Francesco Guardi (Venice, 1712 - 1793) CAPRICCIO WITH A RUINED ARCH AND WALLS OF A VILLAGE oil on canvas, 68.5x54 cm CAPRICCIO WITH A RUINED ARCH AND WALLS OF A VILLAGE oil on canvas, 68.5x34 cm Having escaped specialist study, certainly by virtue of its long absence from the market, this Capriccio guardesco re-emerges after a long period from the private collection that held it along with other works by the Venetian artist, the latter widely documented in the art literature. The theme of the painting-a Gothic archway giving access to a short portico, with a classical archway, perhaps the gateway to a city wall, glimpsed in the background at the conclusion of a street lined with rustic houses and a church- is moreover common to numerous "capricci" painted by Francesco Guardi between the eighth and ninth decades of the eighteenth century, when the Venetian artist also invented this felicitous formula to meet the growing demands of his admirers: as had already been the case in Rome for Gaspare Vanvitelli in his production of "devised views" beginning in the second decade of the eighteenth century and to a greater extent in the 1920s, Guardi's capricci juxtapose motifs from life with others of invention or taken from a different context, restoring an ideal, and indeed arbitrary and extravagant, vision of an evocative but purely invented urban landscape. Our painting can thus be juxtaposed with a series of long-known "capriccios," and others recently added to the Venetian painter's catalog. Among the most famous, immediately comparable to ours are the painting in London, National Gallery and the one formerly in New York, Frederick Mont collection (fig. 1) long since catalogued by Antonio Morassi (Guardi. The Paintings, Venice 1973, I, nos. 966 and 967; II, figs. 846 and 855), and again with the Capriccio catalogued in Milan, Rasini collection (fig. 2) (Morassi, 1973, I, no. 958; II, fig.849), and with many others that repeat its motifs and layout. To these are added those recently catalogued by Dario Succi (Guardi. Catalog of unpublished paintings and drawings, 2021, in particular nos. 302, 353, 356) in the now long-awaited update of the corpus assembled by Antonio Morassi with new numbers that, in our case, increase the grounds for comparison without substantially changing the terms of the question.