Canaletto’s Venice, the Bucintoro at the Molo on Ascension Day — ‘he captured pomp and ceremony like nobody else could’

For centuries, Venice has been renowned for the splendour and pageantry of its many festivals and feasts, none more spectacular than the Festa della Sensa (Feast of Ascension Day). Falling on the 40th day after Easter each year, it marked, according to the Christian calendar, Jesus Christ’s ascent into Heaven. In Venice the day has historic, as well as religious, significance. It’s said that on Ascension Day in 998 AD, the fleet of Doge Pietro II Orseolo won a key naval victory over Dalmatian pirates who had been terrorising the nearby seas for decades.

Festa della Sensa celebrations were keenly captured on canvas in the 18th century by Venice’s most famous visual chronicler, Canaletto. They centred around the Doge and his officials sailing out to sea in his official galley, the Bucintoro. Across Canaletto’s career, he produced several paintings of that vessel’s return to the Molo (the quayside in front of the Doge’s Palace). An outstanding example, Venice, the Bucintoro at the Molo on Ascension Day, will lead the Old Masters sale at Christie’s in New York on 4 February 2026.

‘This is one of the finest Canaletto paintings to remain in private hands,’ says Andrew Fletcher, Christie’s global head of the Old Masters department. ‘It captures not only the spectacle of the Ascension Day ceremony, but the rhythm and majesty of Venice itself’.

A penchant for drama

Canaletto was born in Venice in 1697. As a youth he apprenticed with his father, a successful painter of stage scenery. It’s surely no coincidence that Canaletto went on to show a sense of the theatrical throughout his career.

In the case of the work coming to auction, the view is taken from the Riva degli Schiavoni waterfront, whose paving has been set at an exaggerated (topographically imprecise) angle in the foreground. We look west towards the basin of San Marco and the mouth of the Grand Canal, the adjusted viewpoint allowing Canaletto to include many of Venice’s landmark buildings as a backdrop: such as the twin-domed Santa Maria della Salute church on the left and the Doge’s Palace (with its patterned facade of white Istrian stone and pink Verona marble) on the right.

The angled waterfront serves both as a platform from which viewers can imagine themselves watching the celebrations; and a stage for various characters who add life to an already-bustling scene. Amongst those characters are an elegant patrician seen conversing with people in a gondola below; a pair of figures (and a dog) sitting on a set of steps that lead down to the water; and two Venetians wearing white masks, who stand on either side of a boy holding a basket.

Occupying the scene’s centre is the Bucintoro, with its resplendent red roof and gilded decoration. It is now afternoon, and the vessel has recently returned to the Molo after its annual Ascension Day journey into the Adriatic. There the Doge would cast a ring into the water, to mark a symbolic marriage between Venice and the sea.

A highlight of the Grand Tour

The grand galley was an emblem of La Serenissima, and here it shares the San Marco basin with myriad gondolas. These are filled with smartly dressed passengers wishing to witness the day’s events. The Feast of Ascension Day brought the entire city together. In Canaletto’s time, it was unprecedentedly popular with tourists too, many of them British aristocrats en route through continental Europe on a Grand Tour. This group, hoping to take home a pictorial souvenir of their visit to Venice, represented the artist’s most devoted clientele, and depictions of the Bucintoro moored at the Molo on Ascension Day were a favourite.

The earliest example of this scene, dating to the start of the 1730s, was acquired by Britain’s first Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole and hung on the walls of 10 Downing Street in London (the Prime Minister’s official residence). In July 2025, that painting sold at Christie's for £31.94 million ($43.85 million), the highest price ever paid for a work by Canaletto at auction. 

The artist painted many subsequent canvases of the same subject, adopting varying viewpoints. For Walpole’s picture, he had chosen an oblique angle looking west towards the Molo — something he replicated in Venice: The Basin of San Marco on Ascension Day (a work painted circa 1738 for the Duke of Leeds and today found at the National Gallery in London).

‘Incredible visual power’

The work coming to auction is Canaletto’s last-known attempt at the same scene from roughly the same viewpoint. Painted in around 1754, it stands out for several reasons. ‘The brushwork is broader and the palette more brightly coloured than we see in his earlier views of Ascension Day,’ says Fletcher. ‘The result is a painting of incredible visual power, especially when looked at from afar’.

Also significant is the picture’s shape. For vedute (views) of his native city, Canaletto typically adopted a horizontal format. However, in this rare instance, he chose an upright format instead. This brought with it certain artistic advantages, such as allowing St Mark’s Campanile — the bell tower behind the Doge’s Palace — to look especially elongated and soar into the sky like never before. That sky is a vast expanse, occupying more than half the canvas (mostly blue, but with pinkish clouds echoing the tonality of the Palace facade).

Canaletto in London

The picture’s format was probably dictated by the context in which it was made. Canaletto at that point was coming towards the end of a nine-year spell living in London. The outbreak of the War of the Austrian Succession in 1740 between Europe’s major powers had dramatically reduced the number of tourists travelling through the continent and in turn, the size of Canaletto’s client pool, so in 1746 he decided to settle in the land from which most of his patrons came. 

According to the contemporary engraver and antiquary George Vertue, the artist’s arrival in London was warmly received. ‘The multitude of his works done [in Venice] for English noblemen… has procured him great reputation,’ Vertue wrote, adding that Canaletto’s paintings showed ‘great merrit & excellence’.

The artist took lodgings with a cabinet-maker in what is now Beak Street, in Soho, amongst a community of Italian expatriates. He was enthralled by London, then the biggest city in Europe, and painted myriad views of it, from Westminster Bridge to St Paul’s Cathedral. Occasionally during those years, he painted scenes of Venice too.

One example was Venice, the Bucintoro at the Molo on Ascension Day, a commission from Thomas King, later 5th Baron King — or perhaps a relative of his — intended for display at their country residence, Ockham Park in Surrey.

This painting was the centrepiece of a seven-picture decorative scheme by Canaletto — the other six works being capricci (imaginary landscapes) which today belong to private and museum collections worldwide. These include Capriccio: a Sluice on a River with a Chapel at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston; and English Landscape Capriccio with a Column and English Landscape Capriccio with a Palace, both at the National Gallery of Art, Washington.

It’s thought that the Bucintoro painting served as an overmantel at Ockham Park — hence the vertical format. Canaletto produced it when he was in his mid-50s: several years after he had left Venice and not long before he returned there for good in 1755. One can imagine him at his easel, painting with a combination of nostalgia and memory. He also perhaps brought with him to London — and worked from — this drawing: dating to 1734, it’s depicts the same scene from a similar viewpoint (and today forms part of the Royal Collection).

An impeccably preserved masterwork

Canaletto’s veduta and capricci stayed in the King family for almost two centuries, inherited, by descent, by the likes of Willam King, 8th Baron King, who in 1838 became the 1st Earl of Lovelace. (He was also the husband of the mathematician, Ada Lovelace, whose ideas laid the foundation for modern computing.)

The seven paintings were dispersed in a sale in 1937. Venice, the Bucintoro at the Molo on Ascension Day was later acquired by the Portuguese financier António de Sommer Champalimaud. At its most recent sale — at Christie’s in London in 2005, following his death — the painting fetched £11.43 million, then the highest price ever paid at auction for a work by Canaletto.

It has never appeared in an exhibition and has only been seen publicly on four occasions: to wit, each time it has come up for auction, in 1937, 1973, 2005 and 2026.

‘This relative lack of owners and exposure is critical to the impeccable condition that the painting is in today,’ Fletcher says. ‘Its paint surface is almost as pristine as when it left the artist's easel. With bravura brushwork and boundless imagination, Canaletto here captured the pomp and ceremony of the Venetian lagoon like nobody else could’.