Grand Canal looking East from Palazzo Bembo to Palazzo Vendramin-Calergi

This 1730 Grand Canal view looking east from Palazzo Bembo to Palazzo Vendramin-Calergi, in the Duke of Bedford's collection at Woburn Abbey, belongs to the great campaign of comprehensive Grand Canal documentation that Canaletto undertook for the British market in the late 1720s and 1730s. The stretch documented includes Palazzo Vendramin-Calergi, the magnificent early Renaissance palace designed by Mauro Codussi and later the residence where Wagner died in 1883; in Canaletto's time it was simply one of the grandest Gothic-Renaissance palaces along the canal. The Bedford collection at Woburn Abbey was among the most important British aristocratic accumulations of Venetian vedute, much of it assembled through Joseph Smith's agency. Canaletto's campaign to document the full length of the Grand Canal — the most ambitious topographical project in European veduta painting — required systematic work from multiple vantage points along the three-mile waterway, and the resulting series functioned almost as an architectural survey of the city's palace facades, providing information unavailable in any other medium and invaluable to architectural historians today.

Canaletto employs the canal's gentle curve to create a sweeping perspectival recession, with each palace facade rendered in accurate architectural detail. The morning light from the east illuminates the canal-side facades, creating a warm golden tonality characteristic of his finest work.