Venice with the Salute

Venice with the Salute, painted around 1840, is one of Turner's most frequently reproduced late Venetian works, depicting the Baroque church of Santa Maria della Salute — built by Baldassare Longhena in thanksgiving for deliverance from the plague of 1630 — as a luminous architectural ghost emerging from the atmospheric haze of the Grand Canal's entrance. The Salute had been a canonical subject for Venetian painters since Canaletto established it as the standard closing element of Grand Canal compositions in the 1720s; Turner's version is the definitive Romantic dissolution of that topographical tradition into pure atmospheric sensation. His 1840 Venetian visit, his third, produced paintings of increasing abstraction; the Salute views of this period show Venice dissolving from architectural fact into luminous suggestion with each successive treatment. Ruskin's defence of these works in Modern Painters argued that Turner's apparent inaccuracy was in fact a higher form of fidelity — to the atmospheric reality of Venice rather than its mere stone-and-mortar facts.

Turner renders the Salute as a luminous ghost emerging from the atmospheric haze of the lagoon, using warm, diffused light to dissolve the Baroque architecture into pure atmospheric effect.