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Minerva between Geometry and Arithmetic is a 1550 fresco fragment, usually attributed to Paolo Veronese but by some art historians to Anselmo Canera or Giambattista Zelotti. It was painted for the Palazzo de Soranzi in Castelfranco Veneto but now in the Palazzo Balbi in Venice.
The decorative scheme at the Palazzo de Soranzi was designed by Michele Sanmicheli for the Venetian patrician Piero Soranzo. He took on young painters from Verona to paint the frescoes in the four side-rooms, the main hall and the atrium – these included Giovanni Battista Zelotti, Anselmo Canera and Bernardino India, as well as Veronese. The numbers on Arithmetic's abacus may refer to those hidden by her hand (i.e. 1+2+5+6+9), the latter totalling 23, argued by some to symbolise either Veronese's age at the time or the year of Piero Soranzo and Francesca Emo's marriage, 1523. Others argue that the visible numbers on the abacus (3+4+7+8+10, totalling 32) refer to the length of Soranzo and Emo's had been married at the time they built the palazzo (i.e. 1550).
The Palazzo was completely demolished in 1817 on the orders of Francesco Maria Barbaro, its last owner. At the instigation of Giovanni (John) Vendramini from Bassano, the painter, chemist and mechanic Filippo Balbi removed some of the frescoes from the walls using a new technique and sold most of them to Vendramini himself, who was a London art dealer, lithographer and heir to his Portuguese father-in-law's fortune. Other fragments were donated to Castelfranco Veneto's cathedral and the Venice Seminary and sold to private collectors. An 1817 letter by Padre Barisan refers to 156 fragments being saved, though British and Italian newspapers of the time instead suggest 108, of which more than 60 went to London.
With several others from the Palazzo de Soranzi, the fragment showing Minerva appeared in a Maddox Street Galleries catalogue of 1826 as "Minerva between Mensuration and Calculation". The following year Vendramini produced a print of it entitled THE BELLONA. From The FRESCO PAINTING BY PAUL VERONESE. One of the Series removed from the Walls of the Soranza Palace, and brought to England by M. Vendramini. The Regione Veneto acquired the fragment on the art market in 2002 after being sold three times in the previous hundred years [1]
