Description
Venetian painter (19th century) – Venice, view of Campo Santi Giovanni e Paolo.
Oil on canvas, in carved and gilded wooden frame.
This view of Campo Santi Giovanni e Paolo belongs to the tradition of Venetian urban veduta painting that, from Canaletto and Bellotto onwards, had made this square one of its most recurrent subjects. The composition is anchored by two monumental presences: the equestrian statue of Bartolomeo Colleoni by Andrea del Verrocchio, cast by Alessandro Leopardi in 1496, and the Renaissance façade of the Scuola Grande di San Marco, with its marble revetment and celebrated trompe-l’œil panels. Figures in nineteenth-century dress, passers-by, a stray dog, conversing groups, populate the foreground in the manner of the Canalettian macchiette, here interpreted with the descriptive sensibility of later Venetian genre painting. The light is steady and high, casting sharp shadows across the paved campo.
Condition report: Original canvas. Good state of conservation of the pictorial surface.
