mention the ruins and friezes of ancient Tyre), Sir Henry and his young wife moved to Venice, where they bought a palazzo, the Ca’ Cappello, not far, in my mind at least, from the Ca’ d’Aspi.
One afternoon in 1865, just as he was stepping into his gondola to return home, Sir Henry was approached by an elderly and evidently impoverished man who asked the milord to buy an old painting for five pounds.
Scarcely glancing at the painting, and determined not to be late, Sir Henry refused. He stepped into the gondola and was carried away.
On arriving home, he found the painting propped against his door.
He hung it in a special room, all on its own.
Lady Layard survived her husband by twenty-three years. She remained in Venice, very much upon her dignity as Sir Henry’s widow but fond of social life nonetheless. Younger residents like Henry James knew the Palazzo Layard as the Refrigerator.
In her will she left the painting of Mehmet II, by Bellini, to the National Gallery in London.
Details about the damage to the painting, probably inflicted when it was lifted from board to canvas, and about the heavy restoration work carried out in the nineteenth century, can be obtained from the gallery. Both were considered so extensive that curators have cautiously labeled the painting attributed to, rather than by, Gentile Bellini.
It continues to travel the world; it was recently in Venice, and before that, at the turn of the century, it drew enormous crowds when it was exhibited in Istanbul.
Oddly enough, as I was writing this book, Sotheby’s in London sold a smaller likeness of Mehmet II-much the same size as the picture Palewski saw at the Palazzo d’Istria-for almost half a million pounds.
It was, supposedly, a later copy of the Bellini portrait.
As for the album of his father’s drawings that Gentile Bellini presented to Sultan Mehmet in 1480, there were, in fact, two. One on paper, bought from a market in Smyrna in 1823, is in the British Museum; the other, finer, album on parchment is in the Louvre.
It was discovered in the attic of a house in Guyenne, France, in 1886.
The Fondaco dei Turchi remained a ruin of sorts until 1860, when it was bought by the municipality and restored to its present condition. Following the restorers’ motto, com’era, dov’era, every effort was made to remodel the building as a Byzantine palace of the twelfth century. Consequently, all traces of its former grandeur, as well as its decay, were efficiently erased. Clad in gray marble sheeting, and remodeled within, it is now perhaps the ugliest building on the Grand Canal.
