Isabella Stewart Gardner (New York, 1840 - 1924, Boston)
Travel Album: Italy, 1884
Bound album including collected photographs, found papers, and pen and ink annotations, 36.2 x 30 x 4.1 cm (14 1/4 x 11 13/16 x 1 5/8 in.)
Vatichino
Commentary
Isabella 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.