It might be my personal problem but it seems to me that serious art criticism has died. There are a lot of art magazines but what they do is basically writing about gallery openings and shows of people they are friends with. It is all a big family, and that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But sometimes you need the fine filter of a scholarly mind to tell you what is good and what is merely good and why. Last January, I strolled through a cold Rome until I had to take refuge in the Scuderie del Quirinale where there was exhibition of Vermeer and other Dutch masters. The show was fantastic, and when I left I wanted to buy the catalogue. But the book was to heavy to carry around. Instead, I bought a little book by an an American art historian named Bernard Berenson with the rather dull title “Italian Painters of the Renaissance”. Berenson was an expatriate living in Italy – I guess in the fifties everybody who aspired to be something in the Western world knew him. He took long walks around his villa “I Tatti” in Florence with the brilliant Edith Wharton and the melancholic Marcel Proust. His Italian was straight out of Dante*s Inferno. Only much later I found out that Berenson is generally acknowledged to be the foremost authority on Italian art of the Renaissance, pardon my ignorance. But anyway, I simply wanted to recommend all that Berenson has written and I wonder why it is impossible to write like that as an art historian today. For Berenson art is about feeling: “not what man knows but what he feels concerns art. All else is science.” Art must be “life-enhancing.” And on good paintings he wrote that for the viewer they must be “as if a load had just been lifted from one’s breast; how refreshed, how noble, how potent one feels again, how soothed; and still again, how wafted forth to abodes of far away bliss”.