Did You Know There's a Venetian-Inspired Palazzo in Boston?

Issue #50

I don’t remember the first time I visited the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, but my parents tell me they brought me there when I was a child in elementary school. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve walked those hallowed halls, but to this day it remains my favorite museum in Boston. I went back last week, while I was in town visiting my parents, and being there reminded me that long before I ever stepped foot in Italy, I was exposed to Italian art and culture. I can’t say definitively that it’s the reason why I fell in love with the country, but no doubt it planted a seed that had a profound, if subconscious, impact on my sensibilities.

I would have seen Italian art in other museums growing up, including the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, but the Gardner Museum is no ordinary museum. It’s so much more. Though Neoclassical architecture was all the rage in the United States at the time it was constructed, this building stands out from all the other European-inspired architecture in Boston.

A portrait of Gardner by John Singer Sargent

Far from the typical sober style of buildings seen elsewhere around the city, the Gardner Museum is a pink Venetian-inspired palazzo with an interior courtyard replete with an ancient Roman mosaic floor, Greek and Roman sculptures, fountains, and an abundance of plants. To create it, Gardner brought back windows, doorways, columns, capitals, reliefs, balustrades, and other architectural elements from Rome, Florence, and Venice.

Born in New York City in 1840, Isabella was a wealthy heiress who married Jack Gardner, a Boston Brahmin, and climbed to the top of Boston’s high society, even if she was considered a bit of an outsider. Sophisticated and worldly, she and Jack were friends with artists like James McNeill Whistler and writers like Henry James. They traveled extensively, often for months at a time, visiting Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. In 1883, they ended a year-long trip around the world with a month in Venice, which was the beginning of Isabella’s lifelong love affair with La Serenissima. 

Raphael’s portrait of Tommaso Inghirami (on the left) was the first painting by the Renaissance master to be brought to the U.S.

On their first trip to Venice, they visited the 16th-century Palazzo Barbaro on the Grand Canal—then owned by another wealthy American family from Boston—and starting in 1890, rented it for a few months every other summer until 1898. By then, Isabella had already studied Italian and joined the Dante Society in Boston. In 1892, she bought her first Old Master painting—a Vermeer—but it was the Italian painters who really thrilled her. 

In 1894, she bought Botticelli’s The Death of Lucretia, which was the first Botticelli to travel to the U.S. It now hangs in the Raphael Room on the second floor, near the first painting by Raphael to be brought to the States. On the third floor, Veronese’s The Coronation of Hebe adorns the ceiling of the Veronese room.

The Coronation of Hebe by Veronese

The next room over is dedicated to Titian, whose Rape of Europa she bought in 1896 for a record-setting price of £20,000. In it, Europa is depicted at the moment in which she’s being abducted by Jupiter disguised as a white bull. According to the myth, told in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Europa gave birth to Minos, king of Crete and the Minoans, the first European civilization. 

“The erotically charged canvas was a radical choice for an American at the end of the nineteenth century,” wrote Cynthia Saltzman in Old Masters, New World: America’s Raid on Europe’s Great Pictures. According to Saltzman, only ten years prior, when the Museum of Fine Arts opened in Boston, a committee decided to cover the statues’ private parts with fig leaves. 

The large painting on the left is The Rape of Europa

Gardner, on the other hand, was enraptured by the painting. “I am back here tonight... after a two days’ orgy. The orgy was drinking myself drunk with Europa and then sitting for hours in my Italian Garden in Brookline, thinking and dreaming about her. Every inch of paint in the picture seems full of joy,” she wrote in a letter to Bernard Berenson, the art dealer who secured the painting for her.

Visiting the museum now, you can imagine Gardner standing before the masterpiece. When she built the museum where it now stands, following the death of her husband Jack in 1898, she made sure it would have pride of place. Yet from the beginning, the Venetian-style palazzo was a far more personal project than the typical museum—it was also her home. Gardner lived on the fourth floor and installed her formidable collection on the first three floors, which she opened up to the public for a few weeks every spring and fall, with a limit of 200 visitors per day. She continued to collect works of art and rearranged the galleries until she died in 1924.

A self portrait by Rembrandt hangs on the left

Her will stipulated that the galleries should forever remain exactly as she left them and no works should be acquired or sold from her collection. I think that’s what gives the museum such a unique and special feeling—the rooms are arranged like a private home, with sofas, chairs, tables, antique chests, and other furniture interspersed among the paintings and sculptures. It’s almost like visiting some of the aristocratic palace museums in Italy, but the collection is rather more eclectic. 

Gardner was a visionary and a trailblazer at a time when women were mostly confined to domestic roles. Her museum is a testament to her passion for art and her joie de vivre. I highly recommend visiting it on your next trip to Boston.

Further Reading

• If you’re interested in the Gilded Age collectors who brought European masterpieces to the United States, I recommend reading Cynthia Saltzman’s book, Old Masters, New World. She was my mentor in graduate school.

• I included the Gardner Museum in this piece for the now-defunct Jetsetter about why Boston should be your next getaway.