1 Osella - Francesco Erizzo

The osella was Venice's answer to a bureaucratic tradition: doges had long distributed gifts of wildfowl to members of the Maggior Consiglio at the new year, and when live birds became impractical, the Senate substituted struck silver pieces beginning in 1521. Each doge commissioned a unique reverse design annually, making the series a running visual chronicle of Venetian political preoccupations. Erizzo's 1631 issue falls in the first year of his dogeship — and squarely within the catastrophic plague that killed roughly a third of Venice's population, the same epidemic that prompted the building of Santa Maria della Salute.