The Church of the Redentore, Venice

This 1740 view of the Church of the Redentore on the Giudecca, now in the Manchester Art Gallery, depicts Palladio's masterpiece of thanksgiving architecture across the Giudecca Canal. The church was built in 1577–92 by the Venetian government in fulfillment of a vow made during the catastrophic plague of 1575–76, which had killed perhaps thirty percent of the city's population; the annual Festa del Redentore, when Venetians walked across a temporary bridge of boats to attend mass in the church, remained one of the city's most important civic-religious celebrations. Canaletto painted the Redentore as a companion subject to San Giorgio Maggiore — both were Palladian masterpieces on islands opposite the Molo — and his treatment typically emphasized the church's harmonious relationship with the water and sky rather than the human activity of the festival. The Manchester Art Gallery, one of the leading regional museums in Britain, holds a strong collection of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century painting alongside its famous Pre-Raphaelite holdings, acquired through the energetic civic collecting of Victorian-era Manchester.

Canaletto renders Palladio's classical temple front with meticulous architectural accuracy, the white stone facade luminous against the sky. The broad expanse of the Giudecca Canal provides both spatial depth and reflective water surface, animated by characteristic staffage of gondolas.