St Mark's, Venice

Roberts's Saint Mark's, Venice from around 1830 depicts the most famous church in the city that was already the most-painted in Europe—the Byzantine-Romanesque basilica whose five domes, golden mosaics, and exotic borrowed columns made it unlike any other building in Western architecture. Venice was a mandatory destination on the Grand Tour, and its unique combination of Byzantine, Islamic, and Italian Gothic architectural elements gave Roberts a subject of extraordinary visual complexity that tested his ability to render architectural detail within atmospheric whole. His Venetian subjects, painted before his Egyptian and Near Eastern travels established his reputation as an Orientalist documentarian, demonstrate the continuity between his European and Eastern work: the same combination of topographical precision, theatrical lighting, and animated foreground figures.

The basilica's elaborate facade with its mosaics and sculptural decoration is rendered with Roberts's precise architectural technique and atmospheric Venetian light.