Gondolas glide across the water, passing fishing boats which direct our gaze towards the mouth of the Cannaregio Canal, Venice’s largest waterway after the Grand Canal.
The Ponte delle Guglie (‘bridge of the obelisks’) spans the water. We can just make out the tiny silhouettes of people crossing it, while others emerge into the sunlight along the waterfront. Beyond this is an area known as the ghetto, where, from the early sixteenth century, the Jewish population was forced by decree to live.
Canaletto altered the view to make a more dramatic composition: the facade of the house on the far right is at a sharper angle here than in reality, the bridge is closer to us and the Cannaregio more open, making it easier to see the buildings on both sides. Canaletto’s scenes from the late 1730s tend to have have a cooler, more wintry light, which we can see here – especially in the wispy pink clouds.
Text extracted from the ‘Provenance’ section of the catalogue entry in Michael Levey, ‘National Gallery Catalogues: The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Italian Schools’, London 1986; for further information, see the full catalogue entry.
C. Baker and T. Henry, The National Gallery: Complete Illustrated Catalogue, London 2001
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