(Palmanova 1772–1844 Milan)
The Bacino di San Marco, Venice,
oil on canvas, 62.5 x 80.5 cm, framed

This painting represents the Bacino di San Marco seen from the Punta della Dogana. The monumental buildings, which are symbols of Venice that were celebrated by the eighteenth century view painters, here serve as the setting for the cortege of the Festa della Sensa: the civil and religious ceremony with which the city of Venice was symbolically married to sea on the day of the Ascension of Christ. On the right is the Bucintoro, the great, richly gilded ceremonial vessel reserved for the doge and his retinue; it is shown here as it returns to the Molo following the ‘Sposalizio del Mare’ the [‘Marriage to the Sea’]. Indeed, each year the doge set out to sea in this vessel at the head of a great ‘nuptial’ procession whereupon in a symbolic act of union he would throw a ring blessed by the patriarch of Venice into the deep sea.

This painting compares with another two of the same subject by Giuseppe Bernardino Bison. The first is a little smaller and was with Dorotheum, Vienna, 19 April 2016, lot 99 while a second smaller version was formerly in the collection of the Marchese Serra in Genoa (see G. Pavanello, A. Craievich, D. D’Anza, Giuseppe Bernardino Bison, Trieste 2012, p. 213, no. 90).

The present canvas belongs among those evoking the feast days and celebrations of the eighteenth century and it derives from a composition by Canaletto, commissioned, alongside its pendant of a Regatta on the Grand Canal, by the collector and British consul in Venice, Joseph Smith (now in the Royal Collection, Windsor Castle, inv. no. RCIN 404417). Canaletto’s paintings became even more famous thanks to the engravings by Antonio Visentini collected in the album Urbis Venetiarum Prospectus Celebriores (1742). This series of engravings represented the principal public celebrations in which the doge participated, focusing on the architectural settings of the ceremonies while rendering the figures as cyphers or macchiette.

Giuseppe Bernardino Bison can be considered the last of the great Venetian painters of vedutte of the eighteenth century; his works show a swift manner of execution and a strikingly picturesque sense of taste. In addition to familiarising himself with contemporary art, the painter’s Venetian sojourn permitted him to study and assimilate the achievements of Canaletto, Guardi, Tiepolo, Marco Ricci, Zais and Zuccarelli. Thus although he lived through the neoclassical period and always remained abreast of the most advanced artistic fashions of his era, Bison remained significantly bound as a painter of frescoes, of views and of landscapes, to the Venetian eighteenth century inheritance from which he derives the confident spontaneity that characterises his work.