In Victorian Boston, at the end of XIXth century, a palace was built according to the canons of Venetian Renaissance architecture, to the specifications of a passionate collector, Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840-1924). In the stillness of a park, Isabella conceived Fenway Court , a home to shelter the collection which she and her husband Jack Gardner amassed in a quarter of century. In the interior courtyard, she installed the decorative elements she purchased in 1897 in the former Serenissima, bringing the friezes and the architectural decorations of several palazzo façades back to Boston (fig. 1). In January 1903, the palace, which celebrated its centennial one year ago, opened to the public; and in the entrance, today like yesterday, it greets its visitors with the words ‘“C’est mon plasir”’, which summarizes Isabella’s own mission for her museum.

The Gardners, great travellers, landing in Venice in 1884, where they met with friends. For over a month, Isabella and Jack where guests of Daniel Curtis, a relative and the owner of Palazzo Barbaro on Grand Canal; while her husband recovered from an illness that struck him during their travels, Isabella wandered incessantly around the city, studying its artworks, which she photographed as she went along. The couple returned frequently to Venice, to Palazzo Barbaro: the small garden inside the building was the inspiration for the great courtyard later recreated at Fenway Court.

The artist Anders Zorn was the author of a celebrated portrait which immortalizes Isabella at Palazzo Barbaro. After hours spent together in a gondola, rocked by the waves of the lagoon, the artist immortalized her as she breaks triumphantly into the room from a balcony overlooking the Grand Canal: the painter would said that ‘“not all subjects, alas, are Mrs. Gardner and not all backgrounds are the Grand Canal”’. Back in Venice in 1897, the couple concentrated on searching for decorative and architectural elements to use in the soon- to –be- constructed building. Thanks to the mediation of Francesco Dorigo, the Gardners took the originals balconies of the Palazzo Cavalli - Franchetti adiacent to Palazzo Barbaro, which where replaced by copies, with the complicity of Camillo Boito, the architect for the restoration work, and Baron Giorgio Franchetti: at least this is the explanation by scholar Mary Mc Leod, thought many believe that they are the balconies from the Ca’ d’Oro (but perhaps, there are some from each of the two buildings).

Not only is the interior courtyard of Fenway Court inspired by Venetian architecture, but the collection contains a considerable number of remarkable masterpieces painted in the city of the doges, or by artists sharing the Venetian culture. The most remarkable acquisition, again thanks to Berenston’s help, was certainly The rape of Europa by Titian, one of the poems painted by the artist for King Philip II of Spain between 1554 and 1562.

For those who visit the museum today, before entering the Titian Room, one crosses the intimate room which takes its name from Veronese, covered in cuoridoro partly from Venice, where they where used to insulate the interiors of the palaces from the humidity. Mrs. Gardner had commissioned a ceiling that would imitate the gilded and painted ceilings she had so admired in Venetian buildings, so that she could match the structure to the Incoronation of Hebe by Caliari and his collaborators. On the walls below the painting, two views by Francesco Guardi, the Riva degli Schiavoni and the Piazzetta seen from the Bacino di San Marco, contributed to enhancing the Venetian atmosphere of the place.

The entire Veronese Room is pervaded with Isabella’s taste for objects from Venice. Under a Portrait of a Procuratore, perhaps a Contarini, an one a delicious rococo table, there is a Madonna make of black glass, created in Murano in the XVIIth century to emulate the ancient Byzantine figures. Several meters farther, a large XIXth century mirror; in the past, it adorned the walls of Palazzo Morosini at San Canzian, displaying the coat of arms in the inlaid frame: who knows if, looking all around her and surroundend by so many Venetian objects, Isabella would return in her mind to those gentle summers she spent in the lagoon, wandering through the streets and the squares, nourishing her desire to know, and to collect, the evidence of a splendor with no longer existed in the city.