View of the Island of San Lazaro, Venice

San Lazzaro degli Armeni, the small lagoon island south-east of the Lido, became the center of the Armenian Mekhitarist monastic community in 1717 when the Republic of Venice granted it to the monks after their expulsion from the Peloponnese. By the 1750s, when Guardi painted this Waddesdon Manor view, the island had become a flourishing center of Armenian Christian scholarship and printing, producing religious texts, grammars, and dictionaries. The island's distinctive profile — a low mass of walls and trees rising from the flat lagoon — made it a natural subject for painters documenting the Venetian archipelago's more isolated outposts. Lord Byron would later study Armenian there in 1816-17. Waddesdon Manor's Rothschild collection, assembled with particular attention to eighteenth-century French and Italian art, provides an ideal context for this quiet lagoon view that documents Venice's role as a center of religious refuge and scholarly activity at the edges of European Christendom.

The island's low profile creates a horizontal band of architecture between the expanses of lagoon and sky. Guardi exploits this format to emphasize the atmospheric effects of light on water and the vast Venetian sky. The monastery buildings are rendered with restrained precision, their warm tones standing out against the cooler blues and greys of the surrounding lagoon.