Marcello Massarenti
Don Marcello Massarenti (
Franz Josef of Austria and was decorated with the Order of the Red Eagle of Prussia.[1]
His private lodgings were modest, but he rented space for his gallery in
Joseph Duveen, his famous nephew recalled, had been less than impressed by the authenticity of the paintings, and Duveen's close associate Bernard Berenson, played an uncertain role in the sale of the collection, disparaging the attribution to Raphael of Massarenti's Madonna of the Candelbra[2] in a letter to Isabella Stewart Gardner in 1897.[3]
The purchase en bloc in 1902 of his collection of paintings, Renaissance bronzes, Greek vases and Roman antiquities, 1700 items in all,
The collection, for which Europeans of the time considered Walters to have greatly overpaid, has weathered a century of close study with new, less inflated attributions, and greater confidence in their authenticity, providing the city of Baltimore with a first-rate gallery of art.
Notes
- ^ William R. Johnston, William and Henry Walters: the reticent collectors (1999) pp. 154-63.
- ^ The Madonna of the Candelabra is currently ascribed to "School of Raphael" by the Walters Art Museum.
- ^ Berenson to Mrs Gardner, 11 August 1897, in The Letters of Bernard Berenson and Isabella Stewart Gardner, R. Hadley, ed., 1987, p. 92.
- ^ Johnston 1999, 153f; see on-line excerpt.
- ^ "Polémica intorno al valore della Galleria Massarenti di Roma acquistata del signore H. Walters di Baltimore" La Bibliophilia: Raccolta di scritti sull'arte antica 4 (1902-03) pp 335-39.
- ^ Henry Walters bought several German and Dutch paintings at the Henry Laffan sale, American Art Association, New York, 20 January 1911 (Johnston 1999, p. 187, note 44).
- ^ Bode, noted by Johnston 1999, 154.
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