The restored "Venice: The
Molo from the Bacino di S. Marco" by Giovanni Antonio Canal recently
made its public debut at the Denver Art Museum.
(Denver Art Museum)
Tucked away and forgotten for years in a museum storage bin, the small oil painting held a great secret and was just biding its time, waiting for someone to notice it. And then one day someone did.
So began the Case of the Curious Curator.
It all started in 2000 (actually a couple centuries earlier, but that's getting ahead of the story) when a canvas in dreadful condition called "Venice: The Molo from the Bacino di S. Marco" was bequeathed to the Denver Art Museum from a deceased local collector's foundation.
The accompanying paperwork was vague and referred to it as "from the studio" of Giovanni Antonio Canal — known as Canaletto — an important Italian painter in the mid-1700s.
Because it was assumed to be a student rendering, the painting was relegated to storage. And obscurity.
Seven years later, Timothy Standring, curator of painting and sculpture at the Denver museum, ran across the piece while doing routine inventory. It was so discolored and coated in grime, he later joked, it looked as if it had been "in someone's home who smoked Marlboros for 50 years."England's Royal Collection has one of the largest assemblages of Canaletto's including a whole bunch (technical term) of the Venice scenes.
Still, there was something that caught his eye.
Maybe it was the delicate, wispy brush strokes in the ship sails, or the depth and details of the characters along the Venice seaport. Standring really looked at it for the first time. Then he got excited. No student painted this.
"I think we've got something here," he said....MORE
This find puts the score at:
Queen of England-274---Denver Art Museum-1.
