The story
John Ringling made his fortune from the circus, and he spent a great deal of it on Baroque paintings that most American collectors of the 1920s did not want. On Sarasota Bay in Florida he built a pink museum around a courtyard of copied Renaissance sculpture and filled it with the grand, theatrical art of 17th-century Italy and Flanders.
His prize was a set of enormous canvases by Peter Paul Rubens, full-size cartoons for a series of tapestries on the Triumph of the Eucharist, so large they need a gallery of their own. Ringling bought serious Baroque pictures cheap in a market that had turned against them, and left the collection and its endowment to the state of Florida.
Next to the museum stands the house he built for himself and his wife Mable, Ca d'Zan, House of John in Venetian dialect, a bayfront palace of coloured terracotta and glass modelled on the palaces of the Grand Canal. The circus that paid for all of it has its own museum on the grounds, wagons and posters and all.
