The Bucintore Returning to the Molo on Ascension Day

Every year on Ascension Day the Doge of Venice sailed out in a gilded state galley called the Bucintoro, dropped a gold ring into the lagoon, and declared the city married to the sea. Canaletto painted the barge here around 1729, gliding back to the waterfront by the Doge's Palace as the ceremony ends. He made pictures like this for foreign visitors, especially wealthy young Englishmen on their Grand Tour, who wanted a brilliant, sunlit Venice to carry home. What he could not know is that the boat itself would not last the century. In 1798, after Napoleon's army ended the long-lived Venetian Republic, French troops broke up the Bucintoro for its gold. The ritual he recorded had gone on, in some form, for centuries.