Ambassadors Depart

The scene is a piece of diplomacy from a legend, and Carpaccio built it out of things any Venetian of 1495 would recognise. The king of Brittany has settled his terms and hands the ambassadors the document that sets out his daughter Ursula's conditions for marriage. Over the throne hangs a canopy of state, the kind that in Venice marked the power of the doge, slung here from garlands of boxwood. Off to one side a clerk sits writing at a low desk, the ordinary machinery of government that every treaty needed. The tiled floor runs back in careful perspective toward an open loggia where smaller figures wait their turn.