OPINION:
The first Renaissance men admired the classical world’s gods and heroes, the former acting like teenagers in pursuit of mischief, deception and sex, the latter displaying genius, courage and caritas. It was a wonder to this reviewer — writing book reports in fifth grade — that the nominally divine personages (i.e., gods) wreaked havoc while profane people performed glorious beaux gestes.
Not so the extraordinary and ordinary characters — modern Renaissance men among them — who inhabit Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts and Belinda Rathbone’s larger world of museums, a realm that includes Washington. Her cast of quality and quotidian folk chronically display hubris, greed, ambition, dumb luck and perfidy while often exercising wisdom, honor, elegance, intelligence, scholarship and taste.
Her book’s mysterious heroine — the Helen or Penelope figure — is a beautiful adolescent girl, a vision of worldly innocence. Approaching 500 years of age, she is an image painted on a plank by a renegade genius of her bygone era, Raphael, and we can’t even be sure of that. Her name might be Eleonora Gonzaga; call her “The Boston Raphael” or Rafaello di Boston even in the land of her creation, Italy.
Her Promethean figure, the fated hero, is Perry T. Rathbone, legendary director of the Museum of Fine Arts (and the author’s father). Another strider, an Orpheus type, is a self-appointed aging moralist, a dictatorial Italian art cop. Then there is a vast supporting cast of dueling scholars, curators, dealers and patrons — and a Greek chorus of the American public chanting in the background.
Mythic stories are basically simple. Thus a Harvard-trained wunderkind took the helm of the stuffy Boston museum in 1955 and brought it to new heights. Connoisseur, scholar, esthete and showman, Perry Rathbone boosted the museum’s popularity and attendance, grew its budget and endowment, mounted blockbuster exhibitions, raised its scholarly reputation, enlarged the edifice and enriched its collections with new acquisitions. A leader in the transformation of American museums, he championed a cause: “Art is for everyone.”
Then, bracing for the museum’s centennial in 1970 he sought, found and bought an unknown masterpiece to crown the collection, a work of great rarity and beauty, the aforementioned portrait. But as the epic played out, it appeared that Eleonora Gonzaga left Italy sub rosa, entered the Port of Boston without U.S. Customs’ blessing, skirted legality, scandalized the art world, sullied the museum’s good name, earned bad press to eclipse the huzzahs and got repatriated to Italy where she was consigned to a storage room in Florence. At the Uffizi, cognoscenti said she is not a Raphael. At the Museum of Fine Arts, trustees banished Perry Rathbone.
As in all mythic tableaux, the fascinations and haunting ideas are in the details, and this tapestry is woven as deftly as Penelope’s. Writing about the ascent and fall of one museum man, the author unravels the tale into intriguing yarns: a smuggling caper, a police procedural, an attribution mystery, a boardroom war, the small tragedy of a good man faltering and being set upon by knaves.
If the hero is Perry Rathbone, Iago is George Seybolt, who struts onstage as a reforming new chairman of the board of trustees. Bringing business practices to bear — his day job is presiding at the Underwood deviled ham concern — he makes mincemeat of the museum’s collegial organization and hash of its august mission. (That the museum needed a new board and better governance is a different matter.)
“The Boston Raphael” illuminates a seminal tale in the larger anthology of American cultural history. Boston’s elite founded the Museum of Fine Arts about the time that waves of Irish were immigrating. Perry Rathbone was in town when one of their heirs, a neo-Brahmin, became president and brought his wife to Washington with a band of Bostonians. (Perry Rathbone chose a gallery’s worth of great paintings to hang in Jacqueline Kennedy’s White House.) Some called the ensuing period Camelot; I call it the start of an American Renaissance — comparable to the Italian era of genius, murder and upheavals.
Certainly these years launched the metamorphosis of Washington. While the posthumously named Kennedy Center played a starring role in that flowering, so did the National Gallery as it found its stride, and the National Symphony Orchestra under new leadership, and S. Dillon Ripley’s expansive Smithsonian, and the chronically resurgent Corcoran, and the synergy that arose within, among and around these institutions with their burgeoning audiences.
In Boston, Washington and elsewhere, museums played catalytic roles that were overlooked. Museums changed themselves during this mega movement, and were changed by it. They became more “educational” and “democratic,” taking on traits, some argued, that diluted their classic functions: to serve as stewards of rarity, ivory towers of knowledge, practitioners of arcane disciplines, preservers of unique objects and antique lore.
Belinda Rathbone’s rich and readable book — handsomely designed and nicely adorned with two color signatures of art — is a work of woven parts: a cultural history, a crime caper, an exegesis on the evolution of museums, a paean to an ebbing elite, an homage to a titan who tumbled. She tells each of these tales admirably, and in a feat of feats melds them in a single volume. One triumph lies in weaving the nation’s experience with Boston’s, and the city’s with the Museum of Fine Art’s crisis, which was brought on, ironically, by its own star-crossed champion — of whom she writes, “In the manner of Icarus, Perry flew too close to the sun.”
• Philip Kopper’s books include histories of the National Gallery of Art, the National Museum of Natural History, and Colonial Williamsburg.
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