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The townscape and heritage project paid for up to 90% of the cost of restoring the original architecture of Paisley shopfronts.

"It dates to the fourth century AD and it would be a remarkable addition to the landscape of this corner of Italy. It will significantly aid in the understanding of the ancient town, the ancient townscape and city society in the later Roman Empire because it shows the continuities between the classical pagan world and early Christian Roman world that often get blurred out or written out of the sweeping historical narratives."

Ceruti paints all these figures with an intensity of focus, leaving the setting either largely blank — an empty room, a stone wall, the simple suggestion of a forest — or, in five of the 17, a townscape or farmhouse.

That important Schiele townscape — completed a year before the artist’s sudden death from the Spanish flu at age 28 — remained in the family for 70 years until it was donated in 2006 by the couple’s estate to the Neue Galerie in New York, which has one of the most important collections of Schiele works in the United States.

Technical analysis — including X-rays to examine what’s under the townscape — will study the human figures that dot the canvas to determine if they were originally sketched in by the artist or painted in directly.