Summer is a relatively quiet season on the auction market, but the Old Masters sale at Christie's in London on 1 July proved an exception

Summer is a relatively quiet season on the auction market, but the Old Masters sale at Christie's in London on 1 July proved an exception. Canaletto's "Venice: The Return of the Bucentaur on Ascension Day" sold for £31.9 million, a new record price for a work by Canaletto and the second-largest sum ever paid for an Old Master work at Christie's in London.

The painting depicts the Feast of the Ascension, one of the principal celebrations of the Venetian Republic. On that day the head of the Republic (the Doge) and the highest officials put out into the Adriatic aboard a richly decorated galley called the Bucentaur, to cast a golden ring into the water and thus symbolically "wed" Venice to the sea. This centuries-old ritual underlined the city's special role as a maritime power.

As experts note, works of this calibre attract the interest not only of connoisseurs of the Old Masters but also of collectors of entirely different persuasions, from contemporary art to motor cars. When a work is regarded as the pinnacle of its author's achievement or as the benchmark of its genre, it steps beyond the narrow confines of the collector's usual specialism.

In the artist's own lifetime the painting was in the collection of Robert Walpole, Britain's first de facto prime minister, and it adorned the official residence of the head of government, No. 10 Downing Street.

As for the present buyer, the name is not being disclosed. According to the art dealer Robert Simon, interest in the work was enormous, and there were even rumours that it might be a wedding present from Amazon's founder Jeff Bezos, whose wedding took place in Venice at the end of June.