Francesco Guardi, 'Venice: Piazza San Marco', after 1780

Guardi’s shimmering brushwork gives this picture a magical quality. On the far side of the square, the facade of the Basilica di San Marco – the city’s impressive cathedral – glows, while to the left a blaze of sunlight warms the sky behind the Procuratie Vecchie, the offices of the Republic’s administration.

Tremulous black lines and thin layers of freely applied paint dominated by subtle blue and brown tones describe the doorways, arches and other architectural details; the basilica seems almost to merge with the sky. Although the figures are depicted on a smaller scale than in his earlier picture, Venice: Piazza San Marco, you can still make out all the different types of people going about their everyday lives. To the right, a couple in the black coats and white masks worn during the Venice Carnival talk to a man in yellow. In the centre, a man seems to reach for a child’s hand, while two dogs play in the sun nearby. Further back, market sellers stand beside their white tents.

A jagged, diagonal shadow cutting across the square, basilica, white canopies and several people gives liveliness to the composition. Other diagonals – the rooflines of the buildings at each side of the square and the white stone lines on the pavement – accentuate the recession of space and lead our eye towards the basilica. There are strong vertical lines, too, from the flag poles in front of the basilica and the arches of its facade to the elongated form of the campanile (bell tower).

During the 1770s there was a buoyant market for Guardi’s Venetian cityscapes, which appealed to local collectors and tourists alike. The artist painted this view a number of times – an earlier and larger version is also in the National Gallery’s collection: Venice: Piazza San Marco. In the later work, the brushstrokes are looser and the colouring lighter, and Guardi has given more attention to the scene’s atmosphere than to capturing its details.