The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and its magnificent collection are enlivened through fresh insights and new photography in this updated guide This updated guide to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum charts new pathways through the beloved institution’s superb collection. Gardner, a trail-blazing American who was among the most prominent patrons of her day, built a Venetian-inspired palazzo in Boston to share her exquisite and thought-provoking art objects from diverse cultures and eras. She hosted luminaries in the worlds of music, dance, and literature, and supported such famed artists as Henry James and John Singer Sargent. The authors look at masterpieces by Botticelli, Rembrandt, Titian, and others, as well as hidden treasures, including decorative arts, correspondence, and photographs. Rather than positioning the museum simply as a historical gem, they present it as a site for forging connections between past and present and reinforcing the founder’s legacy of sustaining contemporary art, music, and education. Featuring all-new photography, the book captures the uniqueness of this museum, helping us consider anew what the museum meant in Gardner’s time and what it means in ours.

The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum: A Guide

Arts & Photography

Nielsen, Christina

Riley, Casey

Silver, Nathaniel

History & Criticism

Yale University Press

A major new biography of legendary art collector and philanthropist Isabella Stewart Gardner Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840-1924) assembled an extraordinary collection of art from diverse cultures and eras--and built a Venetian-style palazzo in Boston to share these exquisite treasures with the world. But her life and work remains shrouded in myth. Separating fiction and fact, this book paints an unforgettable portrait of Gardner, drawing on her substantial personal archive and including previously unpublished findings to offer new perspectives on her life and her construction of identity. Gardner was heroically progressive in some of her views and disappointingly biased in others. Nathaniel Silver and Diana Seave Greenwald shed new light on her connections to minority communities in Boston, her views on suffrage and other issues of the day, the sources of her and her husband's wealth, and her ties to politicians, writers, and artists. What emerges is a multifaceted portrait of a trailblazing collector and patron of the arts--from Italian Renaissance paintings to Chinese antiquities--who built a museum unprecedented in its curatorial vision. Beautifully illustrated, this book challenges any portrayal of Gardner as a straightforward feminist hero, revealing instead an exceptional, complex woman who created a legendary museum and played a vibrant and influential role in the art world. Distributed for the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum

Isabella Stewart Gardner: A Life

Greenwald, Diana Seave

Humor & Entertainment

Princeton University Press

includes essays by James R. Banker ad Mactelt Israels and an Appendix by Giacomo Guazzini and Elena Squillantini

Piero della Francesca in America

The Frick Collection

Published in commemoration of the 500th anniversary of Raphael’s death, this engrossing publication accompanies an exhibition the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Raphael and the Pope’s Librarian brings together for the first time one of the most fascinating works in the museum’s collection – the Gardner Museum’s portrait of papal librarian Tommaso Inghirami – and a painting from the Vatican Museums depicting an episode in this life. This book tells the story of the first Raphael in America and explores Inghirami’s fascinating career. Nearly five centuries after his death in 1520, Raphael’s fame remains undiminished. Crowned “prince of painters” by Giorgio Vasari, he inspired both artists of his own time and others for centuries afterward. According to the celebrated writer Henry James, Raphael’s work was “semi-sacred.” Gilded Age American collectors swooned over his iconic religious images and masterly brushwork, and James’s contemporaries feverishly tried and failed to acquire Raphael’s rare paintings in a market flooded with copies, and the occasional forgery. Isabella Stewart Gardner took up the challenge, determined to buy a magnificent Madonna by Raphael. Following her gripping hunt, Gardner was the first collector to bring a work by Raphael to America, where its unexpected subject led to a mixed reception and generated surprising rumors in the years to follow. Despite any hesitations over the painting’s beauty, Gardner named an entire gallery of her new Boston museum after the Renaissance master and installed many of her most celebrated works of art around his portrait of the rotund cleric Tommaso Inghirami. Described by Erasmus as “the Cicero of our era”, Inghirami was a celebrity in the high Renaissance esteemed for his profound erudition and theatrical abilities. His unparalleled knowledge and understanding of classics made him the ideal choice for Vatican Librarian under Pope Julius II. Yet he achieved a lasting fame on stage, playing a leading role in the revival of ancient theatre and acquiring the nickname “Fedra” after starring as the lovesick Queen Athens in Seneca’s Greek tragedy Hippolytus (Phaedra). Inghirami’s friend Raphael offered him another role, recasting the Renaissance humanist as the congenial philosopher Epicurius in his legendary School of Athens fresco before memorializing him in the more worldly painted portrait at the center of this exhibition. Raphael and the Pope’s Librarian is the latest in the Close Up series of books accompanying a Gardner exhibition series, each installment of which sheds new light on an outstanding work of art in the permanent collection.

Raphael and the Pope’s Librarian (Close Up)

Rowland, Ingrid

Paul Holberton Publishing

The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum's new exhibition program, Close Up, features a single work from their collection. The inaugural installation of the series focuses on an altarpiece of The Annunciation by Italian Renaissance painter Piermatteo d'Amelia, which will be removed from the historic palace and displayed in the new Hostetter Gallery. This book recounts three fascinating stories behind this work of art: the riveting tales of its acquisition, its attribution, and its painter.

Close Up

Applewood Books

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Books by Silver, Nathaniel