Francesco Guardi, 'Venice: The Punta della Dogana', about 1770

The huge dome of the church of S. Maria della Salute, begun in 1631 to commemorate the end of the plague, dominates the entrance of Venice’s Grand Canal. In front of the church, where the Grand and Guidecca canals meet, is the Dogana da Mar (Customs House), built in the 1670s and shaped like a ship’s bow – see Guardi’s close-up view of this building. Above its entrance is a weathervane in the form of Fortune, a personification of the Venetian Republic’s supremacy over the Adriatic Sea.

Like its companion piece, Venice: The Doge’s Palace and the Molo from the Basin of San Marco, this picture shows large barges in the left foreground. One, its sail hanging limp, may have just arrived from the mainland or further afield; the other’s sail is neatly furled. The workers aboard these boats are animated, busy with a range of activities, but little attention has been given to their naturalistic form or individuality. By the time Guardi painted this work during the 1770s, he had established a formula for depicting people. Here, as in his other pictures, they appear to merge with their surroundings rather than serve as the main focus.

The water is a hive of activity. Large boats carrying cargo sail beside smaller vessels that head in all directions, while some gondoliers wait for passengers. On the shore, merchants remove goods from their boats, pay import taxes and secure passage into the Grand Canal. A little way along the quay, locals walk towards the church. Despite Venice’s industrious history, the city had experienced economic and commercial decline since the seventeenth century. Within a few decades of this picture being painted Venice surrendered to Napoleon Bonaparte’s troops, causing the collapse of the Republic.

But Guardi’s picture is a celebration of the glory of Venice. He seems to have enjoyed painting scenes with lots of movement and light: the sky here is luminous and sunlight flickers on the water. Guardi has used a variety of tones and colours to create the rippling, reflective surface of the lagoon.

For the buildings he used areas of flat tones, picking out windows, doors and steps with delicate black lines. This is particularly noticeable in the quay and low buildings to the right, which are made up of a continuous sweep of light brown paint with subtle detailing. From a distance the church looks like it has been painted with great precision, but on closer inspection its glorious architectural features have been expertly described using loosely drawn lines, with variations of light and shade to give an impression of solidity and three-dimensionality.