This lavish book is the first ever art historical study to survey this specific and crucial period in the history of  La Serenissima  the Baroque. The 17th century sawVenice s last big drive to respond on a cultural and artistic level to the Republic s inexorable decline on the great stage of European politics. The city s fabric still reflects the desire that was felt at the time for grandiloquent displays of hoped-for triumph. Excess and ostentation prevailed, fuelling a tendency for abundant ornamentation, a taste for the grotesque and the bizarre, and a zeal for enormity and greatness. Here, the authors trace the progression of painting, sculpture and architecture in 17th-century Venice in a series of scholarly essays illuminated by hundreds of glorious illustrations celebrating the city s seminal examplars of Baroque style, among them Santa Maria della Salute, the mosaics of St Mark s and the paintings of Giambattista Tiepolo.