Canaletto (1697-1768)
Piazza San Marco (St Mark’s Square)
late 1720s
Oil on canvas, 68.6 x 112.4 cm
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
The most celebrated view painter of eighteenth-century Venice, Canaletto was particularly popular with British visitors to the city. This wonderfully fresh and well-preserved canvas shows one of the city’s most emblematic locations, the Piazza San Marco. Canaletto reduced the number of windows in the bell tower and extended the height of the flagstaffs, but otherwise he took few liberties with the cityscape. In fact, this painting can be situated among the artist’s other views of the square because of his meticulous documentation of various stages in the laying of its pavement between 1725 and 1727. (MET)