View With Punta Della Dogana And Santa Maria Della Salute

XIX century

View with Punta della Dogana and Santa Maria della Salute

Oil on canvas, cm 40 x 65

With frame, cm 53 x 77

The painting in question, characteristic of the vedutist movement that developed during the nineteenth century in Italy and abroad, depicts a view of Venice, with particular attention to Punta della Dogana and the Basilica of Santa Maria della Salute. The work captures the unique atmosphere of the lagoon city, with its sparkling waters, gondolas that cram the canals and buildings that are reflected on the water.

The term Vedutismo derived precisely from the main subject represented, the so-called views, that is suggestive panoramas imprinted on canvas by the great painters of the time. They differed from the previous landscape paintings precisely because of their strongly realistic nature, their almost maniacal attention to detail and the total preponderance of the landscape element: before the vedutismo, In fact, the landscapes were almost exclusively used as panoramas, that is, as a backdrop for the representation of men, women or animals, who remained at the centre of the scene. This new artistic trend brought the landscape to take the role of protagonist of the work. The reasons for this success are to be found in the custom of the Grand Tour, the journey made by young sons of the European nobility to discover the continent, which had as its favorite destination Italy: Florence, Rome, Naples and obviously Venice, the most fashionable city of the whole eighteenth century, where the English were delighted by the "decadent Italian charm". In Venice, vedutism showed surprising signs of originality, projecting itself between anticipatory visions of romanticism and absolute fidelity to the real, natural or architectural data, thanks also to protagonists such as Canaletto, Francesco Guardi and Bernardo Bellotto. The wonderful landscapes on the lagoon and the unique monuments and palaces that inhabit it were, in fact, a must-see for the nobles of the time and an irreplaceable subject for vedutist painters. In this case the artist focuses his attention on the timeless view of the Punta della Dogana (also called Punta della Salute or Punta da Màr), a subtle triangular language of division between the Grand Canal and the Giudecca Canal, Overlooking the Bacino San Marco and hosting the iconic Basilica of Santa Maria della Salute, designed by Baldassarre Longhena in the first half of the seventeenth century, here well visible. Its construction was born as a solemn vow of the Serenissima to the Virgin Mary, in thanksgiving for the end of the terrible plague of 1630-1631 that decimated the Venetian population: it is not by chance that many artists decided to raise it to the protagonist of their paintings, manifesting through changing colors and romantic atmospheres and decanti this deep connection with a place of great spirituality.