nifty museum
It's always amazing to discover something completely new in a city that you think you know very well. Thanks to yelp, we did just that last week.
As it turns out, Isabella Stewart Gardner was an avid art collector who passed away in 1924. She spent much of her life setting up the museum that now bears her name, and left instructions in her will to leave the collection untouched. So, for about a century, her eccentric composition, with religious artifacts competing for space with medieval furniture, European paitings, and Asisan knick-knacks, has been in the shadow of the Museum of Fine Arts.
The building itself is very interesting - plain on the outside, but made to look like a Venitian palazzo on the inside. Most of the room that surround the indoor courtyard are dimly lit, and the atmospehere is very much different from your run-of-the-mill sterile rooms that other museums tend to have.
One of the rooms has a few empty frames - a remnant of a robbery that occured in 1990, when several vital pieces were stolen, including works by Rembrandt. Because the collection cannot be altered, the frames remain there, and FBI is supposedly still busy trying to track down the theives.
Speaking about a steal - yelp got us in for free, and hooked us up with free drinks. What's not to love?
As it turns out, Isabella Stewart Gardner was an avid art collector who passed away in 1924. She spent much of her life setting up the museum that now bears her name, and left instructions in her will to leave the collection untouched. So, for about a century, her eccentric composition, with religious artifacts competing for space with medieval furniture, European paitings, and Asisan knick-knacks, has been in the shadow of the Museum of Fine Arts.
The building itself is very interesting - plain on the outside, but made to look like a Venitian palazzo on the inside. Most of the room that surround the indoor courtyard are dimly lit, and the atmospehere is very much different from your run-of-the-mill sterile rooms that other museums tend to have.
One of the rooms has a few empty frames - a remnant of a robbery that occured in 1990, when several vital pieces were stolen, including works by Rembrandt. Because the collection cannot be altered, the frames remain there, and FBI is supposedly still busy trying to track down the theives.
Speaking about a steal - yelp got us in for free, and hooked us up with free drinks. What's not to love?
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