wife's daughter Iris Origo and her husband Antonio commissioned Pinsent for work on their La Foce estate.
After ownership passed to Harvard, the gardens fell into disrepair until a donation enabled extensive restoration work.
Setting
I Tatti is set in a mythic landscape. The stony hillsides above it, pockmarked by quarries that supplied the pietra serena for Renaissance Florence, bred masons and sculptors. Nearby Settignano was home to the sculptor Desiderio da Settignano and to the infant Michelangelo, who was sent there to nurse at his family's estate. A number of houses in the area are purported to be the refuge of Boccaccio during the plague and thus the setting of the Decameron. Boccaccio's Arcadian poem, Il Ninfale Fiesolano, celebrates the Mensola, a stream flowing through the property. The scarred and over-quarried hillsides were reforested with cypresses by Temple Leader in the late nineteenth century, giving them their present sylvan aspect. Anglo-American villa culture flourished in the area at the turn of the twentieth century.Operations
“Villa I Tatti, The Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies” is owned and administered by Harvard University, but it is not the typical American student program abroad. Rather, Harvard conceives of Villa I Tatti as an international institution for the advancement of Italian Renaissance studies on the post-doctoral level. Villa I Tatti is one of three centers for advanced research in the humanities belonging to Harvard but located outside of Cambridge, Massachusetts. The others are Dumbarton Oaks, founded in 1940 for Byzantine, pre-Columbian and garden and landscape studies, and the Center for Hellenic Studies, founded in 1962, both in Washington, D.C.While remaining true to the principal outlines of Berenson's vision, Harvard altered Berenson's intended structure by admitting other fields than art history. History and literature were present from the beginning of the Center's existence as a Harvard research institute, and music followed upon the establishment of a library in music history, funded by gifts from Elizabeth and Gordon Morrill. Harvard's insistence on a mix of fields gives I Tatti its distinctive character. Although “interdisciplinary” was not much in use as a term in 1961, the Center was effectively an interdisciplinary institution from the start.
Fellowships
Each year, fifteen full-year fellows are chosen from about 110-120 applicants. All have the doctorate at the time of application but are still in the early phase of their careers. Senior distinguished scholars are not eligible for the fellowship, but every year the director invites some who come without stipend as Visiting Professors in Residence. In a given year perhaps a third of the fellowships tend to be in art history, a third in history, and a third in literature and music. There are no quotas of nation. About half of the fellows over almost 50 years have been from the United States and Canada and half from other countries.In addition to the fifteen year-long fellowships, there are a number of short-term awards aimed at specific groups. A limited number of Mellon Visiting Fellowships, for periods ranging from three to six months, are available each academic year for advanced research in any aspect of the Italian Renaissance. This Fellowship is designed to reach out to Italian Renaissance scholars from areas that have been under-represented at I Tatti, especially those living and working in Asia, Latin America, the Iberian Peninsula and the Mediterranean basin and the Islamic countries. There is a similar three-month award, named after I Tatti's third director the Craig Hugh Smyth Fellowship, for Renaissance scholars whose career paths do not normally allow sabbaticals or afford extended summer vacations, such as museum curators.
Biblioteca Berenson
Berenson described I Tatti as a library with a house attached. Library spaces were added to I Tatti in 1909, 1915, 1923 and 1948–54. The shelf space created during Berenson's lifetime was doubled in 1985 when an additional section, the Paul E. Geier Library, was created in one of the former farm buildings. The wing of the library built by Berenson in 1948–54 was recently renovated by the Roman architectural firm of and renamed in honor of I Tatti's third director and his wife, Craig Hugh Smyth and Barbara Linforth Smyth. Opened in October 2009, the new Smyth Library effectively doubled both the wing's original shelving capacity and the number of workspaces available there.At his death Berenson left a large personal library of 50,000 volumes, principally dedicated to Mediterranean culture seen through its art and archeology. It also included significant holdings in Chinese, Indian and Near Eastern art, reflecting his collecting interests in those fields. The books were located in a library designed by Cecil Pinsent in 1915, but, also scattered throughout the house. It was not conceived as an interdisciplinary Renaissance library from the beginning but as a reflection of Berenson's personal interests. Italian literature was not strongly represented and music was absent. During the early decades of the institution's life it became a priority to flesh out the library's holdings in areas of Renaissance studies not collected by Berenson himself, and to initiate periodical subscriptions in these fields.
Transformed from a rich but idiosyncratic personal library into a modern research library, the Biblioteca Berenson aims to provide comprehensive research-level coverage of current scholarly publications in all fields of Italian art, architecture, history, science, medicine, society, culture and literature approximately from 1200 to 1650. Research tools are also acquired in adjacent fields such as northern Europe in the same period, medieval studies, and Byzantine and Islamic cultures around the Mediterranean, especially where these relate to Renaissance Italy. It tries to provide modern editions of many of the works of Greek and Latin literature. Currently it holds some 140,000 volumes, which include 106,000 books, 7,000 offprints, 14,000 auction catalogues, and 23,000 periodical volumes. Over 600 periodicals are currently received, most with complete runs from the start of publication.
In 1993 I Tatti joined with three other research libraries in Florence to form a consortium for joint, on-line cataloging, IRIS, which now counts seven member libraries. The Biblioteca Berenson is also one of the 73 libraries that form the Harvard College Library and its holdings are accessible through the Harvard on-line catalogue, HOLLIS. In addition, the considerable electronic resources available through the Harvard library are also available at I Tatti, which makes it one of the largest collections of electronic resources in Italy.