The eighteenth century was the last century in which Venice was still great: ‘The greatest of all the Italian city-states’, sustains Michael Levey (in Painting in 18.century in Venice, London Phaidon Press, 1959). But despite the fact that Goethe continued to define her as such, she was no longer La Dominante: she had lost most of the territories she had conquered; her markets were nowhere near as flourishing as they had been, since the city had lost its status as the arbiter of trade between the East and the West; her alliances were less significant and decisive; her independence was mostly a consequence of her neutrality, if not the benevolence of the great powers.

For Venice and its art collections, this was a rather deleterius period: the offer was so vast, that ‘prices were low; in fact we know of paintings scraped down to the raw canvas, and sold for that value, to avoid inflating the market’, says the Soprintendente Giovanna Nepi Scirè; in 1795, it is Sasso who tells us about the fate of one of Paolo Veronese’s altarpieces: ‘assai macchinosa’, that is too cumbersome, it found no buyers; it was thus cut into pieces; an English colonel bought the upper portion, a Dead Christ, for 500 zecchini; Gavin Hamilton and, for 250 zecchini, a third Englishman, split the lower half: ‘Thus it was sold in quarters, like butcher’s meat’.