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contempories, Fausto (1843-1914) and Joseph Bagatti Valsecchi (1845-1934), trans-
formed their Milanese townhouse into a faithful copy of a Lombard-Renaissance palazzo
and filled it with paintings, sculptures, glass, ceramics, textiles, books and crafts belong-
ing to the Lombard Renaissance tradition. Other noble families, like the Melzi d'Eril,
branched out into landscapes, such as those by Bernardo Bellotti, a student of Canaletto,
who painted their villa at Gazzada on Lake Varese, while Napoleonic politician Count
Giovanni Sommariva collected Canova statues and romantic Hayez paintings at Villa Car-
lotta in Tremezzo.
THE CLUE IS IN THE DETAILS
B rilliant art critic and anti-intellectual Giovanni Morelli (1816-91) devised the 'Morellian' technique of identify-
ing authorship of a painting by studying the characteristic 'hands' of painters, by which the minor details of a por-
trait or scene, such as the painting of a subject's ears or hands, reveals the artist's subconscious shorthand.
The Morellian technique of finding hidden clues in the details was to have a much wider cultural influence,
when the method was mentioned in Arthur Conan Doyle's best-selling series Sherlock Holmes , and in the work of
Sigmund Freud.
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