In 1760, the Procurator of San Marco Almorò III Alvise Pisani commissioned the decoration of the great Hall of Festivities, the true heart of the palace on the banks of the Brenta, from the genius of eighteenth-century Venetian painting, Giambattista Tiepolo.

This was an ambitious undertaking, intended both for the ceiling measuring 23 meters in length by 13.85 in width, and for the side walls, including the carved wooden gallery. In a letter to Algarotti, the painter estimated that the work would occupy him for three or four years. In reality, following the summons of the King of Spain Charles III of Bourbon, he was forced to leave the work unfinished, departing in 1762 for Madrid, where he would end his days on March 27, 1770.

In the Hall of Festivities, Giambattista Tiepolo worked as a team with his son Giandomenico, the painter Jacopo Guarana, and the great quadratura painter Pietro Visconti. He reserved for himself the great ceiling scene, opening onto a vertiginous sky crossed by clouds, a synthesis of a lifetime’s research, ideally begun with the Assumption in the parish church of Biadene and the Apotheosis of Saint Teresa in the church of the Scalzi in Venice. The subject treated is a complex celebratory allegory of the Pisani family. On the walls, above the gallery, his son Giandomenico created other monochrome allegories on a gilded background, adopting a formal solution experimented with a few years earlier in the Oratory of Purity in Udine.

The entire complex constitutes Tiepolo’s last great work created in the Veneto: almost an artistic testament of the painter: past sixty and afflicted by gout, he perhaps sensed that in responding to the call of the King of Spain it would be very difficult to see his homeland again.