Giuseppe Borsato

Giuseppe Borsato was born in Venice in 1770, in the last years of a Republic that had stood for a thousand years. The son of an ornamental painter, he grew up to become the man who redecorated the city for its new rulers, first Napoleon's France and then Austria, in the clean Neoclassical style that was pushing out Venetian rococo.

He did nearly everything a decorator could. He painted fresco cycles, designed stage sets and furniture, and laid out the ornamental schemes for palace rooms and public ceremonies. He also made view paintings of Venice in the tradition of Canaletto, recording the events of the French and Austrian years, and he taught ornament at the Venice Academy for decades.

He worked in the city until his death in 1849. His best-known canvas records something he had seen for himself: the memorial service for the sculptor Antonio Canova in 1822, staged in the Scuola Grande della Carità, the great hall hung with black and crowded with mourners.