Other spoils of Berenson's Italian conquests include Raphael's Pieta and a portrait of a Roman Count, a Guardi scene of Venice, Botticelli's Madonna and Child, Giotto's Jesus, Fra Angelico's Assumption, etc. Few museums equal the Gardner's extensive collection of Italian masters. But Berenson was not to stop at conquering Italian walls; sensing Mrs. Jack's interest in a bargain, he induced her to buy Durer, Holbein, Rubens, and Rembrandt.

A 23-year-old Rembrandt (Self-portrait of 1629) watches over the Dutch Room today as visitors look at his other paintings: The Sea of Galilee, The Obelisk, and A Lady and Gentleman in Black; each adds a matching pearl to her string of great masters.

Mrs. Jack was always doing her own collecting concurrently with art expert Berenson's advice. An example of her personal astuteness was the addition to her collection of Anders Zorn (painter and paintings), whom she met in 1893 at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Mrs. Gardner was walking through the exhibit when she saw a painting that she liked, The Omnibus, she asked a man in the gallery who had done it; it was the artist himself, Anders Zorn. She bought the picture of passengers in a bus, and from there started another of her artist friendships.

Zorn's Mrs. Gardner at Venice is one of the most flattering portraits of the cestatic Mrs. Jack, bursting in from the balcony overlooking The Grand Canal in Venice.

MRS GARDNER'S will has some of the flavor of the Miss Havisham scene in Dickens' Great Expectations - she wanted everything kept the way she left it. She explicitly specified that not an article be added or moved from its place in her house, for if anything was changed, the Museum and the funding to support it would become the property of Harvard University:

if they shall at any time change the general disposition or arrangement of any articles which shall have been placed in the Museum . . . then I give the said land, Museum, pictures, statuary, works of art and bric-a-brac, furniture, books and papers, and the said shares and the staid trust fund, to the President and Follows of Harvard College. . . .

Mrs. Jack never forget Charles Eliot Norton's inspiring lectures at Harvard not the wisdom that Berenson applied to amass her Italian collection.

Mrs. Jack never specified in her will that concerts be given in her Venetian Palace after her death, yet the trustees of the Museum decided that it was the intent of her will to continue support for young musicians by providing performances at the Museum. These concerts three days a week continue the tradition of giving starting performers a chance before their big debuts.

The Gardner Museum is in fact Mrs. Jack's jewel box with its own Vermeer quality of natural lighting, stone floors, Gothic windows, and Flemish tapestries. The spring flowers that fill the courtyard intertwine with the Venetian stone and grow into ornamented columns. Her museum is a refuge from the noise, the pollution, and the threatening man-made environment today; the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, unchanged in all these years, is one brief moment caught from fleeting time.