Capriccio with a Ruined Arch in the Lagoon

This small capriccio has a companion. Its pair, a ruined arch and farmhouses on another stretch of lagoon, hangs with it, and the two came to the museum together from the collection of Cesare Bernasconi, one of the leading figures of Verona's 19th-century middle class. Here the broken arch stands in the water itself.

Collections like his, built around small easel pictures, many of them on secular subjects, changed the character of the civic gallery, which had begun with some 200 paintings from churches and public buildings rescued from Napoleon's confiscations. In the rooms rearranged in December 2025, the museum hangs these two capricci beside Pietro Longhi's scenes of Venetian life and the landscapes of Antonio Diziani, to show how steadily Verona's collectors bought the genre painting of their own century.