General admission for children 17 years and under is always free
Venice
Commentary
No foreign location has been more closely associated with Isabella Stewart Gardner and her museum than Venice.
The museum’s collection, for example, includes dozens of Venetian works, notably the most important painting in the United States by the Renaissance master Titian. 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 this spread, 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.