John Marciari first spotted the painting among hundreds of other works carefully filed in pullout racks in a soulless cube of a storage facility in New Haven, Connecticut. He was then, in 2004, a junior curator at Yale University’s renowned Art Gallery, reviewing holdings that had been warehoused during its expansion and renovation. In the midst of that task, he came upon an intriguing but damaged canvas, more than five feet tall and four feet wide, which depicted St. Anne teaching the young Virgin Mary to read. It was set aside, identified only as “Anonymous, Spanish School, seventeenth century.”
“I pulled it out, and I thought, ‘This is a good picture. Who did this?’” says Marciari, 39, now curator of European art and head of provenance research at the San Diego Museum of Art.
