This colorful and crowded three-paneled altarpiece follows the narrative of Christ’s life, with figures representing Europe, Africa and Asia paying homage to the child in the center, the adult Christ’s arrest on the left and carrying the cross on the right. “Triptych: Christ Arrested in the Garden of Gethsemane, The Adoration of Magi, Christ Carrying the Cross,†circa 1520s, was created by the Circle of Netherlandish artist Pieter Coecke van Aelst. All objects are from the collection of the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art.

For the first time since they were sold off in 1927, Alva Vanderbilt’s expansive collection of more than 300 medieval and Renaissance objects have been reassembled for display in their original setting at Marble House. On view in the Gothic Room that was designed to house them in 1892, this is likely a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to view this extraordinary trove, just as Vanderbilt intended it to be seen more than a century ago.

For most of the Nineteenth Century, few Americans were interested in collecting Middle Ages and Renaissance art and decorative items. The term “Gothic” came to be associated with artwork made in Europe between the Twelfth and Sixteenth Centuries.

In the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries, renewed appreciation for Gothic art, architecture and decorative items led to museum collections, scholarly studies and the collecting activities of wealthy individuals. The audacious acquisitions of the latter, characteristic of the ostentatious opulence of the Gilded Age, triggered widespread American interest in Gothic paintings and sculpture, furniture, ceramics, carved gems, cameos, timepieces, wax miniatures and metalwork.

Numerous such items were purchased by Alva Vanderbilt, who was married to William K. Vanderbilt, a New York Central Railroad heir, to decorate Marble House, designed by fashionable Beaux-Arts architect Richard Morris Hunt, when it opened in 1892. She was the middle figure among three successive owners: Paris entrepreneur, collector and dealer Emile Gavet (1830‱904), herself, an affluent society hostess (1853‱933), and circus impresario John Ringling (1866‱936).

Marble House, completed in 1892 at a cost of $11 million, was and is one of the great houses of Newport †and America. ⁊ohn Corbett photo.

“Gothic Art in the Gilded Age: Medieval and Renaissance Treasures in the Gavet-Vanderbilt-Ringling Collection,” on view at Marble House through October 31, comprises the objects that belonged to the three collectors. They were reassembled by the John & Mable Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, Fla., where the exhibition opened last year, and the Preservation Society of Newport County, which maintains Marble House and ten other historic Newport properties.

The saga of the collection begins in Paris late in the Nineteenth Century when Gavet, a collector-dealer, architect-decorator and real estate speculator, amassed a large, broad-ranging collection of medieval and Renaissance artworks that he displayed in his Gothic-style residential gallery near Notre-Dame Cathedral. He idiosyncratically squeezed hundreds of objects into his quarters, seeking to mimic the practice of Gothic Age elite and churches of stuffing grand accumulations into sumptuous rooms.

This was a ploy to attract visiting collectors, especially wealthy Americans, who saw themselves as the new aristocracy and were bent on accumulating objects that reflected the prestige and trappings of Old World nobility. Caught up in the excesses of the Gilded Age, these affluent gentry viewed Gavet’s trove as the embodiment of the luxury, romance, chivalry, piety and munificence of a long-ago age to which the New World aspired.

“The Virgin Fainting at the Deposition,†circa 1530‱540, made of polychromed and gilded oak, was among the most frequently depicted Passion narratives. It was created by the Circle of Netherlandish artist Arnt van Tricht in Germany.

In the summer of 1889, the Vanderbilts and Hunt visited Paris to look for furnishings and decorative objects for the summer “cottage” Hunt was building for them in Newport. The Vanderbilts purchased much of the Gavet collection and had it shipped to Rhode Island.

Built and furnished for a reported $11 million, Marble House was the most opulent residence in America when it opened in 1892 †and may still be the most lavish house in the country. Modeled after the Petit Trianon at Versailles, everything was done on a grand scale, from the soaring white pillars at the entrance to the bronzed entrance grille weighing more than ten tons to the capacious Gold Ballroom. Marble House has carved gilt wall allegorical panels, awe-inspiring ceiling paintings, sculptures and furniture custom-made for the setting, and 500,000 cubic feet of marble.

“It is difficult,” the preservation society says, “to imagine living in this vast expanse of marble punctuated by such lush ornamentation.” But Alva managed to do so in style, entertaining lavishly and solidifying her exalted social position.

While the imposing structure was largely decorated with Louis XIV-period tapestries, carpets and paintings, a special space was created for the Gothic Age trove. “Hunt redesigned the ground floor sitting room of Marble House into a medieval setting specifically to accommodate the collection,” said preservation society curator Paul Miller. “Sculpture was hung on the lowest tier, just above the wainscoting, followed by small paintings, over which were positioned larger panel paintings interspersed with ceramics perched on wall brackets. Smaller objects were scattered about the room in display cases.”

In so doing, Alva Vanderbilt for the first time in the United States, and long before Isabella Stewart Gardner built her grand Boston house/museum, showcased Gothic art in an architectural context of the same age. Her Gothic Room was inspired by a famous 1453 hotel in Bourges, France, Gavet’s apartment and salon-style hangings of contemporary paintings in Nineteenth Century France. The collection and its surroundings became famous in America and abroad, although public access to the Gothic Room was limited.

One standout is a tempera and gold on wood painting, “The Building of a Palace,” circa 1514‱518, by Piero di Cosimo, which hangs today and hung then on the north wall of the room, surrounded by ceramics and smaller paintings. It depicts, in meticulous detail, the construction of symmetrical twin buildings divided by a loggia and adorned with numerous classical statues and pillars. In the foreground, all aspects of the construction process are rendered. This elaborate image would later prove inspirational to Ringling.

Piero di Cosimo’s “The Building of a Palace,†circa 1514‱518, showing the construction of a massive Italian structure, gave its last owner, John Ringling, ideas about the architecture of his museum building in Sarasota, Fla.

Just beneath the picture is an elaborately gold-framed Sixteenth Century Italian “Annunciation” scene on reverse painted and gilded glass. It depicts the Archangel Gabriel informing the Virgin Mary that she is to bear the son of God. In the upper left, “God himself appears in a burst of clouds and putti, raising his arm in a gesture of blessing,” writes art historian Jim Harris in the catalog. The red, white and black checkered flooring adds to this small but compelling work.

Below “Annunciation” is a moving sculpture, made of polychromed and gilded oak, showing “The Virgin Fainting at the Deposition,” circa 1530‴0, by the Circle of Netherlandish artist Arnt van Tricht. As Harris observes, this piece and its companion “display a remarkable interest in the description of textures and fabrics, which, along with the richness of their painting and gilding, result in objects of great material sumptuousness.”

This shiny blue glass standing vase with gilded copper mounts probably originated in mid-Nineteenth Century France.

Also standing out on the north wall are a pair of striking panels depicting the Archangel Gabriel kneeling and the Virgin Mary seated reading a book. Executed early in the Fifteenth Century in the International Gothic style by Portuguese-born Alvaro Pirez d’Evora, the painting is encased in an elaborately carved, gold wooden frame.

Another eye-catching work on the north wall is an elaborate tryptich, with grisaille figures when closed, again of the Archangel Gabriel announcing to the Virgin that she is to mother the son of God. Inside is an elaborate painting of the adoration of the magi in the center, flanked by colorful images of Christ’s arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane and carrying the cross. Painted in the 1520s by followers of Belgian artist Pieter Coecke van Aelst in the Antwerp Mannerist style, the triptych is filled with figures in elaborate costumes and jewels, rendered in dark, glowing colors.

Other notable objects include a Netherlandish or German reliquary bust of a young woman dating to the second half of the Fifteenth Century; two “Warrior Saints,” circa 1480, George and Florian, made of carefully joined, polychromed wood by Austrian craftsmen, which likely served as Shrine Guardians in an Austrian church; two marble “Clerics,” circa 1480, one carrying a book and the other holding a mitre, by Italian Giovanni Antonio Armedo and his workshop; and a serious, gold crowned “Bust of a Female Saint,” likely Juliana, circa 1470, made of polychromed and gilded wood, possibly in Cologne, Germany.

Following her divorce from Vanderbilt, remarriage to O.H.P. Belmont and embrace of the women’s suffrage cause, Alva Vanderbilt Belmont opened the room for limited public tours. Proceeds benefited the “Votes for Women” campaign.

In the mid-1920s after being widowed by Belmont, Alva closed Marble House and moved to her chateau near Fontainebleau in France, where she lived until dying at the age of 80. Meanwhile, international art dealer Joseph Duveen, commissioned to sell the Gothic trove, moved it to his New York showroom. With the exception of two dining room paintings and entrance hall tapestries, which returned to Marble House, the contents of the Gothic Room were sold to circus magnate and ambitious art collector John Ringling for his planned winter residence and art museum in Sarasota.

While Ringling had purchased complete paneled rooms from the Astor mansion in New York for his new museum, he did not create a specific medieval setting for the Gavet-Vanderbilt objects, nor did he keep the collection as a distinct unit. Rather, sculpture and metalwork were placed like trophies throughout Ca d’Zan, his baronial, 31-room Venetian-Gothic mansion, completed in 1926. This suggests, said Ringling curator Virginia Brilliant, that John Ringling “may have been as interested in collecting the Vanderbilt-Belmont pedigree as in securing representative works of art.”

This photograph shows Mrs William K. (Alva) Vanderbilt in the costume of a “Venetian Renaissance Lady†at the Vanderbilt Ball at their New York City residence, 660 Fifth Avenue, on March 26, 1883. ⁐hotograph by Mora

She adds that Ringling’s “interiors are&⁡ progressive reflection of contemporary museological trends whereby individual objects mattered more than context.”

Di Cosimo’s “The Building of a Palace,” which came to Sarasota from the Gavet-Vanderbilt collection, is said to have given Ringling ideas for the architectural plan for his museum building. As Ringling Museum curator Brilliant writes in the catalog, the “resonance” of this painting, in which “an impressive and idealized edifice&⁲ises up out of an otherwise undeveloped landscape, barren in the foreground, verdant in the background cannot have been lost on&⁒ingling.”

Paintings and some sculpture and furniture were placed in the museum, a Renaissance-style villa opened in 1929 and renovated in 1990. They became part of a chronological display spanning 500 years of European and American art. Particularly notable today is the permanent collection of Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century European paintings, highlighted by a group of monumental works by Peter Paul Rubens, that hang in an enormous vaulted gallery.

Also on view in the museum are works by El Greco, Gainsborough, Hals, Poussin, Titian and Velazquez. The star of the impressive Italian Renaissance-style courtyard filled with classical and baroque sculpture is a bronze cast of Michelangelo’s “David.”

For now, the return of the Gavet collection to its custom-built environment in Marble House, where each object has resumed the place that Vanderbilt intended, gives visitors the rare opportunity to view a virtually intact and once-celebrated Gilded Age collection in the architectural framework created for its display.

The 214-page exhibition catalog, with many illustrations, including each object on display, and informative and perceptive essays by Brilliant, Miller and other experts, is published by the Ringling Museum and the preservation society.

Marble House, a National Historic Landmark, is at 596 Belleview Avenue. For information, www.NewportMansions.org or 401-847-1000, extension 131.