The Piazzetta and the Bacino di San Marco

Canaletto painted this view in the later 1730s, building it around the Doge's Palace in strict central perspective. At the time the palace was still the working seat of the Venetian Republic, where the doge and the councils met. The Alte Pinakothek calls the picture a prime example of his mature manner, as exact as it is atmospheric, the kind of Venice buyers across Europe were asking for. Some 60 years later the state it shows was gone. In May 1797, with Napoleon's army on the mainland, the Great Council voted itself out of existence and the last doge stepped down. This canvas and its companion later belonged to the sculptor Antonio Canova, who had been born a subject of that Republic and became the most celebrated sculptor in Europe. Canova died in Venice in 1822, and King Ludwig I of Bavaria bought the pair from his estate there some time before 1845.