Book Review: The Memory Palace of Isabelle Stewart Gardner

By: John Dorfman

October 2007

By Patricia Vigderman. Sarabande Books, $14.95

In the Renaissance, learned men created “memory palaces,” elaborate imaginary architectural structures filled with vivid images for mnemonic purposes. Retrieving any piece of knowledge would be, in theory, as easy as visiting a familiar room and picking up an object one had left there. As these palaces became increasingly ambitious, their creators came to believe that the mind was capable of modeling and accommodating the entire universe. In the late 19th century, a woman, perhaps less learn-ed than a Renaissance polymath but just as ambitious, created her own architectural structure to store artworks and artifacts embodying everything she felt was worth knowing, and to preserve her memories of a life in pursuit of high culture. The woman was Isabella Stewart Gardner, and her memory palace was an actual building called Fenway Court, today the museum that bears her name.

In this book, another learned woman, Patricia Vigderman, plays with the concept of the memory palace to produce a delightful and thought-provoking meditation on the meaning of biography and the nature of museology. Each room in Vigderman’s palace is named for a work of art in Fenway Court, which serves as a gateway to a discursive passage on some aspect of Gardner’s life and collecting pursuits. This small volume in no way pretends to be an analysis of pictures or a treatise on art history, and the use of the artworks, though quite ingenious, is often more whimsical than substantive. For example, Paolo Uccello’s “Young Lady of Fashion” is playfully identified with Henry Adams’s wife, Clover, a good friend of Gardner’s.

With Vigderman as our guide, we browse through the museum in search of its long-dead creator, who stipulated that not one thing in it be changed or rearranged. While the collection remains intact—except, of course, for the works lost in the robbery of 1990, about which Vigderman has mercifully little to say—its compiler proves elusive. Behind her carefully created persona of the flamboyant eccentric hid an intensely secretive personality. Vigderman’s rigorous insistence on understanding her subject as she really was rather than as a prefiguration of present-day concerns leads her to acknowledge a certain remoteness, and to rely as much as possible on testimony from Mrs. Gardner’s more voluble friends and associates, like the Adamses, Henry James, Bernard and Mary Berenson, and the Japanese savant Kakuzo Okakura, author of The Book of Tea. These Bostonians took culture very, very seriously indeed, and while they left behind thoughts and words (some of them dated, some of them not), Mrs. Gardner left us Fenway Court. After reading this book, a visit there will never be the same.