Going to the Ball (San Martino)

Going to the Ball (San Martino), exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1846 as one of a pair with Returning from the Ball (St Martha), represents Turner's most fantastical late Venetian works — paintings in which Venice has been wholly transformed from a real city into a theatre of light and colour in which social scenes are played out within what is essentially abstract atmospheric painting. The San Martino of the title refers to the Venetian parish church whose festival fell in November, a date associated with the lantern-lit night walks of Venetian Carnival. Turner's late Venice was not the Venice of any specific memory or direct observation but a distillation of everything he had felt and seen across three visits spanning twenty years, combined with a lifetime of reading about the city and studying Venetian art. Ruskin struggled to praise these final Venetian works unreservedly; he felt they had moved beyond the boundary of legitimate artistic liberty into something too purely subjective. Later generations disagreed.

Turner renders the Venetian scene with ethereal luminosity, dissolving architecture and figures into atmospheric color and light in his most radically advanced late manner.