Boston and Titian

At least three years ago, I’d read about a fabulous exhibit of 6 paintings of Ovid’s myths involving fleshy, naked Greek women and goddesses that were united for the first time since the 1500’s, when Titian painted them for Philip II of Spain. Should we see it at the National Gallery in London or the Prado in Madrid? Both were appealing; both were rendered moot by Covid. The last stop of the tour was the Isabella Stanley Gardener Museum, in Boston. Mrs. Gardener bought one of these, “The Rape of Europa” in 1896, the first Titian brought to America, as the highlight of the museum she created. (Any woman named Isabella gets a free lifetime membership of the ISG. I am signing Bella up.)

So to Boston we went, staying at the Omni Parker House Hotel, where they claim Parker House rolls and Boston Cream pie originated. Sadly, their restaurant is still closed, so we had to eat elsewhere. The Beantown Pub, Vietnamese Bahn Mi Ho, and Cantina Italiana substituted nicely. We are good hunter/gatherers, with the waistlines to prove it.

The Titian exhibit was marvelous, yet overwhelming. Just the six huge paintings in a dedicated salon, with controlled amounts of visitors, so we weren’t jostling and jockeying to see the pictures. Benches in the center meant we could sit and look as long as we liked. One woman was sketching away, able to see from her seat. But the paintings were so large and so detailed, I soon was overstimulated. I tried to take them but it is beyond me. I wondered what Philip felt when he came into his own room, hung with these six paintings. Or Mrs. Gardener, with the one in her living room. Did they spend time occasionally really looking, or did the paintings recede into the wallpaper? 

Since we were there, we wandered through the three floors of the original museum, a rectangle of rooms around a beautiful courtyard all planted for the holidays, with poinsettias, amaryllis, cyclamens, and lilac orchids tucked among greenery. Each room has a QR code which goes to an individual webpage discussing each and every object in it. It would have been interesting to see the original catalogs they must have used when the Gardeners were traveling all over Europe, concentrating on Italy, buying furniture, columns, and church altar pieces. 

This would be one place I’d agree that computers actually are better than written lists. 

Harvard, on the other hand, didn’t keep particularly good records of some of their acquisitions. We went to see the glass flower exhibit and learned that when a new curator began looking at its glass invertebrate models, she was told there were 40 to 50. 

By combing through the different biology departments, she’s found 350+ so far. I see QR codes in their future.

The glass flowers were both life sized specimens and individual parts, like pistols and stamen, magnified 10 to 100 times so students could study them. The docent said they are still used today, even though they are more than 100 years old and really fragile. In another example of lack of record keeping, no one knows exactly how each model was made, and since the father and son glassworkers kept at it for more than half a century, their techniques changed over time.

Our trip was a mixture of the planned like the Titian exhibit and “The Fabrics of Our Lives”, historical American quilts and blankets and modern interpretations, at the Museum of Fine Arts, and the serendipitous, like the lighting of the tree on Boston Commons. We got there about 5:00 PM, when the sponsors were giving away cookies, Devil Dog cakes, Dunkin’ coffee and hot chocolate, 2 types of egg nog, Cabot cheese, and moose antlers from Xfinity. There were no lines, so we had one of each. Or perhaps 2 of the cookies. Count that as most of a non-nutritious dinner.  By the time we left to get a beer at the Beantown Pub, the lines were stretched for at least a block. 

The tree is donated each year by Halifax, Nova Scotia, in thanks for the food and medicine rushed from Boston to Halifax immediately after that town was almost leveled in 1917 from an explosion in the harbor caused by a ship colliding with a munitions-filled war ship. It was the biggest man-made explosion until atomic bombs were detonated.

According to our waitress, each year a brewer in Nova Scotia brews them one barrel of stout flavored with spruce needles from the holiday tree, and we could order a glass. Of course we did. Merry Christmas.

I also noticed an ad for the Boston Pops holiday concert. I bought tickets for Friday night, their first time back at Symphony Hall in 2 years. Wonderful arrangements of traditional Christmas music, plus a newly commissioned piece using a Mexican song, a Swahili version of “Go Tell It On,The Mountain”, and a Hanukkah tune in Klezmer style. We had tickets for a table near the front and ordered Prosecco to go with our smuggled-in cream puff from Mike’s Bakery. I couldn’t eat my piece of Boston Cream pie because it was too big to hold in my hand, and I didn’t dare ask for a fork. Breakfast the next day.

By today, I was ready to go home. The temperatures were in the mid-30’s with a cutting wind. We walked 3-5 miles each day and took the subway around. I’m exhausted. I’m also tired of wearing my mask everywhere (although it was comfortable in the cold), because Massachusetts has an indoor mask requirement. I’m one of those people who have reached mask fatigue, even in the face of Omicron, the latest Covid variant. I’m also worn from all the details of planning and executing a trip to a new place. But glad I did.