This came back to haunt Berenson in 1898 when word of his secret arrangements with Colnaghi leaked out. Jack Gardner was furious, and Berenson was panic-stricken that he might lose his deep-pocketed client. Richard Norton, Professor Norton’s son, then tracking down ancient sculpture for Belle, bluntly accused Berenson of duplicity. “He is dishonest,” Norton wrote in a September 1898 letter. “He is as you must know a dealer. Well, there are only one or two honest Fine Art dealers in the world & Berenson is not one of those.” As for his own dealings with Belle, he swore “I have never . . . made one single centismo in the business. On the contrary the work is an expense—an expensive luxury.” He concluded the letter with, “You may find it hard to believe that I have written this letter with disinterested motives but such is the case. I tell you so on my honour & the Norton honour is, I believe, so far unsullied.” (Some time later, it was rumored that Richard Norton, too, secretly accepted money from dealers.)
The art world was a murky one at best, as huge amounts of money were being spent and everyone had his hand out. Belle had already made it clear to Berenson that she wanted nothing to do with the Colnaghis. So when Berenson arranged the purchase of a pair of portraits by Hans Holbein the Younger, and she discovered that he was once again surreptitiously fronting for the London art dealers, she threatened a lawsuit. “I am sure the end has come,” she wrote him in May 1899. “It looks as if it might be a question of the Law Courts.” Somehow the two of them managed to patch it up and continue their art quest. They were an odd pair. As one art critic put it, “They tormented each other unmercifully, two vain individualists caught in a curious relationship of affection and annoyance.”
Berenson craved her approval but he also referred to her as the “Serpent of the Charles [River].” He played to her vanity by seeking out any painting with a connection to Queen Isabella—or any Isabella for that matter. “Cable immediately,” he’d write, trying to force a quick decision on a painting. This work is “simply unsurpassable,” it will “enchant you. So be prepared with a pure heart and—a full purse.” There are others in line, he’d warn. As an old man, even he admitted that he might have overdone his sales pitch at times. “I had to put on the praise of the works of art, as Disraeli said of Queen Victoria, ‘not with a trowel, but with a shovel.’ ”
Belle had a mind of her own and was not always swayed by Berenson’s gushing recommendations. On one occasion, however, she purchased a Rembrandt just to please him, later admitting that “the Rembrandt left me cold, and it was only because you seemed so anxious about it, that I wired to get it.” (As it turned out, that particular painting, Landscape with Obelisk, was not a Rembrandt at all. In the 1980s, experts ascertained that the painting was by Govaert Flinck, one of Rembrandt’s pupils—and in 1990 the work was stolen along with the other Gardner treasures.) But together Berenson and Belle assembled some of the great masterworks in her collection—paintings by Rembrandt (genuine ones), Raphael, Botticelli, Giotto, Fra Angelico, and Rubens—and in later years, Chinese antiquities and Islamic miniatures.
In his memoir, Sketch for a Self-Portrait, written toward the end of his life, Berenson wrestled with his conscience over his role as the art arbiter for the ultrarich. Turning art into commerce gnawed at him. The once-poor émigré was eager for the money, but equally appalled by it. Berenson, nonetheless, emulated his Gilded Age patrons, renting and then buying a property outside Florence, Villa I Tatti, which had begun life as a sixteenth-century farmhouse. Set atop a hillside with spectacular vistas, the house and grounds were transformed by Berenson into a Renaissance-style villa with a magnificent formal garden. His work and life merged in his hilltop villa, as he filled it with his own impressive collection of art and books. Bequeathed to Harvard, the estate now serves as the university’s Center for Italian Renaissance Studies.
Belle had Berenson and other agents, including Sargent, in the field seeking out treasures; they were her knights in shining armor, ready to do battle to secure a prize for her. (“Do you want to see or buy a magnificent Persian rug of the finest design and period, worth all the pictures ever painted?” Sargent wrote her in 1894.) Belle loved the thrill of the chase and hated being outmaneuvered. In 1897 a Florentine art dealer told her he didn’t think he’d be able to get a fifteenth-century terra-cotta sculpture out of the country (authorities were cracking down on the wholesale looting of the country’s art treasures). Jack thought it was a ruse and that the dealer just wanted to sell the sculpture to someone else, probably at a higher price. Belle was competing against the J. P. Morgans of the world who, with their limitless funds, were scooping up everything in sight. “Please grab” the terra-cotta from the dealer, Belle instructed Berenson in a November 1897 letter from Paris. “Don’t let any one else have it, and if it really can’t be got out of Italy, take it away from him and have it put somewhere in greatest secrecy for the present. Tell no one and let no one see it—please.” That painted sculpture, The Deposition of Christ, is currently displayed in a hallway on the third floor of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum—exactly where she placed it.
Secrecy, an integral part of the game, added a cloak-and-dagger element to the quest. In 1898 when Richard Norton came upon a sculpture from the studio of Praxiteles, the renowned fourth-century BCE Athenian sculptor, he wrote Belle, “Don’t mention it to a soul or the game is up.” He needed her go-ahead immediately. A few months later in London he was shown a Raphael—“Don’t gasp. It is true”—that had been spirited out of Italy without the government’s knowledge. It “is beyond words to praise & all I beg of you is not to waste a moment. . . . But, good Lord, just think of it a real, unquestionable, perfect portrait by Raphael.”
Another time, Norton wrote to her from Rome that she should just wire two words—“Yes relief”—if she wanted an ancient marble throne he’d been bargaining for. Other cryptic one-word responses he recommended included “Patrizzi,” “Door,” and “Drapery.” When a small Rembrandt came within Norton’s range he warned her not to use the artist’s name in a telegram. “ ‘Ditch’ will serve as a synonym.” He also pointed out that the painting was only “about 24 inches square—just a nice size to put in a trunk!” Furiously telegraphed messages in code, art smuggled out of countries. It was the high drama that Belle loved.
Fooling customs officials became an art in itself. Joseph Lindon Smith, an artist and friend of Belle’s, purchased her a terra cotta Madonna and child and covered it in watercolor to obscure its antiquity—and its worth. “When therefore, this lovely thing reaches you,” he wrote, “it will not be at all lovely, until the deceit has been taken off.” On another occasion, the ever-resourceful Smith covered four marble Arab capitals with plaster and paint that was removable after being soaked in water. Better yet, he talked the dealer he bought the columns from in Seville into creating a fake invoice so Belle would pay less on duty tax. Smith advised her to destroy his letter to keep their deception secret.
Belle didn’t always get away with this sort of subterfuge. In 1904 she had to pay $200,000 in custom duties for art and statuary that had been imported in 1898 under what government officials considered false pretenses. (She claimed it was for a museum; they disagreed.) When a friend brought her art from Europe in 1908 under the guise of “household effects,” Belle was caught and fined $150,000—for art valued at roughly $82,000. “My life is as usual,” she wrote to a friend that year, “music, people & constant persecution from our government.” The Boston press, not usually an ally, weighed in on Belle’s side in this cause célèbre. An editorial in the Evening Transcript—aimed sarcastically at the custom laws—suggested that Belle should import dogs instead. “A snarling, blear-eyed bulldog of uncertain walk and disagreeable temper, valued at $10,000 can be imported free of duty. A yelping, howling, snapping poodle of no earthly good to himself or humanity but valued at $8,000 can be imported duty free. . . . But any millionaire who tries to import works of Titian, Rubens or Turner is lucky if he escapes jail.”
In fact, when Belle imported those heavily fined works in 1898, she had already decided to create a museum. Berenson had secured two Old Masters for her in 1896: Titian’s monumental Europa—deemed by Rubens the greatest painting ever made—and a self-portrait by Rembrandt. They would be the cornerstones of a collection that she could see expanding upon, with no end in sight. Belle was hooked. “I suppose the picture-habit (which I seem to have) is as bad as the morphine or whiskey one—and it does cost,” she wrote Berenson in 1896. Belle had already gone through her own inheritance (supplemented by the winnings of a racehorse she owned) and Jack was ready to call a halt to her spending. “I have not one cent and Mr. Gardner (who has a New England conscience) won’t let me borrow even one more! I have borrowed so much already.”
But Jack didn’t stand a chance if Belle wanted something. Within a month of writing that pitiful letter to Berenson, Titian’s Europa arrived and Belle was in raptures—and also making plans for her museum. “I am breathless about the Europa, even yet!” she wrote Berenson on September 19, 1896. “I am back . . . after a two days’ orgy. The orgy was drinking my self drunk with Europa and then sitting for hours in my Italian Garden at Brookline, thinking and dreaming about her.” Belle took absolute pleasure in the work: “Every inch of paint in the picture seems full of joy.” She invited a number of friends and painters to view the rather shocking canvas that depicts the mythological story of the princess Europa in a moment of terror/ecstasy after having been raped by the god Jupiter. Disguising himself as a tame white bull, Jupiter ravished the unsuspecting princess. “Many came with ‘grave doubts’; many came to scoff; but all wallowed at her feet,” Belle wrote. “One painter, a general skeptic, couldn’t speak for the tears! all of joy!!!” Yes, she would have her museum. That month Belle commissioned the architect Willard Sears to redesign and enlarge their double house on Beacon Street in order to accommodate her growing art collection. She and Jack would live in private quarters above the museum. Belle swore Sears to secrecy about the project.
Art and Venice merged in Belle’s imagination. The city’s very geography—a myriad of islands in a lagoon set in the Adriatic Sea—was like a one-of-a-kind art installation. Venice was drenched in romance and mystery. Water lapped against the front steps of the palaces, many of them brightly colored, which lined the canals that crisscross the islands. The so-called “City of Water” or “Floating City” was just that—a sensual dream world rising out of water. Isolated and cast off in its lagoon, beset by mosquitoes and occasional outbreaks of cholera (especially among the poor), oppressively humid with no dry season, Venice was decomposing as one watched. By the late thirteenth century Venice was the richest city in Europe, a great commercial empire that dominated Mediterranean trade with the Byzantine and Islamic worlds. Over the course of five centuries, the city’s merchant princes built palaces—one more magnificent than the next—resplendent with commissioned paintings and frescoes from the greatest artists of the day. Eventually the economic tide turned, and Venice lost its preeminent place in international commerce.
By the late nineteenth century the old Venetian aristocrats, then penniless, tried to keep up appearances as their palazzos crumbled around them. Yet despite the ravages of age, the palaces presented an extraordinary spectacle: “The wind and the weather have had much to say,” Henry James wrote, “but disfigured and dishonored as they are, with the bruises of their marbles and the patience of their ruin, there is nothing like them in the world.”
The past was present and palpable in Venice. The air of decay amid grandeur—even the poor, barefoot children who roamed the alleyways—held a picturesque appeal to the rich expatriate Americans who settled in Venice, many of them Bostonians, some of whom were fleeing scandal back home. This was a place of refuge. Exiled royalty, among them Empress Frederick of Germany and Don Carlos of Spain, were in Venice at that time. The city “wouldn’t know herself without her rois en exil,” James wrote. But the melancholy of exile was more than compensated for with joy: the seemingly endless processions and feast days, regattas in the Venetian Lagoon, evenings filled with song and fireworks, barges and gondolas illuminated with colored lamps jostling for space on the busy canals, the surprise and delight of secret interior gardens.
Conventional rules were bent or ignored in Venice, and sexual mores were relaxed in that languorous, sultry atmosphere. Aesthetes like Henry James—widely considered a repressed homosexual—regularly took refuge in Venice. Whether he ever acted upon his longings is unknown. Sargent loved exploring and painting the city’s waterways and back alleys, and perhaps he let his guard down and enjoyed the sexual freedom the city offered. One friend reportedly claimed Sargent had a “positively scandalous” sex life in Venice. And an Englishwoman painted by Sargent confided to a niece that he was “only interested in Venetian gondoliers.”
The Gardners—Belle, at least—fell instantly in love with Venice when they first went there in 1884, and, thereafter, they made semiannual treks to the city. The vivid colors, the quality of the light, the semitropical climate, the astonishing art everywhere, the sexual freedom, and the unabashed homosexual activity—nothing could be further from Boston. Belle’s own rebellious spirit seemed at home in this world.
When in Venice, the Gardners generally stayed at the opulent Palazzo Barbaro on the Grand Canal, a fifteenth-century palace owned by the Curtis family, expatriate friends from Boston. According to legend, the Curtis family—Daniel Sargent Curtis (a cousin of John’s), his wife, Ariana Wormley Curtis, and their artist son, Ralph—fled Boston in the 1880s in the wake of some unpleasantness on a local train. Daniel got into an argument over a fellow commuter’s luggage taking up too much space. Words were exchanged, and when Daniel was accused of not being a gentleman, he responded by twisting his foe’s nose, which precipitated a fistfight. Daniel’s combatant happened to be a prominent lawyer. Curtis was convicted of assault and sentenced to two months in prison. Despite the judge’s offering him the opportunity to apologize and drop the whole matter, and practically all of Brahmin Boston—including Jack Gardner, the president of Harvard, and the usual assortment of Lowells, Higginsons, Saltonstalls, and other eminences—weighing in with a petition to the governor for a pardon, Curtis refused on principal, and served his two months. But the incident soured him on Boston society. Eight years later he left the city for good.
The Gardners were sometimes guests at the Palazzo Barbaro; on other occasions they rented it for themselves. Belle was in her element there, orchestrating grand dinners and nocturnal boat rides, and taking full advantage of the circle of writers, artists, and musicians the Curtises attracted to the house. When the Gardners were in residence, there could never be too many people. Belle was the engine of all the frivolity. Jack meanwhile chatted about business to anyone who might be interested (not many of those about) and busied himself keeping an account of their expenses. “I don’t much wonder she likes other company in the house most of the time,” one visitor wrote. “Mr. Jack is a comfortable sort of a body but come to think of it I guess pretty stupid as a constant companion.” That being said, the visitor had to admit, “they are quite a devoted pair.”
On at least one occasion Belle overbooked the enormous palace. There were no bedrooms available when Henry James came to visit in the summer of 1892, so Belle arranged for a four-poster bed, surrounded by netting to keep the mosquitoes at bay, to be placed in the elegant upstairs library. Lying on the bed James could gaze through the netting at the fabulous frescoed ceiling. Dazzled by its seductive beauty, James used the Palazzo Barbaro as the backdrop for his novel The Wings of the Dove; its main character, an American heiress named Milly Theale, bears an uncanny resemblance to Belle.
Photographs from Venice depict Isabella and her friends leaning back in flat-bottomed gondolas guided by handsome gondoliers wearing broad-brimmed straw hats at a jaunty angle, and dashing white sailor suits cinched around the waist with long sashes. The athletic and sunburned gondoliers skillfully navigated the water
ways and were idolized. Belle ogled them. Sargent painted them. The artist brought an Italian named Nicola d’Inverno to work in his studio in London. Visitors assumed the muscular young man was a gondolier from Venice, although in reality he was an amateur boxer from an Italian enclave in working-class London. D’Inverno worked for Sargent and traveled widely with him—to Palestine, Italy, and the United States, staying with him for over twenty years. D’Inverno left Sargent’s employ in 1918, forced to do so for legal reasons—and perhaps to prevent a scandal for the artist—after he got into a brawl at the grand Hotel Vendome in Boston. His portrait, in which he could be mistaken for a Venetian gondolier, remained in Sargent’s Tite Street studio until the artist’s death.
Having settled on their plan for a museum, the Gardners’ 1897 trip to Venice turned into a sustained, omnivorous adventure in acquisition. By this time, Jack had actually warmed to the museum idea and he helped Belle select treasures of every kind: furniture, paintings and wall panels, sumptuous fabrics, a pair of stone lions, and large architectural details—entire columns, frescoes, balconies, reliefs, fountains, an iron gate, and carved molding from the fourteenth century. Most of the architectural pieces in the interior courtyard of her Fenway Court museum were purchased during this trip. The buying continued in Rome and Sicily and Paris, where Belle hired a large storeroom to house her purchases and wait for a “more favorable time to bring them into the country than the present”—undoubtedly a plan designed to circumvent government officials and fees.
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