Allegory of the virtues Mocenigo

Jacopo Guarana painted this glorification of the Mocenigo in 1787, and the date gives it a quiet weight the family could not have felt at the time. The Mocenigo were one of the grand patrician houses of Venice and had given the Republic several doges over the centuries. Here their virtues gather as allegorical figures, floating up in the bright, weightless manner of late Venetian ceiling painting, a style the city had been decorating itself with for generations. Ten years after Guarana finished it, in 1797, the Venetian Republic came to an end, handed to Napoleon without a fight. Guarana lived just long enough to see that happen, dying in 1808. The gallery itself acquired the canvas only in 2010, after it had passed through the London salerooms.