The Island of San Michele, Venice

San Michele in Isola — Venice's island cemetery between the city and Murano — was a functioning Camaldolese monastery when Guardi painted it around 1774, its white church designed by Mauro Codussi in 1469 forming the earliest purely Renaissance building in Venice. The island's permanent cemetery function was established only after the Napoleonic decree of 1804, three decades after this painting was made; Guardi thus recorded it in its pre-cemetery guise as a monastery set apart from the city in the northern lagoon. The Metropolitan Museum of Art holds this veduta as part of its comprehensive collection of Venetian eighteenth-century painting, where it can be read alongside Canaletto's more precise architectural treatments of similar lagoon subjects. The island's subsequent history as Venice's burial ground — the resting place of Stravinsky, Diaghilev, Brodsky and many others — lends Guardi's painting a retrospective quality as a record of the island before its transformation into the final destination of those the city has most honoured.

The white walls of the cemetery island create a striking horizontal form against the lagoon and sky. Guardi's handling of water and atmospheric light captures the particular luminosity of the Venetian lagoon.