Dubbed "a mighty poet" by American author Henry James, Titian remains one of the most celebrated painters in Western art. Since his death in 1576, the artist's reputation has never waned. In Gilded Age America, Titian paintings becamethe peerless prizes of leading collectors and quickly rose to the top of Isabella Stewart Gardner's wish list. In 1896, she landed his masterpiece, The Rape of Europa. It became the sole example of his celebrated cycle of poesie outside of Europe, inspired an entire gallery in her newly built museum, and contributed to England's national outcry over the loss of its art treasures. This book - the first dedicated to Europa - tells the painting's story in Gardner's time, in Titian's, and offers rare insights into the artist's virtuoso technique. Nathaniel Silver, William and Lia Poorvu Curator of the Collection, tells the acquisition story behind The Rape of Europa (1562), one of the most influential and iconic Renaissance paintings in America. The purchase of Titian's masterpiece from an English aristocrat marked the beginning of a new phase in Gardner's business relationship with scholar and art dealer Bernard Berenson and made her the envy of every art collector in the United States. While Henry James nicknamed Isabella "daughter of Titian" and all of Boston fell at her feet, European contemporaries took note of their rapidly disappearing national patrimony. The same celebrity that would make Europa the crown jewel of Boston's newest museum fueled the widely publicized debate over England's artistic heritage. "American despoilers" became the rallying cry of British museum directors, curators, and scholars who cast their country as the victim of New World rapacity, and Isabella its most brilliant villain. This volume further explores Europa in Titian's own time. Here the legendary painter laid claim to the power of poetic invention, creating the last of the six mythological canvases to reach Philip II in three years between 1559 and 1562. Described by the artist as poesie (literally "painted poetries"), these celebrated pictures reimagined stories from antiquity and explored the epic consequences of encounters between gods and mortals. Titian's staggeringly original interpretations solicited comparisons with Ovid's poetry and ancient art. Completed over more than a decade, they fulfilled part of a larger agreement to furnish the king with paintings both secular - and highly sensual in character - as well as altarpieces of religious subjects. Published here for the first time, dramatically enlarged details of the composition demonstrate Titian's deft touch and dazzlingly technical accomplishment. These bravura passages recently revealed by the painting's comprehensive cleaning - the fi rst since its arrival in America - are accompanied by commentary from the conservator, Gianfranco Pocobene, who returned Europa to its original glory.

Titian's rape of Europa

Published in commemoration of the 500th anniversary of Raphael's death, this engrossing publication accompanies an exhibition the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Raphael and the Pope's Librarian brings together for the first time one of the most fascinating works in the museum's collection - the Gardner Museum's portrait of papal librarian Tommaso Inghirami - and a painting from the Vatican Museums depicting an episode in this life. This book tells the story of the first Raphael in America and explores Inghirami's fascinating career.

Raphaël and the Pope's librarian

Botticelli : Heroines and Heroes explores the work of the legendary Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli, focusing on a genre called spalliera that Botticelli employed with staggering originality. The catalgoue and exhibition, held at the Gardner Museum, Boston, include significant loans from European and American public collections. Accompanying the exhibition at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston (14 February - 19 May 2019), this catalogue explores the work of legendary Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli (about 1444-1510). Today the alluring and enigmatic Primavera forms the cornerstone of his modern fame, but its familiarity belies distant origins in the heady intellectual environment of Laurentian Florence and the residences of its moneyed elite. Part of a genre called spalliera, so named for their installation around shoulder (spalla) height, this type of painting introduced beautiful, strange, and disturbing images into lavish Florentine homes. With staggering originality, Botticelli reinvented ancient subjects for the domestic interior, paneling patrician bedrooms with moralizing tales and offering erudite instruction to their influential inhabitants. At the center of this exhibition is a spalliera reunited, the Gardner's Tragedy of Lucretia and its companion The Tragedy of Virginia (Accademia Carrara, Bergamo). Together with extraordinary loans of the same genre from European and American public collections, Heroines and Heroes explores Botticelli's revolutionary approach to antiquity - from ancient Roman to early Christian - and offers a new perspective on his late career masterpieces. Catalogue essays address Botticelli's spalliera (Nathaniel Silver), their violence (Scott Nethersole), his textual sources (Elsa Filosa), and rediscovery in Gilded Age Boston (Patricia Lee Rubin). Entries include new insights for each work and up-to-date bibliographies, while a special section features archival materials devoted to Gardner's pioneering acquisition of the first Botticelli in America.

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