The Reliable Venetian Hand

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The Reliable Venetian Hand was a Venetian collector in the 1700s who gathered old master drawings by Venetian and other Italian painters, mostly from that century. For each drawing he would add an attribution to the artist in elegant handwriting, sometimes with help from a professional calligrapher. His attributions are mostly accurate, a fact noted by Arthur E. Popham in 1935 in his Catalogue of the Fenwick Collection. Because of this careful work, scholars of Venetian art gave him the nickname “the Reliable Venetian Hand.”