View of the entrance to the Arsenal

The Arsenal was the state shipyard of the Venetian Republic, a walled yard where galleys were built and put straight into the water. At its height it employed thousands of men. By the 1730s the Republic had been at peace since 1718, the yards worked far below their old capacity, and the city was living off its visitors. Canaletto painted this for one of them. It belongs to the set ordered in the early 1730s by the young Duke of Bedford, home from his tour of Italy, the largest group of pictures Canaletto ever made for one patron. That set was never broken up and still hangs at Woburn Abbey. Beside the Arsenal gate stand the marble lions Venice carried home from the harbour of Athens in the 1680s.