Santa Maria della Salute, Venice

Cooke's Santa Maria della Salute, Venice depicts Baldassare Longhena's great Baroque church, completed in 1681 as a votive offering for Venice's deliverance from the plague of 1630—a building of extraordinary architectural ambition that dominated the entrance to the Grand Canal and was among the most frequently painted subjects in Venice. Cooke's marine training gave him particular sensitivity to the church's relationship with the water that surrounded it—the way its reflection animated the surface of the Grand Canal basin, the quality of light on its white Istrian stone under different atmospheric conditions. His multiple Venetian subjects from the 1840s onward demonstrated his ability to bring technical marine knowledge and atmospheric sensitivity to the most complex and demanding subject available to any landscape painter.

The composition frames the Salute's distinctive dome and scrolled buttresses from across the Grand Canal, with the warm Venetian light rendered in a higher key than Cooke's northern European palette. Gondolas and shipping provide characteristic maritime detail in the foreground.