The Doge and Grand Council in Sala del Maggior Consiglio

This unusual 1763 painting in the Statens Museum for Kunst — one of Canaletto's rare interior views of a governmental space — depicts the Doge and the assembled Grand Council in the Sala del Maggior Consiglio, the vast hall that was the operational heart of Venetian republican government. The Sala del Maggior Consiglio was the largest room in any European palace, its walls covered by vast historical canvases by Tintoretto, Veronese, and Bassano, with Tintoretto's Paradise (1594) — reputedly the largest oil painting in the world — covering the entire eastern wall. Canaletto's decision at age seventy-six to paint this interior scene, rather than the outdoor vedute that had defined his career, suggests a final meditative return to Venice's political soul at a moment when the Republic's decline was unmistakable. The Danish royal collection, now in the Statens Museum, acquired significant European works through the eighteenth-century court patronage and later became one of Scandinavia's great public museums; this Canaletto reached Copenhagen through a chain of transactions typical of the dispersal of Venetian vedute across European collections.

The cavernous interior is rendered with attention to Tintoretto's Paradise on the end wall and the surrounding cycle of historical paintings. The assembled council members create a dense, ceremonial composition.