Piazza San Marco Looking East from the North-West Corner

This 1758 National Gallery view of Piazza San Marco from the northwest corner is among Canaletto's last dated treatments of his most iconic subject, painted two years after his return from England and a decade before his death. By 1758, he had been painting the Piazza for over forty years, accumulating dozens of views from every possible vantage point, and the challenge of maintaining freshness and authority in such thoroughly worked material is evident in the subtle variations he introduced — a different angle, different light conditions, slightly different staffage. The painting belongs to his late Venetian phase, when he worked without the commercial pressure of the Smith relationship and without the novelty demands of the English market, producing views for Venetian clients and for the continuing international demand that his reputation generated. Francesco Guardi, who was now fully established as a rival vedutista, was treating the same subjects with a more painterly, emotionally suggestive manner; the late competition between the two painters' approaches to identical material was a formative episode for the next generation of European painting. The National Gallery holds this as part of its comprehensive representation of the Italian Baroque and Rococo traditions.

The northwest vantage provides an oblique view across the piazza toward the Basilica. While the architectural rendering remains competent, the figure handling shows the simplified technique characteristic of Canaletto's last works.