Description of the picture:
View of the peninsula of San Giorgio and Giudecca – Francesco Guardi. Around 1774. Oil on canvas. 200×281
Francesco Guardi led the family art workshop after the death of his brother. He began his own career with portraits, painted religious compositions and scenes in interiors, but all his life he remained a singer of his native town. It is true the worldview that specifically Guardi’s work, being the top of the Euro Veduta genre, marked its end. The painter departs from an accurate, structurally marked objectivist vision. Venice on his canvases becomes a fabulous fantasy, shrouded in a poetic haze of vibrating transparent light.
This landscape has another name – “Bachino (pool) San Marco with a view of the church of San Giorgio Maggiore and the Canal of Judecca”. Next to the magnificent temple of San Giorgio Maggiore, the creation of Palladio (which the master wrote many times), on the left flank of the canvas there is a bell tower shot up by an arrow, which collapsed in 1774. You can thank the artist for the accuracy, preserving the “historical details”, but it turns out to be much more valuable the impression of romantic excitement, sadness, and even anxiety, which is conveyed in his later works by the unsteady tremor of the brushstroke, rich, but still slightly faded color scheme with fluorescent flashes of light, times wash outlines of forms."