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Elizabeth Anne McCauley, Alan Chong, Rosella Mamoli Zorzi, and Richard Lingner. Gondola Days: Isabella Stewart Gardner and the Palazzo Barbara Circle. Easthampton: Antique Collectors' Club, 2004. 297 pp. $55.00.
Lavishly illustrated with fine reproductions of photographs, paintings, sketches, and letters, Gondola Days, with its essays by Italian and American scholars and excellent supporting materials, offers far more than coffee-table decoration. This beautiful book, published in conjunction with a 2004 exhibit at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, joins recent works on Whistler and his circle in Venice1 in recovering the meanings and uses that Venice offered to latenineteenth-century Anglo-Americans. These volumes liberally depict Venices at once new and familiar to us, helping us to recognize how our perceptions are framed by the visions of Whistler, Sargent, and James, just as those artists originally saw Venice through Ruskin.
With "fresh examination of documents, sources, and works of art" (xi), Gondola Days seeks, in a series of essays to exfoliate the significances of a particular Venetian place, the Palazzo Barbaro. Rosella Mamoli Zorzi credits Henry James with the Palazzo's "lasting fame," describing him as the building's "most eloquent and prolific rhapsodist" (70). Gondola Days is dedicated to preserving and extending that project. The building and its multiple artistic representations, including the brilliant Sargent painting, A Venetian Interior of 1898 (now at the Royal Academy of Arts in London), are charted and reproduced throughout. And the art and literary critics and historians who contribute to Gondola Days provide an education in the complex cultural meanings of the Palazzo, its visitors and inhabitants.
Alan Chong, Curator at the Gardner, introduces the volume and the Palazzo:
Ariana and Daniel Curtis of Boston first rented the Palazzo Barbaro in 1881, and purchased it in 1885. Almost immediately, the palace hosted readings by Robert...