Friends and art

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.