Il doge Alvise IV Mocenigo sul Bucintoro presso la Riva di Sant'Elena

This is one of 12 canvases Guardi painted to record the festivities held in 1763 for the election of Doge Alvise IV Mocenigo. Guardi did not witness the scene as we see it. He worked from drawings by Canaletto that had been turned into prints by the engraver Giambattista Brustolon, so the picture is a painting of a picture. At its centre floats the Bucintoro, the golden state barge the doge rode out each year to drop a ring into the Adriatic and marry Venice to the sea. Within a generation both were gone. French troops took Venice in 1797, ended the thousand-year Republic, and broke up the Bucintoro for its gold the next year. This very canvas was seized in that same wave of confiscations.