The Doge Alvise IV. Mocenigo on the Bucentaur near the Riva di Sant'Elena

The Sposalizio del Mar — the Wedding of the Sea — was Venice's most ancient and symbolically charged civic ceremony, performed annually on Ascension Day since at least the twelfth century. The Doge sailed in the Bucentaur, the Republic's magnificent gilded state barge, to the Lido, where he cast a gold ring into the Adriatic with the words 'Desponsamus te, mare' (We wed thee, sea), affirming Venice's sovereign claim over the Mediterranean. Guardi painted the ceremony several times, drawn by both its documentary significance and its spectacular visual material — the huge gilded vessel, the accompanying armada of gondolas and barges, the crowds on the Riva. The Louvre holds this version as part of its important collection of eighteenth-century Venetian painting. Doge Alvise IV Mocenigo reigned from 1763 to 1778, providing a precise dating context for this ceremonial record of a Republic that would survive him by less than two decades before Napoleon's conquest in 1797.

Guardi's flickering, atmospheric brushwork captures the pageantry of the ceremony with impressionistic vivacity. The rendering of the gilded barge, the accompanying flotilla, and the shimmering lagoon water demonstrates his characteristic dissolution of form into light and atmosphere.