Friends and art

[redbird]

papersky was in town for a couple of days to give a talk at Harvard, and suggested getting together for lunch and maybe a museum beforehand. She had the excellent idea of also inviting nineweaving, and selected the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (at her aunt's suggestion). cattitude and I met Papersky and Nine at the Gardner around 10:30, and then waited around outside because it turns out that museum opens at 11. (I had checked that they were open on Monday, because some museums aren't, but none of us had checked how early on Monday.) It was chilly out yesterday morning, but I was happy to spend some time talking before we went into the museum, as well as during and after.

The second floor of the museum, which has much of the best art, was closed yesterday for unspecified "restoration," but there was enough on the first and third floors, plus a special exhibit on Renaissance books, to keep us busy and happy for as long as we had to spare, given that Papersky wanted to be back in Cambridge in plenty of time for her talk. Nine, who has been there far more often than I have, says the Gardner is the kind of place where there's always more to see, lurking next to something you looked at on a previous visit: Gardner didn't believe in leaving a bit of wall bare that could hold a little more art, or putting ten pieces of glass or china in a display cabinet that could hold fifty[0].

I wasn't quite as taken by the special exhibit as my friends; it may be relevant that I was the only one of us who doesn't know Latin, and the few books that weren't in Latin were in Italian. The exhibit includes an illuminated book of hours, an original of the edition of Dante illustrated by Botticelli, and the first thing ever printed with italics.

The museum cafe had actual interesting food (the tea selections included a rose-flavored Chinese tea that was Gardner's personal favorite); it's not cheap, because it's in the museum, but I'd rather pay $22 for broiled scallops than $15 for a ham sandwich. (Some other day, I'll eat lunch somewhere else, for a third the price, and then go to the museum.)

[0] Gardner's will established a foundation to run her home as a museum, on the condition that everything be left where she'd had it. That means the entire large and somewhat eclectic collection[1] is on display. The museum provides laminated "room guides," each of which identifies the items on one wall of the room you're standing in.

[1] A few items were stolen late in the last century, and are still missing. The places where they should be are indicated within empty frames.

Comments

[anne]

They're fixing the leaky roof.

[filkerdave.livejournal.com]

Wait, did I miss you moving back east?

[redbird]

Yes, last March.

[filkerdave.livejournal.com]

Huh.

[42itous.livejournal.com]

I need to go to the Gardner again -- it's been over a decade since I was last there. Mostly I've been going to the MFA (where there's a very reasonably priced cafeteria in the basement, and in good weather you can take your tray out to eat lunch in the garden).

[browngirl.livejournal.com]

I love the Gardner for its glorious eclecticness.

[light-of-summer.livejournal.com]

*waves hello*

I seem to remember that there's at least one mystery novel set at the Gardner, but I don't recall if it was a good one.

[redbird]

The one I've read is Charlotte MacLeod's The Plain Old Man, which I thought was good in a deliberately light and somewhat humorous sort of way. (In her good books, the tone works; in some it's less actually funny and more "look, I am making jokes here," which I suspect was partly because as a series goes on, it's easy to assume that the readers will keep buying the books, and also harder to keep the same characters and their relationships fresh.)

[light-of-summer.livejournal.com]

I know what you mean about Charlotte MacLeod--I've long been partial to funny mysteries, and have seen the unevenness you mention in her work. I think you're right about the increasing strain and decreasing motivation as series go on. (Poster-boy: Roger Zelazny, the Amber books--meow.)

And even when the author is still clearly trying hard, sometimes it just seems like the plots start seeming recycled. (By the umpteenth Amelia Peabody novel by Elizabeth Peters, it seemed like all the major characters and most of the minor ones had been kidnapped at least once! And I thought those books were generally better written than a lot of MacLeod books and the last 60% of the Amber books.)

Pratchett, on the other hand, just seemed to me to get better and better with time. He gave himself a whole lot of room to work with in DiscWorld, though--several settings and several sets of characters.

Ha! I didn't mean for this comment to go on so long.

Back to the Gardner as a setting: I think the book I was thinking of, before, was Murder at the Gardner, by Jane Langton.