Superbly restored rooms, a show on the art of vodou, and energy and élan at a New England treasure.

A couple of weeks ago I visited the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. I hadn’t been in two or three years, at least, but a nice couple purchased a tour of the Gardner by me in a silent auction raising money for the Friends of Acadia. It’s the support group for the national park on Mount Desert Island in Maine. I was delighted to see the Gardner, a unique American treasure, looking fantastic and filled with happy visitors of all ages. There seemed to be lots of young people, so I asked about demographics. Last year, nearly 60 percent of the Gardner’s visitors were younger than 45. That has to be very gratifying.

I also saw lots of subtle changes at a place whose brand used to be semper edem, always the same, but, to draw on Gardner’s beloved Italian, sempre mummificato — or on the fusty and musty side. Yes, the founder, Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840–1924), decreed that nothing could be moved or added, and, yes, the museum used to look like a high-end tomb, with what seemed like tomb lighting. Actually, Gardner had the option for electric lights when she built the museum in 1901 but decided in favor of natural light. Given Boston’s weather, the look was often dark and drab.

No more. The place is abuzz. For readers who don’t know the Gardner, and for those who don’t know it well, it was purpose-built as a museum but evokes a grand palace in Venice. It’s got about 25 distinct spaces — a courtyard, loggias, chapels, cloisters, hallways, and themed galleries, including the Titian Room, the Raphael Room, and the Dutch Room. Gardner decorated each space with Old Master paintings as well as furniture, carpets, sculpture, architectural elements, tiles, tapestries, and so much more. The total effect is both smorgasbordian, to invent a word, and, though most rooms are jam-packed, harmonious and beguiling.

The big news at the Gardner is gallery refurbishment, which has been ongoing, room by room, for a few years. The latest job to be tackled is the Dutch Room.

The Dutch Room — there’s no point revisiting in any depth the notorious robbery in 1990. Gone but not forgotten are 13 works of art, among them two grand Rembrandt paintings and The Concert, by Vermeer — these three taken from the Dutch Room, cut from their frames. The trail is cold as a dead baby in a well, as my grandfather would put it. It seems to have been a low-level Boston organized-crime job, the principals are now dead, and the crooked Boston FBI office botched the investigation.

No news, in this case, is bad news. Are they tucked under the bed of some old North End nonna? Not for 35 years. Hope springs eternal. The empty frames are still on the walls.

Putting aside the stolen art, the Dutch Room is still brimming with beauties, among them a Rembrandt self-portrait from 1623, displayed next to a portrait by Dürer and a German wall sculpture of Saint Martin and the Beggar from about 1520, and Rubens’s dynamic portrait of the Earl of Arundel. I would have swiped that and left the Vermeer. Saint Martin and the Beggar has already been cleaned, as were the empty frames. When I visited, a conservator was on a scaffold cleaning part of the room’s coffered ceiling, which was made for a room in Orvieto in Italy around 1500. As centuries of gunk come off, we’re seeing hundreds of little, painted mythological figures, many nude. Necks will be strained.

Many of the Gardner’s gallery walls are covered with fabric. The Dutch Room, the Gardner’s conservators learned, originally had eleven different patterns, all variations of green that, since the early 1900s, were replaced by a single pattern. Using the museum archives, they’ve discovered what Gardner used. Working with Prelle Manufacture in Lyons, France, in business since 1752, the museum is reproducing the different fabrics, some from scratch since they’re no longer made. The entire project will take the space down to the studs and last about a year.

These restoration projects are a fascinating mix of science, archival research, craftsmanship, and decorating. Curators are, in part, good decorators. Recently finished is the splendid Titian Room, starring Titian’s Rape of Europa, from between 1559 and 1562 and one of the six mythological nudes commissioned by Spain’s Philip II. The Gardner was able to reunite all six in 2020 and 2021 for the first time in 400 years in an exhibition that I called the exhibition of the year. As the show traveled to London and Madrid, the Gardner restored the space.

First of all, it’s now beautifully — and deftly — lit. The room has light-sensitive textiles, among them carpets and wall fabric, as well as less light-sensitive paintings, so the new lights had to be calibrated to serve both and also the public. Over the decades, little changes were made here and there in the Titian Room and most of the other galleries that, cumulatively, wandered far from the look Gardner had in mind. For instance, the floors in the Titian Room were originally plain pine. After years of wear and tear, they were covered with an oak parquet floor whose patterns actually distracted the eye from the art. Now, the floors are neutral oak planks and back to basic.

For years, the wall surrounding The Rape of Europa was covered in a plain red silk, installed in the 1950s and, by the early 2020s, faded and dingy. Researchers discovered that the original fabric was a red-and-yellow brocatelle, linen and silk, that mimics in color and movement the scarf Europa waves as Jupiter, disguised as a white bull, sweeps her away for a spell o’ whoopee. Prelle, which, by the way, made the Frick’s new wall coverings, was able to reproduce the fabric. During World War II, Europa’s frame was vastly simplified — elaborate decorative elements were removed — in case the picture had to be whisked away fast during a German air raid. A search of the Gardner cellar located the elements, so the frame is now back to its original, florid state befitting the drama underway.

The entire wall is magnificent. On a table in front of Europa is a Bellini painting of Jesus wearing the crown of thorns. Hanging near the Titian, commissioned by Philip II, is a full-length Velázquez portrait of his grandson, Philip IV, dressed in black and as a new king. A nice touch. Next to the Velázquez is Benvenuto Cellini’s bronze bust of Bindo Altoviti, the pope’s banker and a friend of Raphael, Vasari, and Michelangelo.

Cellini was the pope’s goldsmith. Gardner kept good company, but she had a sense of humor. What looks like a fancy, low cabinet is really a commode that would have concealed a chamber pot. We’re all human.

Gardner was from New York, the daughter of a rich businessman only a generation removed from Scottish immigrants. In 1860, she married John, or Jack, Gardner and big Boston money. She considered Boston Brahmins to be “always respectable but never amusing,” and many considered her brash, as one said, “both too much and too hard to dismiss.” Art-collecting was almost all her doing, but she and Jack conceived of a public museum together in the 1890s. After he died in 1898, she activated their dream. By 1903, what we know as the Gardner was ready to open. Fenway was then mostly empty and mostly a bog. Gardner worked with an architect but designed and supervised nearly every detail.

It’s easy to overlook how phenomenal, how extraordinary her ambitions were. In collecting, she preceded Frick and Mellon. As museums go, the Met’s façade and Great Hall opened just months before the Gardner. In 1903, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts was still in dinky digs on Copley Square. There were lots of art museums in America, but they were either on university campuses or they were civic museums forged over decades by committees of grandees. The Gardner was the creation of one woman, from scratch, over a few short years. There was no template for what she created, at least not in America.

The Gardner might be a Boston treasure, but it expresses New York chutzpah. John Singer Sargent’s full-length portrait of Isabella Gardner from 1888 is in the Gothic Room, which was her private apartment. He portrays her standing before a swirling, patterned background, so she seems both to have a halo and to have posed for a Gothic Italian painting of a saint. With an hourglass figure, tiny waist, and low-cut dress, she’s more Myrna Loy than Virgin Mary. She was a cougar.

I didn’t know the Haitian-born, American artist Fabiola Jean-Louis (born in 1978), whose exhibition Waters of the Abyss: An Intersection of Spirit and Freedom opened at the Gardner at the end of February and closes on May 25. It’s a sculpture show anchored in the revolt of Haitian slaves that ended in 1804 with the French colony’s independence. But Jean-Louis also interprets black freedom today using Haitian vodou beliefs and iconography.

What is vodou? It’s a mix of Roman Catholicism and West African religions developed by slaves in Haiti over hundreds of years. It’s not doctrinal, and there’s no central authority or liturgy. And banish thoughts of New Orleans, dolls, and stickpins.

The art and exhibition design are very, very beautiful. Jean-Louis is creating another world for us, starting with sculpture that evokes portals, then mermaids, mirrors, angels, some naughty, some nice, and ancestors with whom to commune. Lwa, from 2021, shows a six-foot-tall angel spirit in a four-foot-wide dress. She dazzles and approaches and bewitches us, all at the same time. An Entry Point to Heaven, from 2024, is an altar built into a grotto. It might be underwater. Soft and hard, water and stone, sparkling light and dull mass all play parts in an exhibition that at times feels like immersion in a small, old church.

I’ve never written about papier-mâché, French for “crushed and ground” and an ancient, versatile, and ubiquitous material dating to antiquity. It’s Jean-Louis’s material of choice. Papier-mâché starts with old paper that’s shredded and then mixed with water and a glue-based binder to create a gunk that can be modeled into light, hard sculptural forms. It can be cut, sanded, and painted. The medium has been put to a million uses — parade floats, ceremonial masks, dolls, toys, fancy ceilings, small sculptures, picture frames, theater sets, dummy heads, and combat decoys among them. It’s easily lacquered, too. Jean-Louis decorates her papier-mâché sculptures, many human-size, with shells, crystal, bits of wood and glass, sequins, coral, and whatever other accent materials she finds to get the look she wants.

Vodou isn’t political, either, though, as an indigenous force, it powered the revolution in Haiti. Believers prize access to dead ancestors in a way that people obsessed with now, now, now — most Americans — don’t. Jean-Louis, for example, uses shiny and reflective materials since vodou belief imagines light as summoning ancestors, who live in the sea off Haiti.

There are different ways to look at Waters of the Abyss. Since the Gardner’s audience is Boston, Cambridge, and their loony-left suburbs, some visitors will turn into bloodhounds on the scent for colonialism, oppression, revolution, grievance, and black freedom as opposed to anyone else’s freedom. Blah, blah, boring old blah. I see Jean-Louis’s art as imagining channels connecting our mundane, mortal world with a reality beyond what we ordinarily perceive. It’s subjective, poetic, enigmatic art that will put visitors in a thoughtful, peaceful frame of mind. Jean-Louis should be in the Venice Biennale. I won’t write that she’s a better artist than either Jeffrey Gibson or Simone Leigh. Rather, her art doesn’t veer into the land of schtick.

I’m all for contemporary art about faith, reverence for the past, and the links among past, present, and future. This takes me back to the Gardner theft. If there were a spirit among the dead who could access the world of the living, it would be Isabella Gardner’s. Botched FBI investigation or no, if she had the power to swoop down in fury, ladylike pearl-handled pistols blazing, a diamond-encrusted sheriff’s badge on her ample bosom, those pictures would be back in their frames. The Vermeer and the two Rembrandts were precious to her. It makes me think — for a long moment — that the living and dead occupy separate, impermeable realms.

Why is the Gardner doing a show about Haiti and vodou? Gardner never went to Haiti and was, after all, a High Episcopalian. That’s not the right way to see it. She was curious and worldly. She adored the marriage of creativity and craftsmanship. And she certainly collected enough religious art inspired by not only Christianity but also Islam and faiths in Pacific Asia.

Jean-Louis was an artist in residence at the Gardner a couple of years ago. This program, which the Gardner started in 1992, is among the keys that unlocked the museum’s potential to attract a serious but big and diversified audience. Nearly all of Gardner’s art dates to before 1900, with a chunk from before 1500. The artist-in-residence program gives it a foot in the contemporary art world as well as the zing of new creativity. The Renzo Piano–designed wing, one of the Italian architect’s success stories, opened in 2012. It has stood the test of time. Everything I’ve seen in the new wing’s temporary exhibition galleries, from Titian to Jean-Louis’s sculptures, looks as if the spaces were made for them.