A Halberdier in a Landscape

Caterina Cornaro, the Venetian noblewoman who became Queen of Cyprus, was born in 1454 in her family's house on the Grand Canal, and the palace on that site still carries her title, Ca' Corner della Regina. In 1724 the Corner family began rebuilding it, and for its great hall, according to the gallery, Andrea Corner commissioned a broad canvas from Tiepolo, the Finding of Moses, painted in the later 1730s. Around 1820 the picture was cut in two, probably, the gallery suggests, to bring the scene of the finding back to the centre. The larger part, with Pharaoh's daughter and the baby, went in time to Edinburgh. This tall strip, more than two metres high, is the piece taken from the right-hand side, a soldier with a halberd standing in a mountain landscape with his dog. In 2022 the British artist Simon Starling made the cut itself the starting point of an exhibition here, imagining the canvas joined to its missing part.