The Piazza of San Marco, Venice

By 1780, when this Piazza San Marco was painted, Guardi had depicted this subject more times than perhaps any other composition in his career, and the late versions show how thoroughly he had internalized the challenge of representing the vast paved space of Venice's civic heart. The social life of the Piazza — the conversations under the Procuratie arcades, the merchants at the base of the Campanile, the foreign tourists copying buildings in their notebooks — was familiar material to a painter who had spent his entire life in Venice. The Piazza was also a political theater: the passage of senators in their black robes, the proclamations from the Loggetta, the ceremonies in the Basilica — all the business of a functioning republic played out in this space. Each of Guardi's many versions varied the atmospheric conditions, the groupings of figures, and the precise angle of view, preventing the repeated subject from becoming mechanical. The untraced location reflects the wide dispersal of his large veduta output across private collections worldwide.

The vast Piazza is filled with animated figures rendered as quick brushstrokes. The Basilica facade and Campanile provide architectural structure against which Guardi's atmospheric effects play.