BOSTON, MA.- From May 3 to June 19, visitors to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum are invited to take a closer look at seven Venetian manuscripts from the museum’s extensive rare books collection in a unique, compact exhibition entitled Illuminating the Serenissima: Books of the Republic of Venice. Organized by Dr. Anne-Marie Eze, Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow, whose recent research has focused on Isabella Stewart Gardner as book collector, this collection of beautifully decorated Venetian commissioni will be on view in the museum’s Long Gallery, where they have been kept in covered bookcases since Isabella Gardner’s day. La Serenissima, or the Most Serene Republic of Venice, existed for over a millennium from the late seventh century to 1797. At the height of its power in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, it was the center of an empire extending from mainland Italy to the eastern