Object details
Object number
U25c27.1-512
Creator(s)
Italian, Netherlands, Italy, and France
Title
Leather Wall Panels
Date
17th century - 18th century
Medium
Tooled and painted leather with silver gilding
Provenance
Purchased by Isabella Stewart Gardner in at least ten lots (mostly in Venice and Paris) from 1892-1901.
Commentary
The walls of the Veronese Room are covered with leather wall panels—a particularly opulent type of decoration. Immensely prestigious because of its expense, this wall treatment was found in fashionable palaces and religious institutions throughout Europe from the 16th through the 18th centuries.
To create these panels, silver leaf was glued to leather hide and then coated with layers of yellow-tinted varnish to give the hangings their rich, golden color. This technique suggests the glamour of gold leaf without the expense. Imagine how the silver, when new (most of it now tarnished to black), would have reflected candlelight around an elegant room. Isabella Gardner assembled this collection from different sources, combining over 500 pieces of different shapes and sizes to create a richly patterned environment. Panels from rooms of wealthy households are punctuated with larger rectangular panels painted with religious images (the panels above the fireplace, for instance) that would have been used to decorate the front of an altar.
Gallery
Veronese Room
Bibliography
Catalogue. Fenway Court. (Boston, 1903), p. 17. (as old Spanish and Italian leather)Gilbert Wendel Longstreet and Morris Carter. General Catalogue (Boston, 1935), p. 198. (as Venetian and Spanish; most of the panels as Spanish, 17th-18th century)C. Mei-An Tsu et al. "The Conservation of Leather Wallhangings at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Part II." Preprints of the ICOM Committee for Conservation 12th Triennial Meeting, Lyon, 3 September 1999 (London, 1999), pp. 708-13. (over twenty-five types of leather of Netherlandish, Italian, and French origin, 17th-18th century; most of the panels as Netherlandish or Italian)Valentine Talland et al. "The Conservation of Leather Wallhangings at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum" in Postprints of the Interim Meeting of the ICOM Committee for Conservation, Leather Working Group, Brussels, Belgium, 25-27 March 1998 (Brussels, 2007), pp. 21-26. (most of the panels as Spanish/Italian or Netherlandish, 17th-18th century)Alan Chong et al. (eds.) Eye of the Beholder: Masterpieces from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (Boston, 2003), p. 126, ill.Fausto Calderai and Alan Chong. Furnishing a Museum: Isabella Stewart Gardner’s Collection of Italian Furniture (Boston, 2011), p. 218, ill.Sarah Towers, "The Secrets Revealed by the Long Gallery Stools' Conservation," Inside the Collection (blog), Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 28 June 2022, https://www.gardnermuseum.org/blog/secrets-revealed-long-gallery-stools-conservation
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