As an intern at Harvard’s Villa I Tatti in the summer of 2023, I spent my days in a sun-drenched Tuscan villa, studying in the wood-paneled library and sharing homemade Italian lunches paired with Harvard-label wine. Fresh focaccia was served every morning, and tea and cookies were elegantly plated in the jasmine-scented garden in the late afternoon. I had never been anywhere more beautiful, serene, and patrician.
I spent the better part of my time there staring at one photograph of a bronze bust. The photograph came from the eccentric photo archive of Bernard Berenson, A.B. 1887, a pioneering art dealer and art historian who donated Villa I Tatti to Harvard, along with his photograph collection, in 1959. My internship supervisor sat me down in the Fototeca, where hundreds of thousands of photographs, mainly of Islamic architecture and Renaissance art, are housed. Plunking down three unmarked boxes of what the center had termed “indigenous art”—photographs and printed material related to objects from the Western Hemisphere, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Oceania—he instructed me to devise some project with the poorly organized collection. Piqued by the tag “Fogg Museum” on the back of the picture of the bronze bust, one among four similar photographs of West African bronzes, I combed the archive for weeks, trying to discover how this image had made its way to Italy, and whether its presence was accidental or an indication of Berenson’s interest.
I’ve now seen the bust itself, in three dimensions. Head of an Oba is housed in the Fogg, part of the Harvard Art Museums; it was donated in 1937 by philanthropist Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, a member of one of the richest families in American history. The bust is a hotly contested item in the collection. In 1897 it was looted from the Kingdom of Benin, in present-day Nigeria, in a punitive attack by British forces. The bust, and some 2,000 other objects known today as the “Benin Bronzes,” are at the center of the debate over repatriation of stolen art. That Harvard has the bust via the fortune of an oil robber baron makes its ownership even more ethically complicated. As I spent hours researching this work and the corresponding image, contemplating the chain of events that led to the creation and extradition of both (one to Cambridge, the other to an elegant library in the hills above Florence), I became less and less sure about my own justification for studying it. What began as a mystery to solve as part of an internship I’d applied to largely for its once-in-a-lifetime location instead became a major part of my academic path at Harvard. I can’t help but wonder, how much of that interest and success do I owe to Berenson?
Donors like Berenson and the Rockefellers have long helped shape the University by contributing funds and resources, including substantial support from David Rockefeller ’36, G ’37, LL.D. ’69, for the art museums’ renovation (see harvardmag.com/gift-08), and by providing objects of study that often determine topics of research and discourse. The will of donors thus affects how students move through this place, but it often goes unnoticed. For undergraduates, Harvard is presented as an endless series of doors—opportunities—for us to enter. But if opportunities are doors, then donors are often architects, deciding where and how those doors will open.
Berenson was an art connoisseur whose taste for Italian Renaissance art helped catapult it to global fame. Created at a time when commercial photography had revolutionized art history by enabling scholars to examine priceless works from different corners of the globe side-by-side, his enormous collection helped advance the field. I was not an art historian, but an American studies concentrator who wanted research experience in the humanities. My summer project morphed into an independent study in the history of art and architecture department. I could not have predicted beforehand how much my time at the villa would foster a new and lasting interest. Last summer, a year after completing my internship, I presented a version of my research at an international conference. Seventy years after these materials were donated to Harvard, there I was, swept up in passionate study amid luxury I had only ever imagined.
During my sophomore year, I participated in a weeklong Wintersession course at Dumbarton Oaks, Harvard’s art museum in Washington, D.C. Donated by Robert and Mildred Woods Bliss, Dumbarton Oaks fosters scholarship in the Blisses’ seemingly disparate interests: garden and landscape studies, pre-Columbian art, and Byzantine art. I met Kari Traylor ’24 at Dumbarton Oaks, where the course we signed up for, “Cultural Philanthropy in the Museum Space,” introduced us to the collections and the wider landscape of philanthropy in metropolitan D.C. Yet while the group talked about how donors influence major cultural institutions, even dictating the minutiae of how certain collections are displayed, we never examined that topic as it relates to Harvard, beyond its small, esoteric museums. At the time I thought of the Blisses more as eccentric collectors than major donors with the power to change Harvard’s academic discourse.
But even smaller donors can affect the student experience in profound, and sometimes unplanned, ways. This year, Kari is studying at Cambridge University on a Lionel de Jersey Harvard Scholarship. Endowed in memory of its namesake, a 1915 Harvard College graduate, the scholarship covers tuition, as well as a suite of rooms in Emmanuel College, cleaned weekly by staff. At the time of funding, this provision likely seemed ordinary. But not to Kari, who has been thinking about how she might compensate the workers who enhance her already privileged experience. The donors’ focus was academic, but for Kari, the scholarship also sparked a reckoning with class disparities in academia.
Even the least prescriptive donations shape the student experience. Talia Blatt ’23 was a recipient of the Michael C. Rockefeller Memorial Fellowship, which provides the coveted opportunity for “purposeful travel” to anywhere in the world post-graduation. The grant is widely regarded as an opportunity to dream up a year of no-strings-attached adventure. Talia, an integrative biology concentrator, saw a chance to tap into her creative side. When she presented her plans—to learn the craft of stained glass in Glasgow—to the selection committee (composed of former awardees and Rockefeller family members), she remembers that a family member perked up and suggested other glassworks sites she might explore. The committee was likely compelled by her proposal for a number of reasons, but in a fellowship with so few parameters, it is hard to imagine the interests of the donors playing no role in funding decisions.
The fellowship is designed to steer students toward projects like Talia’s, away from routine professional or academic pursuits (the fellowship’s namesake, Michael Rockefeller ’60, died during an anthropological expedition in New Guinea). The fellowship website states that the year should be planned “with the idea of exploration, challenge, and new discovery.” Implicit in that mandate is the idea that without opportunities like this, Harvard students will gravitate toward careerism, a culture this donation aims to resist.
There are donations like the Rockefel-ler Fellowship that aim to promote indelible personal growth, and others that expand Harvard’s collections, museums, even schools and faculties, thereby increasing opportunities and angles of study. The people behind large-scale donations have come under particular scrutiny this past year, as they sought to exert their influence on University politics amid the upheavals of the Israel-Gaza war. In some ways, those donors are short-sighted: their threats to withhold funding suggest a failure to see how donations tied to specific interests or certain opportunities, like Berenson’s Villa I Tatti, can institutionalize not just ideas but entire academic trajectories for decades and centuries to come.
As I enter my senior year, I think about some of my interests that have been nurtured into major academic projects through specialized donor-funded experiences: West African sculpture, Italian culture, the memory politics of the Jewish diaspora. It is impossible to separate the intellectual pursuits from the funding that made them possible. Had donors not decided to open those opportunities, I would have chosen a different path, a different research topic. Maybe I would be planning graduate studies in different fields—or eschewing academia altogether.
In many ways, by merely enrolling in the College, we expect certain opportunities and privileges to be made available, rarely pausing to consider who makes those things possible. Perks cost money. When we accept our places here, we accept the fundamental mission of the donor, which, ideally, is to affirm that a place like Harvard, with all of its niche academic pursuits, should exist.
I think about the Head of an Oba, and whether I should be able to study it—it was a Rockefeller’s decision to donate it to Harvard and Berenson’s apparent decision to include its image in his collection that brought the item to my attention. It was funding from the Berenson estate that enabled me to spend a summer researching it, to ultimately conclude that it belongs not in the Fogg collections but with the Benin people. I sit with the contradiction that the object’s violent past is the very reason I am able to study it. And yet the reason I study history and culture is to learn from the past in order to make difficult decisions for the future—such objects must be returned. The doors that donors set in front of us are ours to open, or to close.