(c) 2009 Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston

Travel Album: Italy

primary Isabella Stewart Gardner (New York, 1840 - 1924, Boston)

photographer Carlo Naya (Tronzano Vercellese, Italy, 1816 - 1882, Venice)

Date1884

Place MadeVenice, Veneto, Italy, Europe

MediumBound album including collected photographs, found papers, and pen and ink annotations

Dimensions36.2 x 30 x 4.1 cm (14 1/4 x 11 13/16 x 1 5/8 in.)

ClassificationsBooks

Credit LineIsabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston

Accession numberv.1.a.4.12

eMuseum ID730666

EmbARK ObjectID17490

TMS Source ID5762

Last Updated8/9/24

Status

Not on view

Web CommentaryIsabella Stewart Gardner kept thorough records of her travels in the form of travel albums. This album features her favorite city, Venice. Though she briefly visited the city as a teenager, she returned for the first time as an adult in the spring of 1884 at the conclusion of the months-long tour of Asia she took with her husband. Coming from the East to see Venice—a city that has always facilitated trade between Europe and Asia— was an exceptional experience for a nineteenth-century American tourist. Gardner created this album on the trip, which would be her first of several stays in the city over the coming fifteen years. In pages 77-78, she pastes an image of a Madonna and Child on top of a posed sentimental image of street children in Venice. This juxtaposition perhaps illuminates the ways in which she thought the virtues of charity and grace evoked in Renaissance art connected to contemporary issues like childhood poverty.

BibliographyNotesElizabeth Anne McCauley et al. Gondola Days: Isabella Stewart Gardner and the Palazzo Barbaro Circle. Exh. cat. (Boston: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum; Venice: Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, 2004), pp. 2-51.
Stacy Perman. "Diary of a Somebody". Patek Philippe (Vol. 3, no. 12, 2015), pp. 44-49, ill.
Nathaniel Silver (ed.), Titian's Rape of Europa (Boston, 2021), pp. 12, fig. 2.
Diana Seave Greenwald and Casey Riley (ed.). Fellow Wanderer: Isabella Stewart Gardner's Travel Albums. Exh. cat. (Boston: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 2023), pp. 46-47, 209, plate 6, no. 13.
Nathaniel Silver and Diana Seave Greenwald. Isabella Stewart Gardner: A Life (Boston, 2022), p.59-60, fig. 29.

MarksNotesEmbossed in gold ink on the center front cover: Venezia
Inscribed in ink in Isabella Stewart Gardner's hand on page 2: I.S. Gardner - / May 14 - June 24. / 1884