Ruins with a large Arch and Columns

The odd shape of this canvas tells you what it was for. It is more than twice as wide as it is tall, a little over two metres across and under a metre high, a proportion no painter chooses for its own sake. A picture like this was made to fit one particular place, most likely set above a door or run along a stretch of panelling in a Venetian palace or a villa on the mainland. The subject suited that decorative job. An invented stretch of antique ruin, a broad arch and standing columns with open sky behind them, is exactly the pleasant fiction of the ancient world a fashionable room was furnished with around 1730. The old museum catalogue still lists the painting as number 847.