View of the Rialto, Venice, from the Grand Canal

By 1785, when this view of the Rialto was painted for the Norton Simon Museum's collection, Guardi was in his early seventies and had been Venice's dominant veduta painter for nearly two decades. His late Rialto views show the increasingly abbreviated and atmospheric handling of his final period — the architectural forms of the bridge and flanking palaces suggested rather than precisely rendered, the water surface treated with rapid parallel strokes that dissolve the boundary between reflection and ripple. The water-level viewpoint was standard for Grand Canal vedute, giving the bridge its characteristic dramatic silhouette against the sky and allowing the painter to show the busy traffic of gondolas and barges passing beneath its single wide arch. The Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena holds this alongside other examples of eighteenth-century European painting, placing Guardi's late atmospheric style in the context of a museum founded by a collector whose tastes spanned from Old Masters to twentieth-century modernism.

The low viewpoint emphasizes the bridge's architectural mass while gondolas and boats enliven the foreground water. Guardi's late style shows increasingly free, almost impressionistic brushwork.