The Chamber of the Four Doors in the Doge's Palace

By 1822, when Giuseppe Borsato signed the back of this canvas, the Venice it shows was already gone. The Republic and its doge had ended 25 years earlier, in 1797, and the city now answered to Austria. Borsato, trained as a decorator and a painter of interiors, still reconstructs the Sala delle Quattro Porte in the Doge's Palace exactly, down to the coffered ceiling, and fills it with the doge's procession passing through in full ceremony. He knew the room well. The care he lavishes on the pageantry belongs to a state that no longer met there. On the back he wrote only, Borsato f. l'anno 1822.