Duck Hunting on the Lagoon with Two Ladies

 The great Venetian genre painter Pietro Longhi, born on this day in 1701, painted mostly indoor scenes – including his famous Exhibition of a Rhinoceros in Venice – but he sometimes ventured outdoors, as in this typically cheery scene of duck hunters on the lagoon.

Is the smartly dressed hunter firing arrows at the birds? No, apparently the technique was to fire hard clay pellets from a bow (surely they'd have been better off using catapults?). Hunting birds on the lagoon was a popular pastime, as well as a useful source of food, and it is recorded also in a painting from 250 years earlier, by Vittore Carpaccio. 

The Carpaccio disappeared from public view until 1944, and now lives at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. In 1961 an art scholar made the bold suggestion that it might originally have formed the upper half of a work of which the lower half was the famous Two Women, which hangs in the Museo Correr in Venice.  This would explain the otherwise anomalous appearance of a bunch of lily flowers at the bottom left of the duck hunting scene. It seemed a pretty wild theory, and even its originator withdrew it. However, subsequent restoration and forensic work confirmed that the two paintings were indeed originally one. This is what it would have looked like – 

Surprisingly, it seems to work, doesn't it? It would be good if the two paintings could be reunited and put on display, if only temporarily. Preferably in Venice...