Centennials Isabella Stewart Gardner in Venice; George Balanchine at Harvard BY JEFFREY GANTZ
	"Gondola Days: Isabella Stewart Gardner and the Palazzo Barbaro Circle" Curated by Elizabeth Anne McCauley, Alan Chong, Rosella Mamoli Zorzi, and Richard Lingner. At the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum through August 15. "George Balanchine: A Life’s Journey in Ballet" Curated by Fredric Woodbridge Wilson and Iris M. Fanger. At the Harvard Theatre Collection in Pusey Library through May 28.

At Venice, please, if possible, no dreadful, no vulgar hotel; but, if it can at all be managed — you know what I mean — some fine old rooms, wholly independent, for a series of months. Plenty of them too, and the more interesting the better: part of a palace, historic and picturesque, but strictly inodorous, where we shall be to ourselves, with a cook, don’t you know? — with servants, frescoes, tapestries, antiquities, the thorough make-believe of a settlement." Those are the words of Milly Theale in Henry James’s 1902 novel The Wings of the Dove, and the rooms she obtains as a result are in the Palazzo Barbaro, whose circle, having formed in the early 1880s, took in James, Robert Browning, James McNeill Whistler, John Singer Sargent, John Addington Symonds, Vernon Lee, Bernard Berenson, and Claude Monet. From 1890 on, the Barbaro was also the Venetian base for Isabella and Jack Gardner. The museum she built in the Fenway is celebrating the tail end of its centennial with "Gondola Days: Isabella Stewart Gardner and the Palazzo Barbaro Circle," which opens the fourth floor — Isabella’s residence — to the public for the first time with a show that has as much to say about the Gardner as it does about Venice.

Isabella and Jack first visited Venice in 1884, on the return leg of a trip to Japan and India, putting up at the fashionable (whether it was also dreadful and vulgar only Milly Theale could tell us) Hotel Europa, on the Canal opposite Santa Maria della Salute. Among the friends they made there were fellow Bostonians Daniel and Ariana Curtis, who had first rented the Palazzo Barbaro in 1881 and who would buy its top floors in 1885 for a mere $13,500. The Gardners returned to the Europa in 1886 and 1888, but in 1890, they rented the Barbaro, where Isabella’s salons became the stuff of legend. By 1896, they were planning a small museum to be built on the site of their house at 152 Beacon Street, but even before Jack died, in December 1898, it had become clear that their acquisitions — sculpture and architecture as well as paintings — would require more space. Isabella bought a plot of land in the Fenway and construction began in 1899; the museum, including a fourth-floor apartment, opened January 1, 1903.

It’s not hard to see what drew the Gardners, and especially Isabella, to Venice. Boston had no history to speak of, no extravagant art, no extravagance in anything. Venice was a floating palace of fantasy and mystery, with ancient art treasures awaiting everywhere and adventure just a gondola ride away. For some, the gondola ride was the adventure: the 1884 painting Drifting with the Tide, by Ralph Curtis, the son of Daniel and Ariana, shows a fashionably dressed woman who may be flirting with her gondolier, and Sargent’s 1880-’82 Head of a Gondolier, with its sensuous, almost cruel face, raises questions about the relationship between artist and sitter. Isabella herself was able to enjoy the attentions of young male artists in a way that would have been more difficult back home. In 1892, the mother of one such Bostonian, Joseph Lindon Smith, wrote, "She bows sweetly to Joe as he goes by. She has with her one Boston gentleman on the string already and maybe will not require the admiration of our Joseph — his watchful Ma will sit in ambush and note what’s being done."

"Gondola Days" takes you up the elevator and through Mrs. Gardner’s irregularly shaped dining room (the rectangular dining table has been removed) and her "speak-a-bit" alcove waiting room to the drawing room where she received visitors and her winter bedroom, both of which have been hung with paintings, some bought by Isabella, some borrowed from private collections and other museums. The Museum of Fine Arts has contributed Claude Monet’s Le Grand Canal (which he painted at the Barbaro in 1908, two years after Mrs. Gardner’s last visit), and there are works by James Whistler and Anders Zorn, but it’s Ralph Curtis and John Sargent who dominate the show. Curtis is an enigma: Drifting with the Tide is agreeably painted and mildly suggestive, whereas Return from the Lido, done the same year (1884, when the Gardners first visited Venice), seems almost amateurish, with its blocky, anonymous depiction of the lady and its conventional composition (Isabella nonetheless bought it, for $150). His San Giorgio by Moonlight, which goes back to 1880-’82, with its two unformed and unsuggestive figures, has the look of a tourist watercolor next to Sargent’s contemporary Café on the Riva degli Schiavoni, which bursts at its seams. Curtis’s 1885 Scirocco, which is represented by a photograph, is a gauzy depiction of the Ker sisters as two full-bosomed wasp-waisted young ladies, one playing the guitar, the other looking wistfully out over their balcony. In the 1890s, Curtis drifted away from painting. In 1897, he married heiress and widow Lisa Colt. In 1908, Edith Wharton published a story called "The Verdict" in which a successful young artist marries a wealthy widow and then abandons his career. Lisa was livid; in fact, Ralph had abandoned his career before he met her.

He’s not, of course, the only artist who looks second-rate hanging next to Sargent. Antonio Mancini’s Daniel Sargent Curtis and Ariana Wormeley Curtis, both done in the early 1880s, are sensitive portraits of a middle-aged couple (he was born in 1825, she in 1833); in his face you might detect a hint of the pride and pugnaciousness that led to his serving two months in the Brookline jail in 1869 for twisting a lawyer’s nose on a Chestnut Hill streetcar and thereafter refusing to apologize. And a photograph taken at the Barbaro in 1888 shows Ariana Curtis in the same kind of lace cap and demure pose, so it’s not as if Mancini’s pastel weren’t accurate. But Sargent’s Ariana Curtis, which he did in 1882, shows a different woman, vibrant, determined, with her tight lips and pointed chin, the cap pushed back to reveal her glossy dark hair. She looks 10 years younger and 10 years more beautiful. Is it flattery, or is Sargent seeing through the ravages of age?

Henry James’s negative reaction to Sargent’s 1898 painting of Lisa Curtis notwithstanding, it’s a Jamesian portrait of a 28-year-old woman who, arms back and bare shoulders forward, is well aware of what her wealth and her beauty are worth. James particularly disliked the elaborateness of her silver dress ("indeed it seems to me that her certainly very striking beauty is of an order to rejoice in clothes the least fustian possible"); and though it is the sort of "fustian" costume that might have appealed to Sargent, it’s also one that Lisa likely knew she could outshine. The other Curtis painting Sargent did in 1898, A Venetian Interior, shows the family in their salone. Ralph and Lisa stand to the left, Ralph lounging against the edge of a table in a distinctly flâneur pose, Lisa looking prim as she finishes puring tea. Daniel and Ariana sit in the right foreground, Daniel white-maned, intent on his newspaper, Ariana looking a little vacantly at the artist and seeming much older than she did in 1882. The interior itself is dark (Ludwig Passini’s 1855 watercolor The Salone of the Palazzo Barbaro shows how much life there was in the room), as if the century were closing in on the Curtises (Ralph and Lisa didn’t spend much time there after their marriage, and Daniel died in 1908), or as if the glory of Venice were lost on them.

Sargent did not visit Venice between 1882 and 1898, and so he never saw Mrs. Gardner there (she came in 1897 and 1899). The celebrated 1894 portrait that the Swedish painter and Barbaro circle member Anders Zorn did of her, Isabella Stewart Gardner in Venice, has Sargent’s flamboyance but not his insight. Writing to Joseph Lindon Smith, Isabella described it as "A night scene, painted at night. I am on the balcony, stepping down into the Salone pushing both sides of the window back with my arms raised up and spread wide! Exactly like me." Done on the spur of the moment, Zorn’s painting is a tour-de-force depiction of Mrs. Gardner as a dove descending, as the hostess of Venice’s most brilliant salon. It’s Isabella as she undoubtedly saw herself, but the blurred — appropriately, one might argue — face doesn’t convey the complexity of Sargent’s 1888 Boston painting of Isabella (where the tension is conveyed by her expression, her posture, and her dress) or even Passini’s rejected and now lost 1892 pastel, which brings out her childlike side.

In 1888, Ralph Curtis wrote to tell Mrs. Gardner that the Palazzo Contarini-Fasan (opposite the Salute) was for sale and that if she bought it, her bedroom "would be Desdemona’s balcony room." When Mrs. Gardner’s father died, in 1891, she inherited a reported $1.75 million. Given that Daniel Curtis paid just $13,500 for the Barbaro, it’s clear that she could have bought a Venetian palazzo had she wanted one. The Curtises were happy to live in Venice, to read and study history and walk in their garden on the Giudecca. Milly Theale, who knows she’s dying, makes the Barbaro "the ark of her deluge." Isabella’s "gondola days" seem to have been just that, a refuge from but not a replacement for Boston. She wasn’t ready for the "thorough make-believe of a settlement"; after Jack’s death, she visited Venice just twice, in 1899 and 1906. Her "ark" was the museum she built in the Fenway, and in Boston, as opposed to Venice, there was nothing like it.

The artwork and the memorabilia collected for the show only hint at the story told in the accompanying catalogue. More like a book, Gondola Days offers essays by the four curators plus "John Sargent’s Fountain of Youth" by the MFA’s Erica Hirshler, "A Venetian Courtyard in Boston" by Giovanna de Appolonia, "The Palazzo Barbaro Before the Curtises" by Marino Zorzi, and "My Barbaro" by Patricia Curtis Viganò, Daniel and Ariana’s granddaughter, who has lived in the Barbaro all her life. Here you’ll find the complete story of the infamous "Proboscis Pulling" as well as biographies of the Barbaro circle (and very few slip-ups, though on page 228 the church in Ralph Curtis’s San Giorgio by Moonlight is, of course, not Santa Maria della Salute but San Giorgio Maggiore). The Gardner is also offering its usual invaluable series of talks and lectures; for a schedule, visit www.gardnermuseum.org.