Saint Mark’s Square in Venice

Oil on canvas

58.5 x 103 cm

Canaletto (real name: Giovanni Antonio Canal) depicts Saint Mark's Square bathed in light under a bright blue sky. It is enlivened by market stalls, merchants and passers-by: a souvenir painting for tourists, many of whom visited Venice on the way to Rome in the course of a Grand Tour in the eighteenth century. Thanks to these travellers the scenic painter Antonio Canal became the famous Canaletto, a painter of the cityscape, or veduta, who could barely satisfy the tourists' great demand for his work.

Canaletto was born in Venice in 1697 where he died in 1768.