by Jon Lackman | 25 February 2006 | Conferences, News
Contributor Ross Finocchio reports: “Friday’s program offered a feast for Italianists. In a morning session that met at the Museum of Fine Arts, Frederick Ilchman chronicled the hits and misses of Italian acquisitions at the MFA, including an overpainted female portrait, dubiously attributed to Raphael and illicitly exported in a curator’s suitcase. In an afternoon panel back at the convention center, Alan Chong discussed Isabella Stewart Gardner, that pioneer Bostonian collector of early Italian art whose purchases, made with the advice of Bernard Berenson, inspired envy and imitation. Her idiosyncratic display preferences, however, met with derision; Berenson’s wife summed up the aesthetic of Gardner’s neo-Gothic palazzo-museum as ‘junk shop.’ Fogg Art Museum curator Stephan Wolohojian defended Harvard’s purchase in the early 20th century of ruinous panel paintings. Students need to study degradation, after all.”
