The story
For decades a large canvas of Susanna and the Elders hung in Brno under the name of the Carracci, the Bolognese family of painters. When restorers cleaned it in 1953 and 1954, they found a signature and the date 1649 on the stone balustrade at the right. It was a late work by Artemisia Gentileschi, the Roman-born painter who came back to this story of a woman cornered by two old men more than once. The picture had reached the city through the bequest of a Brno industrialist, Heinrich Gomperz.
It now belongs to the Moravian Gallery, the second-largest art museum in the Czech Republic, formed in 1961 when the picture gallery of the Moravian Museum merged with Brno's museum of applied arts, founded in 1873. The collection is spread across several buildings. The Governor's Palace, a former Augustinian monastery rebuilt in the Baroque style, shows art from the Gothic period to the 19th century. The Pražák Palace, designed by Theophil von Hansen, the architect of the parliament in Vienna, is given to 20th-century and contemporary art, including the Czech avant-garde painter Jindřich Štyrský, later a founder of Czech Surrealism.
The gallery also looks after the villa of the architect Dušan Jurkovič and the childhood home of the designer Josef Hoffmann in Brtnice, and since 1963 it has run Brno's International Biennial of Graphic Design.
