Berenson’s recognition of an “unrivalled connoisseurship” in his friend Enrico Costa (1867-1911) cannot have been an exaggeration dictated by their special closeness, if Giovanni Morelli too recommended him to his disciple Jean Paul Richter, declaring him worthy of particular attention. This article aims to give at least some insight into Costa and his work, focusing in particular on the twelve years he spent in Bogotá, where he became a teacher at the School of Fine Arts, as well as a member of the prestigious Academy of Fine Arts, founded in 1902. His presence in the Colombian capital is recorded in a number of documents, but even more so in the significant critical act of buying three works by Cézanne in Europe in the 1890s and showing them to the students of the School, an institution still strongly rooted in academic painting. And it was once again a painting, the ‘Portrait of María Costa de Suárez’ conserved at the Museo Nacional in Bogotá, that served as a lead for the reconstruction of the illustrious Italo-American genealogy “of one of the most profound and most personal art critics” of his time (Carlo Gamba).