The Rape of Europa

by Charles FitzRoy

  Isabella lived on the fourth floor of the museum, and would come downstairs to entertain the leading intellectual and artistic figures of the time: Henry James, Oliver Wendell Holmes (the most widely respected judge in America), Charles Eliot Norton, the Berensons, John Singer Sargent and James McNeill Whistler. She was a generous benefactor to talented young artists and musicians, giving a cello to the young Catalan cellist Pablo Casals. Isabella was becoming increasingly imperious, and was often seen seated on an ancient marble throne in the courtyard of the museum, gazing at the mosaic of Medusa in the centre, the Gorgon’s head encircled by snakes.

  Isabella loved to portray herself as a cultural icon. She was more than happy to entertain her friends, but tended to treat the public with regal disdain. One day one of the guardians, Corinna Putnam Smith, entered the Titian Room and spotted that ‘a young woman, timid-looking, almost pathetic, was gazing’ at Europa. ‘On observing that [she] was about to jot something down in a minute notebook, I was about to inform her kindly that this was against regulations, when Mrs Gardner pounced on her like a fury, shouting ‘Don’t you know you are breaking a rule?’ The unfortunate girl fled from the room in tears but was later invited to lunch by the repentant owner, with the chance to spend a whole day in the museum. Subsequently, Isabella’s decision to enrol Harvard students to help oversee the rooms in the museum was a great success, the students taking great pride in their role. Girls brought in to help from Radcliff College were less complimentary, noting how Isabella’s face was covered in powder and rouge, and that she sported an outrageous yellow wig.

  The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum was a truly remarkable institution and Isabella was anxious that people should understand the reasons for its creation. In 1917 she wrote to her friend Edmund Hill, describing why she had created the museum:

  Years ago I decided that the greatest need in our Country was Art. We were largely developing the other sides. We were a very young country and had very few opportunities of seeing beautiful things, works of art etc. So I determined to make it my life’s work if I could. Therefore, ever since my parents died I have spent every cent I inherited (for that was my money) in bringing about the object of my life.

  The writer Edith Wharton, descended from one of the grand old families of New York (her father was George Frederic Jones, and the expression ‘Keep up with the Joneses’ originated with her father’s family) and a friend of Berenson’s, compared the museum to the ones she knew so well in Europe. ‘Of course I have seen Palazzo Gardner,’ she wrote, ‘her collection is marvellous, and looks beautifully in its new setting, but a spirit of opposition roused in me when I am told “there is nothing like it in Europe”.’ Henry James took the opposite viewpoint, taking ‘an acute satisfaction in seeing America stretch out her long arm and rake in, across the green cloth of the wide Atlantic, the highest prizes of the game of civilization.’

  Bernard and Mary Berenson had contrary views of Isabella and her museum. The art historian retained a real affection for his former patron. Although their business relationship had ceased in the early years of the twentieth century, he had loyally offered Isabella the magnificent Feast of the Gods by Bellini and Titian (National Gallery, Washington) when it appeared on the market in 1917, writing cynically: ‘Bless the war, that you have the chance [to buy], for without it the Feast would never have left its old home, nor I be in a position to urge it upon you.’ And visiting her late in her life, when she was ‘a little “gaga” as the French so aptly say’, he loyally took with him paintings by Mantegna, Piero della Francesca, Vivarini and two Fra Angelicos, wrapped in bath towels (a wonderfully cavalier approach to the way that important Old Masters should be handled, though Berenson never treated the condition of paintings with the same seriousness as his attributions).

  Mary had waxed lyrical when first visiting the museum: ‘We were quite overcome, the whole thing is a work of genius’, adding, in her diary: ‘In beauty and taste it far exceeded our expectations, which were high … One room is more entrancing than another, and the great masterpieces of painting seem mere decoration in the general scheme. I thought there was remarkably little that was not of Bernhard’s choosing, but that little annoyed him immensely and hurt him too.’

  By the time of her visit with Berenson in 1920, however, she had changed her tune with a vengeance, possibly because she now thought of Isabella as a tyrant who may not have given her husband full credit for all the work he had done for her. Considering that Isabella had suffered a stroke, and that the Berensons lived a life of great privilege at I Tatti, entertaining the great and the good, in large part due to the money Berenson had made from his art dealings with Isabella, Mary’s behaviour seems astonishingly mean-spirited. She began by launching a personal attack on Isabella:

  We went out to see Mrs Gardner today. She will soon die and she must know it, but she is unchanged in her egotism, her malice, her attachment to detail, to nonsensical things. All this, in the days of her vitality, when it seemed as if she couldn’t grow old and die, was actually part of her. But now it is purely pathetic, and a little ugly.

  Mary now moved on to savage the museum her husband had done so much to create: ‘But the worst of all is that her great Palace, in spite of the marvellous pictures in it, looks to our now enlightened eyes, like a junk shop. There is something horrible in these American collections, in snatching this and that away from its real home and hanging it on a wall of priceless damask made from somewhere else, above furniture higgledepiggled from other places, streamed with objets d’art from other realms.’

  It was true that Isabella’s heyday as a collector was long gone, but her prescience and good fortune meant that she had been ahead of the game. Though she often lamented ‘Woe is me! Why am I not Morgan or Frick?’, she had formed the bulk of her collection before they entered the art market. Now, in old age, she was increasingly preoccupied with what would happen to the museum after her death. She had always cultivated impressionable young men and had taken a shine to Morris Carter, a Harvard graduate who was librarian at the Museum of Fine Arts. By 1908 she was hard at work persuading him to come to live at Fenway Court. Carter tried to resist, commenting: ‘shan’t I, like a very poor person, be extravagant with other people’s money?’, but resistance proved futile. He was presented with a piece of land at Brookline, Isabella’s country estate, on which he planned to build a house, but soon discovered that his benefactress intended to take control of the construction. Carter realized the real reason for Isabella’s generosity: she intended him to be the first Director of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

  Living in such proximity to this powerful lady, Carter was under no illusion of the scale of the task he was to confront. This was outlined by Isabella’s cousin John Chipman Gray, who had drawn up a legal document enshrining his cousin’s wishes: ‘I direct that Morris Carter shall be director of the Museum. He shall have the power to make suitable rules for the conduct of employees and visitors … He shall have the sole power of appointing and dismissing … subordinate officers and employees.’

  There were, however, stringent limitations to Carter’s powers. Not only was he commanded to live on site, he was even told how much holiday he was allowed to take. On Isabella’s birthday, 14 April, he was instructed to hold a memorial service in the chapel at the end of the Long Gallery, as though Isabella was a saint or a queen. More seriously, Carter was forbidden to move a single object in the museum. If he had the temerity to do so, the whole collection would be put up for sale by the President and Fellows of Harvard. On 14 July 1924 Isabella died in Fenway Court. Like some Old World monarch she had left precise instructions: ‘Carry my coffin high – on the shoulders of the bearers’, adding, characteristically: ‘They will have to be told exactly what to do’. A mass was to be said daily for her soul by the priests from the Society of St John the Evangelist. No doubt Philip II, who had commissioned the greatest work of art in her museum, would have approved.

  Carter had been appoint
ed to tend the Gardner flame, and he never really escaped the long shadow cast by his former employer. From beyond the grave it seemed that Isabella was watching his every move. The board of the museum, composed of the conservative old guard of Boston, approved of the policy of minimal change and it was not until the 1930s that electricity replaced gaslight in the museum. When Carter tried to introduce changes, he found his every move observed. Isabella had begun a tradition of filling the courtyard of Fenway Court at Easter with nasturtiums. But in May 1929 the nasturtiums were missing from the floral display. The Boston Herald, sympathetic to Carter’s predicament, drew this faux pas to its readers’ attention:

  It is only when the word ‘nasturtiums’ is mentioned that a gleam of madness shines from his [Morris Carter’s] mild eye. If it has been a hard day, he may even be heard to utter dark threats of murder by strangulation. It appears that during Mrs Gardner’s lifetime, when the palace was open to the public in April, the small balconies above the courtyard were filled with brilliant nasturtiums … Apparently no one who saw the court with the nasturtiums has ever forgotten them, and as a result the unfortunate curator is hounded – no matter what the season – with the remark: ‘Mrs Gardner used to have nasturtiums growing from those balconies – don’t you ever have them now?’ … Those who [have seen the nasturtiums in the courtyard] will realize why no one ever forgets them and also why the patience of the long-suffering curators will still continue to be tried by observant ladies who walk past the Titians but gasp with emotion over a few green tendrils covered with crimson blossom.

  Since Carter’s long tenure in office (1924–55), there have been only three directors of the museum. The first of these was George Stout (1955–70), a diligent and meticulous student of the art of restoration, who had learned his trade in the conservation department at the Fogg Art Museum in Boston. During the 1930s, with the help of the departmental chemist, John Gettens, he pioneered research into the raw materials of painting – the pigments, oils, gums, resins and glues – and studied the causes of deterioration in a painting and the ways of preventing this. Stout’s meticulous attention to the principles of conservation (he established the conservation department at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1933) were widely accepted and were adopted by the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Fogg Art Museum and the Worcester Art Museum, three of the most important museums in Massachusetts.

  Stout himself, however, is best remembered for his extra-ordinary work in recovering works of art in Europe at the end of the Second World War. His heroic exploits have recently been dramatized in the film The Monuments Men, where the dapper restorer is played by the rather unlikely figure of the glamorous George Clooney. During the war the art of conservation, hitherto restricted to the dusty back corridors of museums, suddenly assumed much greater importance. The allies realized that they urgently needed to preserve world-famous works of art in the coming conflict. Nazi Germany had stolen millions of cultural objects from the countries it had conquered, including some of Europe’s greatest art treasures.

  Stout left his job in training museum curators in the art of conservation, and early in 1944 he joined the newly formed Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives section of the Allied armies, shortened to MFAA or, as they came to be called, the Monuments Men. Following the D-Day landings this unit, initially consisting of just 15 men, eight American and seven British, and possessing no offices, vehicles or support staff, were assigned to the allied armies to try to mitigate damage to churches, museums and other important monuments between the English Channel and Berlin, a truly herculean task. In addition, they were authorized to locate stolen or missing works of art. Stout and his colleagues could not even rely on allied generals to help them, since General Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force, had instructed his senior officers that if they had to choose between preserving a monument or protecting their troops, ‘the lives of our men are paramount’.

  Undaunted, the members of the MFAA set to work. The most impressive act that the unit performed during the campaign of 1944–5 was at the Merkers mine complex which the American army captured on 6 April 1945. This was one of the biggest salt mines in Thuringia, consisting of a total of 35 miles of tunnels. When Stout arrived five days later, he was amazed to discover an artistic treasure trove, consisting of some of the most important Old Masters from the Prussian royal collection, Albrecht Durer’s original woodcuts for the Apocalypse series, priceless Egyptian papyri, Greek and Roman antiquities, Byzantine mosaics and Islamic rugs. It turned out that Dr Paul Ortwin Rave, a dedicated museum professional, had just organized delivery from Berlin of this irreplaceable collection of art at the very moment when the Russians were shelling the German capital.

  This artistic cornucopia was stored deep underground and it was difficult and dangerous work trying to locate the works of art in such dark, cold and damp conditions, with minimal lighting, no maps, narrow and cramped corridors, with the perpetual threat that the next compartment might have been booby-trapped by the retreating Germans. The situation at the Merkers salt mine was made considerably more complicated by the fact that the Third Reich’s gold reserve was also stored in the mine, and this had attracted the attention of the world’s press. The mine was also in the Russian zone of occupation and there was therefore considerable urgency in moving the works to a better location to keep them out of the hands of the Russians.

  General Patton, reluctant to leave behind much-needed troops to guard the gold and the art, and eager to continue his advance into Germany, gave the order for his troops to move out on 15 April, just four days after Stout’s arrival at the mine. Stout immediately began filling any available boxes and crates with a combination of art and gold, using a thousand sheepskin coats from a nearby Luftwaffe depot as packing materials. After working flat out for four days and nights, the first convoy left at daybreak on 15 April. By 9 p.m. the next night the uncrated paintings had also been brought above ground, an even more complicated job. The crates were then loaded and at 8.30 on 17 April the cream of the priceless Prussian state art collection left for Frankfurt in a convoy of 32 ten-ton trucks, with an armed escort including air cover.

  Stout went on to remove 80 truckloads of artwork from another salt mine, the Altaussee, in the Austrian Alps and, with typical thoroughness, managed to inspect most of the Nazi repositories between the Rhine and Berlin. After Germany’s surrender, he transferred to the Pacific theatre of war, and served as chief of the Arts and Monuments Division in Tokyo at Allied headquarters until mid-1946. Stout’s work has now been given proper recognition, notably by Robert Edsel in his book The Monuments Men: Allied Heroes, Nazi Thieves and the Greatest Treasure Hunt in History, published in 2009, on which the film of The Monuments Men is based.

  On returning home, Stout served briefly at the Fogg Museum and the Worcester Art Museum before becoming Director of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1955. He served there until 1970 and cemented his reputation as one of the greatest experts in the field of conservation, which he placed at the heart of the museum’s philosophy, introducing state of the art climate control and establishing a stable environment for the works of art in the collection. In addition he improved the visibility of the whole collection by upgrading the lighting and controlling the amount of daylight entering the galleries.

  Stout was succeeded by Rollin van Nostrand Hadley (1970–89), whose edition of the letters of Isabella Stewart Gardner and Bernard Berenson is a fascinating account of the relationship between a patron and her art adviser. Hadley’s successor Anne Hawley, the current director, inherited her post in the most traumatic circumstances, as she was greeted, almost on arrival, with the devastating news of the burglary that took place at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum on 18 March 1990. This was enough to tax the most hardened museum director, but the new incumbent proved more than capable of handling the situation and, under her dynamic directorship, the museum has undergone a transformation. In Hawley’s words Boston ‘sat out the twent
ieth century in the visual arts’, but ideas such an artist-in-residence have proved hugely successful. More recently, in 2012, the museum opened an extension by Renzo Piano which will serve as a temporary exhibition and performance space. There are apartments for artists-in-residence, and visitors are encouraged to listen to conversations between artists and curators.

  For the director and her predecessors, the overriding concern is to respect the wishes of Isabella Stewart Gardner when she created her museum over a century ago. And this means placing the strongest emphasis on the permanent collection, which plays such an important role in attracting visitors to Boston. If the object of Isabella’s life, as she told Edmund Hill, was to give people the opportunity to see beautiful things, then it is Titian’s Rape of Europa more than any other painting, the crowning glory of the museum, which has helped to achieve this.

  Conclusion

  What does the future hold for the Rape of Europa? Although the painting, over five centuries old, is in surprisingly good condition, having suffered no more than a number of minor restorations, reflecting the care with which it has been treated by its successive owners, its fragility, as well as the terms of Isabella Stewart Gardner’s will, means that it is most unlikely ever to leave the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum again. The Rape of Europa has enjoyed a rich history, but now that it is housed in a museum, its fascinating journey, as it has moved progressively from Venice to Spain, France and Britain, before crossing the Atlantic to America, is over. One can only speculate what might have happened if it was still subject to market forces. Would it have been acquired by a Russian oligarch, or an oil-rich Arab, perhaps from Qatar, where the government is building some of the most impressive art museums in the world, or perhaps a wealthy Chinese, benefiting from China’s fast-growing economy to begin collecting Western art in earnest?