6 VITTORE CARPACCIO Carpaccio was one of the first Renaissance painters to employ scenes of everyday life in Italian, 1460/65-1525/26 his work. This striking view of his native Venice shows cormorant hunters on a lagoon. Hunting on the Lagoon, Note that the hunting party does not use arrows but rather shoots pellets of dried clay, circa 1490-95 apparently to stun the birds without damaging their flesh or plumage. In an early Oil on panel instance of arrested action in a picture, one such pellet, just fired from the boat at right, 75.4 x 63.8 cm (29¾ x 25 in.) can be seen in midair, about to clout the cormorant in the foreground. 79.PB.72 This panel is the top part of a composition that was originally much longer, as the truncated lily in the lower left corner suggests. It served as the background for a scene of two women sitting on a balcony overlooking the lagoon, now in the Museo Correr in Venice. That painting has a vase with a stem sitting on a balustrade that matches up with the blossom in the Getty painting. Recent examination of both panels confirmed that they were once one; the wood grain is identical, and much like a fingerprint, wood grain is unique. Sadly, they were probably sawed apart for commercial reasons sometime before the bottom part entered the Museo Correr in the nineteenth century. The back of the Correr's panel was removed, presumably at the time it was separated from the top, but the reverse of the Museum's painting preserves an extraordinary image. The illusionistic letter rack, with letters seemingly projecting into the viewer's space, is the earliest known trompe-l'oeil (fool the eye) painting in Italian art. The back also has grooves cut for hinges and a latch, indicating that the two-sided panel probably functioned as a decorative window shutter or a door to a cabinet. This suggests that there may have been a matching shutter or door unknown today. If the painting served as a shutter, when closed the panel would have made the spectator think the window was open to this vista of the lagoon, extending the remarkable illusionism even further. DC 18 ITALIAN SCHOOL