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The spoils of victory can be many and various, as the Super Bowled-over residents of New Orleans and Indianapolis are discovering.

One of the most significant (and valuable) paintings in the permanent collection of the Indianapolis Museum of Art, J.M.W. Turner’s The Fifth Plague of Egypt, will travel to the New Orleans Museum of Art for a three-month stay, likely beginning in early April, the head of the Indianapolis museum indicated yesterday.

The visit of the epic canvas painted by Turner in 1800 is the result of a Super Bowl bet between New Orleans museum director John Bullard and his Indianapolis counterpart, Maxwell Anderson. If that last name seems familiar to Canadians, it’s because the New York-born Anderson was director of the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto from 1995 to 1998.

The bet of an art loan was proposed last month by Washington-based art blogger Tyler Green as the Colts bested both the New York Jets and the Baltimore Ravens in the playoffs. However, Anderson didn’t bite until the New Orleans Saints and the Colts were confirmed as adversaries.

Anderson first offered an abstraction by Los Angeles painter Ingrid Calame. Bullard, however, called the Calame “insignificant.” To up the ante, he said New Orleans would part with a 1910 Renoir, Seamstress at Window, if the Colts prevailed.

Anderson pooh-poohed the offer, describing the Renoir as a “sentimental blancmange by that china painter’” – a sweet trifle, in short, by the Impressionist master whose early training was as a decorator of porcelain. He countered with a jewelled trophy crafted in the mid-19th century by French artisan Jean-Valentin Morel. Bullard snickered at the chalice, calling it an “over-elaborate Victorian tchotchke.”

After a couple more humorous volleys, they settled on their respective bids: If the Colts triumphed, as most analysts predicted, New Orleans would lend Claude Lorrain’s 1644 landscape Ideal View of Tivoli. If New Orleans won, it would get all 8,778 square centimetres of the dramatic Turner oil, a mainstay of the Indianapolis collection since 1955.

Before the Super Bowl, Anderson was confident the Colts would prevail. “Obviously we wouldn’t presume to place one of our greatest masterpieces on the road for three months unless we were sure we wouldn’t have to.” (The record for a Turner sold at auction, set in 2006, is $36-million (U.S.))

Yesterday, though, in a phone call from a cab in Manhattan, Anderson was expressing no misgivings.

Maxwell Anderson, director of the Indianapolis Museum of Art

New Orleans, he noted, doesn’t have a Turner in its permanent collection so getting The Fifth Plague of Egypt will be a real treat.

“The residents of Indianapolis, meanwhile, will have something to do instead of hanging their heads in shame. They can come visit the art museum. ... It doesn’t have to wait once a year to hope we get in the Super Bowl. We’re in the Super Bowl of the art world all year-round.”