View of the Molo, Venice

This view of the Molo at Venice, painted around 1730 and now in the Columbia Museum of Art in South Carolina, captures the symbolic heart of the Venetian Republic's public space in a composition Canaletto returned to throughout his career. The Molo — the stone quay between the Piazzetta's two granite columns and the waterfront — was Venice's formal maritime threshold, and the act of depicting it was simultaneously topographical, political, and commercial: it provided a luxury souvenir of the world's most famous city for collectors who had made the Grand Tour. The Columbia Museum of Art, opened in 1950 and one of the American South's most significant art institutions, holds this work as part of its European painting collection — one of many American museums that acquired Venetian vedute through the twentieth-century dispersal of European private collections. The painting demonstrates Canaletto's characteristic approach to the subject: the afternoon sun illuminating the pink stonework of the Doge's Palace, the columns framing the vista, and the Bacino alive with the gondolas and merchant vessels that conveyed Venice's continuing commercial vitality to viewers in far-distant drawing rooms.

The two columns of the Molo frame the composition, with the Bacino di San Marco's busy water traffic extending beyond. Canaletto's precise rendering of the columns' stone and the doge's galley in the foreground demonstrates his full mature command of architectural and maritime subjects. The sky is handled with the graduated blue tonality characteristic of his best work.