Venice: The Arsenal

The Arsenal — Venice's vast shipbuilding complex in the eastern part of the city — was the largest industrial establishment in pre-modern Europe, capable of constructing a fully armed galley in a single day at the height of Venetian naval power. Its massive entry gate, adorned with Greek lions brought as war trophies from Piraeus and the Peloponnese, was a civic monument to Venice's military prowess as well as a working industrial facility. Dante visited the Arsenal and used the scene of boiling pitch and swarming workers as an image for the eighth circle of Hell in the Inferno. By the mid-eighteenth century when Guardi painted it around 1757, the Arsenal's productive capacity had declined along with Venice's naval power, but it remained a potent symbol of the Republic's past greatness. The National Gallery in London holds this view as part of its collection of Venetian eighteenth-century painting, where Guardi's work can be compared with his contemporaries and with the Canaletto school that preceded him.

The imposing gateway of the Arsenal is rendered with more architectural precision than Guardi typically employed, its Renaissance facade clearly described. The surrounding water and sky, however, display his characteristic atmospheric freedom.