Courtyard of a Palace with Stairs

This is early Marieschi, painted in the mid-1730s, before the loose, confident capricci of his final years. A broad open staircase climbs through the courtyard of a palace that was never built. He assembled scenes like this the way a set designer builds a stage, which is close to how he began, painting theatre scenery. Notice the steep angle, the flight of steps pulling the eye upward, the few small figures set at the foot of the architecture to make it tower over them. Real Venetian motifs, an arcade, a stair, a doorway, are combined into one place you could not actually visit. It reached the gallery in 1816 in a bequest from the Venetian collector Girolamo Molin.