View of Campo Santa Maria Formosa

A second version of the Campo Santa Maria Formosa, painted around 1730 and with unclear current institutional ownership, attests to the commercial demand for this subject that Canaletto's market generated — multiple collectors could request the same view, and Canaletto would produce variations that might differ subtly in staffage, light quality, or compositional details while maintaining the essential topographic accuracy. The campo of Santa Maria Formosa, one of Venice's largest and most irregular public squares, was among the subjects that demonstrated Canaletto's ability to handle spaces without the dramatic long vistas of his Grand Canal work: the irregular geometry, the mixture of Gothic and Renaissance buildings, and the animated daily life of the surrounding neighborhood required a different compositional approach from the axial perspectives of his canal views. Repetitions of this kind — the same subject treated in multiple versions for different collectors — were a standard commercial practice in the veduta tradition and distinguished Canaletto from his great predecessor Titian, who rarely repeated compositions. The practice served the art market effectively: Canaletto's vedute functioned as luxury goods whose value derived partly from the place depicted and partly from the artist's name, and both remained valuable regardless of the number of versions produced.

The irregular campo is organised into a convincing spatial recession toward the church facade. Canaletto's rendering of the paving stones and the shadows they cast in strong afternoon light gives the scene its characteristic Venetian quality. The figures going about daily business are observed with the casual naturalism typical of his best genre passages.