Black by law, not by style

Here's something I didn't know until I started painting one. Every gondola in Venice is black, and it isn't fashion, it's a four hundred and sixty year old law that nobody ever bothered to repeal.

By the middle of the 1500s, wealthy Venetian families had turned their private gondolas into floating displays of wealth, gilded, painted in family colours, as ostentatious as they could manage. In 1562, the Venetian government got fed up with the one-upmanship and passed a law forcing every gondola in the city to be painted plain black, no exceptions. The law itself is long gone now. The habit never left. Every black gondola on the canals today is really just the ghost of a rule about rich people showing off too much.

I painted one in watercolour and ink, that glossy black against the water. There's a poster with a letter home and a postcard if you'd like one.

Shop the poster here: A Gondola, Venice · Travel Poster