One of the world’s oldest gondolas is on view at Washington’s National Gallery of Art, complementing the exhibition “Venice: Canaletto and His Rivals”, now through May 30.

The 37’ x 5’ ornate gondola from around 1850 provides a dramatic, elegant representation of the many images of gondolas in these Venetian view paintings termed “vedute”.

The gondola has two carved chairs upholstered in leather, brass sea horses on both sides, many other brass fittings, a gilt coat of arms behind the chairs, and a lamp at the bow.

Many of the world’s great writers have praised these sleek vessels, which date back more than 500 years.

Goethe, in “Italian Journeys”, wrote, “Reclining in my gondola, I suddenly felt myself, as every Venetian does, a Lord of the Adriatic.”

“What pictures a gondola calls up of lawless, silent adventures,” wrote Thomas Mann in “Death in Venice”. “Or even more, what visions of death itself, the bier and solemn rites and last soundless voyage!”

Adventures and “a secret thrill of stepping into a Venetian gondola, that singular conveyance,” are called up by pictures in this exhibition -- of 20 masterworks by Canaletto (Giovanni Antonio Canal), and 34 by his most important contemporaries, including Bernardo Bellotto; Michele Marieschi; Gaspar Vanvitelli; Luca Carlevarijs; and Francesco Guardi.

“No one ever forgets his first gondola ride down the canals,” wrote Ernest Hemingway, far less imaginatively than Mann, Goethe, Shelley, Lord Byron... and even John Ruskin. 

Hemingway, as always, had plenty of adventures and thrills in and out of gondolas whenever he stayed in Venice, where he wrote “Across the River and into the Trees”. The book reads as if he rode in a gondola across some river and crashed after drinking copiously at Venice's legendary Harry’s Bar. “You find everything on earth in Harry’s,” Hemingway wrote in the book, which he said “came to me in a sort of a haze in Harry’s Bar.”

The poet Lord Byron and one of his many lovers floated in a gondola along the Grand Canal, while they ate polenta warmed between her breasts. 

The gondola on display, although not Lord Byron's, was reputedly owned by poets Elizabeth and Robert Browning.

American painter Thomas Moran bought it as a souvenir from his visit to Venice in 1890, and imported it to Hook Pond, near his summer residence in Easthampton, Long Island, NY. He enjoyed telling friends that the gondola had been owned by the Brownings, but the story can't be corroborated.

Robert Browning died at his palazzo on Venice’s Grand Canal in 1888.  

Fellow poet Percy Bysshe Shelley termed gondolas “that funereal bark”:

“So ‘oer the lagune We glided; and from that funereal bark, I learn’d, and saw the city…Its temples and its palaces did seem like fabrics of enchantment pil’d to heav’n.”

This gondola, and certainly this extraordinary exhibition's paintings depicting Venice's gondolas, temples, and palaces, are indeed fabrics of enchantment.

Although the exhibit can be seen only at DC's National Gallery (February 20-May 30), the gondola will return afterward to The Mariners' Museum in Newport News, VA -- “perhaps the greatest maritime museum in our country,” said National Gallery director Earl A. Powell III, “a true treat.”

Gondolas were used to celebrate one of the greatest military victories, World War Two. British Eighth Army soldiers rode in gondolas along the Grand Canal on May 4, 1945, three days after Germany’s surrender in Italy.

The entire exhibition is a celebration of great art, and great friendship between Italy and America.

For more info: National Gallery of Art, www.nga.gov, East Building, Mezzanine, on the National Mall at Constitution Avenue between 3rd and 7th Streets, Washington, DC, 202-727-4215.