Gardner museum a treasure trove

The time: New Year’s Eve, 1903. The place: a spectacular Venetian palace. You are the privileged guest of a brilliant New England socialite who counts William James, T.S. Eliot and John Singer Sargent among her closest friends. Fifty members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra drown your delighted senses in the music of Mozart, Bach and Schumann. Doors roll back to reveal lanterns, flowers, fountains, and sculptures. A spectacular courtyard rises four stories high, and your sensations fly to illimitable heights.

Isabella Stewart Gardner, embodiment of all things beautiful and enriching, demanded that her visitors in the year 2002 experience (almost) a similar transcendent brilliance that enraptured her very first guests. If you’ve never journeyed to her ethereal estate, you’ve deprived yourself of an unparalleled encounter with artistry.

Just two blocks from the Museum T-stop, behind elegantly unassuming gates, lies Isabella Stewart Gardner’s masterpiece. I entered. My eyes floated wistfully along the courtyard’s clean path, lingering on its rare and beautiful flowers. The fluid lines of sculpture pulled my attention away from the ground and up a curving pair of stone steps. Climbing higher and higher, my gaze grazed over panes of glass that reflected intensifying light until I reached the summit of splendor that stretched out overhead.

Mrs. Gardner spread her impressive collection of art throughout small chambers that wrap around the intoxicating, but disappointingly inaccessible, courtyard oasis. Every detail, from the material on the floor to the position of the furniture, enhances the distinctive atmosphere of each room. The Tapestry Room is dark and rustic; the swirling red wallpaper of the Titian Room soaks in light from the courtyard’s glow.

Intimate displays tempt museum visitors to forget everything else and indulge in a dialogue with the art. Raphael’s Pieta, for instance, rests on a writing desk near a window. The small oil painting depicts the Madonna holding her crucified son, and its place on the desk invites very personal meditation. Just when you start to get lost in the experience, however, the ‘PLACE NO OBJECT HERE’ signs that are plastered on every single piece of furniture – at least once – will rudely remind you of reality.

The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum owns an astonishing number of significant works. Titian’s Europa was named ‘Boston’s Most Important Work’ by a panel of museum directors surveyed by The Boston Globe. The large and colorful painting depicts the abduction of Europa, a Phoenician princess, by Jupiter, who is disguised as a white bull. Motion explodes from the canvas, and subtle details in the Titian room – like a sculpture of a flying cupid that sits under the bottom left corner of the painting to echo one of Titian’s cupids – culminate to create an intense impression of beauty and violence.

The Gardner Museum also owns a self-portrait by Rembrandt, painted when he was 23 years old, and boasts works by Vermeer, Botticelli, Whistler, and Manet. There are a number of paintings by John Singer Sargent, who served as an artist-in-residence during the museum’s early years.

Mrs. Gardner’s dedication to contemporary artists, poets and musicians has lived on, and today the museum hosts weekly concerts and lectures. ‘Episodes: Bus Park and Forevermore’ is the museum’s latest contemporary art exhibit. The school bus installation, which includes audio recordings of school children reading from children’s books acquired by Mrs. Gardner, is the work of the museum’s current artist-in-residence Nari Ward.

Mrs. Gardner’s phenomenal library, which includes more than 1,000 rare books spanning six centuries, should not be overlooked. If you see a glass case swathed in brown velvet, don’t skip to the next painting. Peek under the cloth, and you may discover original Dante manuscripts or a letter from Oliver Wendell Holmes.

The Gardner Museum is open Tuesday through Sunday, 11a.m. to 5 p.m., and costs $5 for students.