Venice rewards the Fine Arts

Venice founded its academy of fine arts in 1750, and a few years later, in 1756, painters were making pictures exactly like this one in order to get into it. Morlaiter's canvas is that kind of proof piece. The city of Venice appears as a figure handing out rewards to the arts of painting, sculpture and architecture, an allegory painted to show the painter deserved a place among them. It seems to have worked. Ten years on he was himself one of the founding professors of the reformed Venetian academy. The picture entered the Accademia's own collection in 1807, so today it hangs inside the very institution it was made to flatter.