Concert

Andrea Palladio finished Villa Foscari, on the Brenta canal at Malcontenta near Venice, around 1560 for the brothers Nicolò and Alvise Foscari, and its walls were painted in stages between 1557 and 1575. The first painter, Battista Franco, died in 1561 with a room still unfinished, and Giovanni Battista Zelotti worked in the house that same year. This scene comes from one of its rooms. Two young couples are making music, and Cupid has joined them.

The museum records that the fresco was stripped from the wall, and the villa's own history explains how pieces like this one left it. After the Foscari moved out in the 1810s, the paintings were pulled off in a series of strappi, a technique that lifts the paint layer onto cloth, and the bare walls were whitewashed. Recovering what remained took until the 1970s. Zelotti left Verona young, and the museum notes that nothing else by him survives in his home city.