Chasing Beauty: The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner

“Motu et Lumine.” How apt. The motto from the Venetian fireplace looked simultaneously to her past and her future—and to her aim to live “with motion and light.”

The Armory Show would showcase artists most Americans had never seen before, including Brancusi, Braque, Kandinsky, Duchamp, Picasso, and Matisse. American artists would be represented too, such as the Ashcan School painters George Bellows and Robert Henri,

Bernard Berenson wrote to Isabella early in their friendship about the work of Walter Pater, the critic and novelist who made him feel, as he later said, “keenly alive.” While a student at Harvard he’d often read Pater’s masterpiece The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry late into the night, absorbing the critic’s argument that art, as Berenson

helped her acquire a large coffered ceiling from Orvieto, the hill town near Rome, decorated with painted scenes from ancient myths.

Lilla Cabot Perry,

Velázquez had the uncanny power to make it seem as if the person pictured was looking right back at the viewer.

Lord Byron’s remark: “One who has not seen Seville has not seen wonder.”

View of the Riva Degli Schiavoni and the Piazzetta,

The American artist John La Farge also looked to literature for an apt comparison—not to fiction but to poetry, likening Fenway Court to a poem “woven into