The Festa della Sensa was the greatest cultural and religious festival of the Venetian Republic. Its origins are lost in the early centuries of the Republic, with the earliest records of the celebration dating to the 12th century. The Festa della Sensa fell on the Thursday following the fifth Sunday after Easter (Ascension Day) and celebrated both the Ascension of Christ and two historical events: Doge Pietro II Orseolo's victory over the Dalmatian pirates (in the year 998 or 1000), and the peace of Venice signed in 1177 under Doge Sebastiano Ziani between Emperor Frederick Barbarossa and Pope Alexander III.
Over the centuries, the festival, celebrated with great ceremony, became an attraction for visitors from all over Europe, and in the 18th century featured as a well-established highlight for travellers on their Grand Tour. Every year, the Fiera della Sensa was a centrepiece of the celebrations: a wooden portico, housing the workshops of local craftsmen, was erected in St Mark's Square a week before the day of festivities. The fair remained open for another two weeks and was also open in the evenings, providing an additional attraction for travellers. Guardi dedicated some of his most fascinating paintings to the Fiera della Sensa, including the two beautiful views of the square now in the collection of the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon (fig. 1).
The climax of the festival, however, was Ascension Day: the day before, the Bucintoro travelled from the Arsenal (the only time it did so in the whole year) and docked in front of the Doge's Palace. The following morning, the doge would leave his palace and board the Bucintoro, greeted by bells from churches across the city; accompanying the doge on the barge would also be the Sopragastaldo, members of the Signoria of Venice, and foreign ambassadors.
On leaving its dock in front of the Doge’s Palace, the Bucintoro travelled to the island of San Nicolò del Lido, accompanied by a procession of multitudes of civilian, military and merchant vessels. Halfway along the route, the Bucintoro was joined by the Patriarch's golden Peatone, which placed itself at the stern of the great ship. During the journey, the Bucintoro was also flanked by the two boats of the Nicolotti (the fishermen of San Nicolò) and the Provegioti (the islanders of Proveglia) who had the ancient right to escort the ceremonial vessel.
On arrival at the Lido, the Bucintoro halted its journey, while the cannons of surrounding galleys continued to fire blank shots; it was here that the rite of the Marriage of the Sea took place. Standing aboard the Bucintoro, the doge emptied a small vial of holy water into the sea below, before throwing a ring, blessed by the Patriarch, into the waters of the Adriatic, pronouncing the words: 'Desponsamus te, mare nostrum, in signum veri perpetuique dominii' (‘Let us wed you, our sea, as a sign of true and perpetual dominion’).
Once the ceremony of the Marriage of the Sea was over, the doge disembarked at the Lido of Venice and headed to the church of San Nicolò, where, received by the Benedictine monks, he attended the pontifical mass. While the doge and his court attended mass, the gondoliers staged regattas in the Giudecca Canal and grand lunches were held in the gardens of the surrounding islands.
Once back at St. Mark's, the doge visited the fairgrounds of the Sensa festival; the celebrations were concluded with a sumptuous banquet that the doge offered at his Palace. To emphasise the civic character of the festival, in addition to ambassadors and members of many of the illustrious families of the Venetian aristocracy, one hundred arsenalotti were invited to the banquet, which consisted of several courses arranged over ten tables. According to tradition, an audience of spectators representing the citizens was admitted to the first course.
A festival of such pomp and importance clearly provided an ideal subject for landscape painters. The celebration provided Canaletto with the subject for some of his most famous canvases, including those in Woburn Abbey, in the National Gallery, London, in the Royal Collection (fig. 2), and in the Aldo Crespi collection in Milan. In these works, Canaletto depicts the Bacino of St. Mark crowded with all kinds of boats surrounding the Bucintoro, either on its outward, or return journey from San Nicolò.
For his paintings depicting the Festa della Sensa, Canaletto routinely chose a fairly intimate viewpoint; Guardi, on the other hand, more often opted for a broader perspective that arguably allowed him to achieve more spectacular evocations of the procession. In most of the fourteen canvases that Guardi dedicated to the Festa della Sensa, the scene is depicted from a high vantage point at a distance from the proceedings, allowing the artist to create sweeping views with great impact, comprising a large part of the body of water separating St. Mark's from San Nicolò.
In addition to the paintings examined here, it is worth noting as a comparison the two canvases in the collection of the Louvre which are based on Brustolon's engravings after Canaletto. Works that appear more similar to the present paintings are the versions in the Midy and Stramezzi collections in Crema.
The two paintings under discussion here first appeared at the exhibition, Eighteenth Century Venice, at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London in early 1951, where they were on loan from Lord Charles Ughtred John Kay-Shuttleworth. The two vedute had been in the collection of the Shuttleworth family since the 18th century. There is no documentary evidence of who commissioned the works; in the literature, James Shuttleworth (1714–1773) is often mentioned, but it is perhaps more likely that his son Robert (1744–1816 ) was behind their creation. The latter’s birthdate better fits the dating of the works as proposed by the most recent scholarship, discussed below.
At the Whitechapel exhibition, the paintings were immediately noticed by scholars such as Rodolfo Pallucchini and Antonio Morassi. On Morassi’s recommendation, the two works were subsequently bought by Mario Crespi (1879–1962), in whose collection they are recorded by Morassi in 1952. The eldest son of Benigno Crespi, Senator Mario Crespi was one of the most important figures in the Italian economy in the first half of the 20th century. When his father died in 1910, Mario and his two brothers, Aldo and Vittorio, inherited an economic empire with particular strengths in the cotton industry, electrical companies and the publishing group that controlled the Corriere della Sera.
In the years following the Second World War, Senator Crespi amassed an important collection of historic paintings, focusing on 18th-century Venetian painting that included masterpieces by Tiepolo, Canaletto and Guardi. Upon his death, it passed to his second wife, Fosca Leonardi, and upon her death to his daughter Elvira Leonardi, the famous fashion designer 'Biki'.
The collection, albeit with some alteration and losses, remained intact in the house in Via Sant'Andrea in Milan until Leonardi’s death in 1999, and was only disbanded in 2004, with the decision of the her grandchildren to sell the collection through the auction house Porro & Co., which organised an auction in the autumn of the same year; however, the two paintings of the Festa della Sensa under discussion here were not included in the sale and were instead sold privately.
Following the catalogue of the 1951 exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery and the initial assessments by Morassi and Pallucchini that came out in the same year, the first in-depth analysis of the works was undertaken by Antonio Morassi in an article published in Arte Veneta in 1952. In the article, the scholar emphasises how the two paintings are the only examples in Guardi’s oeuvre of the artist producing a pair depicting both the outward journey to San Nicolò del Lido and also the return to the Doge's Palace. Further, Morassi give his enthusiastic praise to the two paintings, even going as far to state that in Guardi’s oeuvre they are 'among the highest achievements of his art' (‘…tra i più alti raggiungimenti della sua arte’).
Commenting on the first canvas of the pair, the scholar writes:
“It is morning: the spring sky, silvery-blue, is a little whimsical with its pinkish-white clouds, its haze blurring the horizon in the distance. But the lagoon is calm, stagnant and reflects that golden light to the east. It is a 'view of the lagoon' taken from afar, taking in the entire estuary from the left-hand edge, where San Nicolò rises: and we can see all the little islands, far away, almost absorbed in the atmosphere... On these waters, rendered with a sense of hallucinating truth, the Bucintoro heads towards S. Nicolò del Lido ...
The painter has rendered every detail with extreme accuracy, never losing sight of the whole, which is fused in a unique silvery-blue hue: never losing sight of the overall effect, that is, the expansive vista that is fundamental to any depiction of the lagoon...
But despite the fidelity of the representation, this view is, above all, a painting of a marina with boats, in which the main emphasis is placed not on the boats, but on the marina; and it is above all, I would say, a 'state of mind', standing before the enchantment by the Venetian lagoon, which Francesco had in his heart."
Turning to the second painting, The Return of the Bucintoro to the Doge’s Palace, Morassi is no less enthusiastic in his description:
“This enchantment is carried through in the complementary scene. It is still morning. And the sun gently warms the façade of St Mark's, the Riva degli Schiavoni, the vast quadrilateral of the Doge's Palace, down to the Punta della Dogana with the Salute: the buildings are like pink water lilies floating on the water. Past San Giorgio Maggiore ... the Bucintoro rows swiftly towards the shore, now followed by the Patriarch's 'Peatona' and other luxury gondolas stationed on the water, as well as a dense crowd of boats. Here too, a vigilant, meticulous demonstration of faithful observations: but also a witty twinkling of lights, a darting of reflections, a leaping 'pizzicato' over long harmonious blue-silvery-pink chords, a diffuse and intense musicality.
...there is no other version known that can compare with such an accomplished rendering of optical truth, that at the same time achieves such high poetic values.”
After entering the Crespi collection, the two paintings only left their new home in Milan on two occasions: the great 1967 exhibition held at Palazzo Ducale dedicated to Venetian vedutisti, and the exhibition held again in Venice twenty years later, organised by the FAI (Fondo per l’Ambiente Italiano), in which the most important vedute paintings from private Italian collections were exhibited; this was the last time that these works were on public display.
The two views were published in the volume dedicated to Francesco Guardi in the Classici dell’arte series and in the monumental monograph that Morassi published in 1973, the crowning achievement of a lifetime of studies dedicated to the artist. As evidence of the very high regard Morassi had for these works, it is notable that a detail from The Return of the Bucintoro was chosen as the illustration displayed on the box that encloses the two volumes.
Morassi places the two works in the full maturity of the artist, dating them around 1780 (which, as previously mentioned, adds weight to the idea that Robert Shuttleworth commissioned the pair). This date makes the works comparable to some other exceptional works in Guardi's corpus such as the cycles for the visits of the Counts of the North and Pope Pius VI, which were both executed in 1782. In recent years, some scholars such as Succi and Friederichs, have proposed a later dating, suggesting the end of the 1780s, but this argument seems less convincing.
Two large drawings are also known, both recorded by Byam Shaw in the early 1950s, and variously considered as preparatory works for the paintings or perhaps derived from them: the drawing of outward voyage in the Strauss collection in New York, and the return journey (fig. 3) recently sold at Sotheby's, New York, on 27 January 2021, lot 59 – where it set a new record for a Guardi drawing, selling for $1,230,000.
To conclude this study, it is worth considering a final quote by Antonio Morassi, this time taken from the 1973 monograph, to emphasise once again the exceptional quality of the two paintings:
‘The exquisiteness of the pearly and rosy atmosphere, the high level of the 'modern' vision of these two works – these elements cannot be stressed enough’.
Fig. 1. Francesco Guardi, St. Mark's Square with the Fiera della Sensa, c. 1775 (Museu Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon).
Fig. 2. Antonio Canal, called Canaletto, The Bacino di San Marco on Ascension Day, c. 1733-34 (Royal Collection Trust).
Fig. 3. Francesco Guardi, The Return of the Bucintoro from S. Nicolò di Lido (Sotheby's, New York, 27 January 2021, lot 59).
