Bucintoro at the Molo on Ascension Day

On the back of this canvas there is an inscription, uncovered during recent conservation work. In Italian it reads, I, Antonio Canal, called Canaletto, made this, 1760, with the nickname spelled Canalletto, a double l. By that year Canaletto was in his early sixties, and the subject was one he had painted again and again since the late 1720s. Each Ascension Day the doge was rowed out in the Bucintoro, the gilded state barge, to wed Venice to the sea. Here the barge has come back and lies at the Molo, the stone waterfront below the Doge's Palace, with gondolas crowding around it and the bell tower of San Marco rising at the left. The picture was sold in Manchester in 1838 and was later given to Dulwich by the collector Henry Yates Thompson.