Venice, the Piazzetta with the Ceremony of the Doge Marrying the Sea

By the time Turner painted this, around 1835, nobody had seen a doge marry the sea for almost 40 years. Every Ascension Day for centuries, the doge of Venice had been rowed out in his gilded state barge, the Bucintoro, and dropped a gold ring into the Adriatic as a sign that the Republic ruled the water. The ceremony ended when the Republic fell to Napoleon in 1797, and the next year French troops burned the Bucintoro to recover its gold. So this is a history picture, staged among buildings Turner had walked past on his visit of 1833. The campanile of San Marco and the upper part of the Doge's Palace, on the right, are the only things he worked out clearly, because he abandoned the canvas unfinished. The doge himself is in the group of figures at the lower left, caught in the act of giving the ring, and like the rest of that crowd he was never brought to a finish.