Chasing Beauty by Natalie Dykstra

Author:Natalie Dykstra
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2024-02-07T00:00:00+00:00

At every step, she fought with Sears and the city authorities about what she could and could not do. Captain John Damrell, the city’s building inspector, was her particular nemesis, especially regarding the use of steel, which his office required in buildings of a certain size, to ensure stability and to reduce fire hazard. She didn’t want to use any steel. If Italians could build palazzi that lasted for centuries, surely she could do likewise. She wanted authenticity. But the concern was twofold: the interior spaces in the design were too large for wooden construction without steel support, and imported marble columns might not have sufficient tensile strength for the weight of a four-story structure. She explained the situation to Berenson in March: “I am fighting with architects and city government because I won’t have ‘Steel Construction’—so I may have to end by having nothing!” She finally relented to having a small marble sample tested by engineers at the Watertown Arsenal. She also allowed some marble columns to be hollowed out and filled with a steel core and made other concessions for steel trusses.

Later, Isabella loved to regale listeners with stories of these battles, relishing especially one exchange with Damrell. “I am well aware that you can stop my building,” she had told him. “But in view of what that would mean to Boston, I think it would be folly for you to do so; if however, Fenway Court is to be built at all, it will be built as I wish and not as you wish.”

No detail escaped her. When the large wooden beams for the ceiling of the third-floor Gothic Room didn’t look sufficiently rough-hewn and medieval, she took an ax to a beam herself to mark it in the way she’d remembered from one of her trips. The workmen sputtered and stammered as she chopped, desperate that she not cut off her foot with the heavy ax, but they followed her example in shaping the rest of the ceiling beams. A similar scenario played out with the high interior walls of the courtyard. The first efforts of the painters working on the surface did not meet her standards. So she got on a ladder herself. She dipped a large sponge in a pail of pink paint and then into a pail of white paint and showed the painters how to daub the mixture onto the wall to mimic the marble of Venetian palazzi.

Isabella had in mind the perfect wall color for several rooms: a shade of deep blue used in the sculpture showroom of Stefano Bardini, an antiquities dealer in Florence. She asked Berenson in March 1900 to “get on a piece of paper the blue colour that Bardini has on his walls. I want the exact tint.” Maybe, she speculated, someone could “paint it on a piece of paper.” A half year later she asked about it again, reminding Berenson to “get me a piece of paper painted with the blue of Bardini’s walls. You know you promised this before.

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