Giovanni Battista Piranesi

The Marriage of Venice to the Sea ceremony was an annual celebration of Venetian maritime power. A procession of boats, which included large ceremonial gondolas known as bissone, escorted the doge in the magnificent bucintoro, a massive galley propelled by 168 oarsmen. This design for a bissona employs the elaborate Rococo style favored for Venetian interiors and decorative objects in the first half of the eighteenth century. There is no evidence that it was ever realized, but Piranesi reused much of the decorative language--including shells, satyrs, a spread wing, medallions, and crowns--in his Grotteschi etchings. Moreover, he turned the center of the bissona into the horse-drawn coach that appears in the foreground of the Piazza San Pietro that he created for the Veduta di Roma series around 1748.