The view is taken from the right bank of the Grand Canal, from the front of the Palazzo Barbarigo, looking southwest towards the church of San Stae. While its interior is much older, the façade of San Stae, an abbreviation for Sant’Eustachio, was designed in the Palladian style and begun in 1709 by Domenico Rossi, funded by Doge Alvise Mocenigo, whose family palazzo is down the calle to the right. One of the more theatrical and splendid church façades lining the Grand Canal, it is embellished with an extensive programme of sculptures was commissioned from Tarsia, Torretto, Baratta, Cabianca, and Corradini; Corradini executed the three figures that crown the upper pediment, with Faith and Hope to left and right, with the Redeemer at the apex. To the church’s left is the Palazzo Foscarini-Giovanelli, attributed to the architect Giuseppe Sardi, and the pink Baroque building of the Scuola dei Tiraoro e Battioro (home to the guild of artists and makers of gold thread and gold leaf), designed by Antonio Gaspari and constructed in 1711; these structures flank the Rio della Pergola. To the immediate right is the two-storey Gothic-style Palazzo Priuli-Bon and then the imposing, classical Palazzo Contarini, destroyed by fire in the middle of the nineteenth century and replaced by a garden, which remains on the site today. At the far right is the early fifteenth-century Palazzo Duodo.

Of the three opulently embellished and gilded gondolas poised upon the shimmering water of the canal, the two leftmost were once identified as belonging to the Giustiniani, one of the oldest noble families of Venice, on account of the double-headed eagle which sits on their respective rooves; more recently, Montecuccoli and Pedrocco have suggested that these gondolas are in fact those of the imperial ambassador to Venice, and note that the very same gondolas appear in the foreground of Canaletto’s Reception of the Imperial Ambassador, Count Giuseppe di Bolagno, at the Doge’s Palace (private collection).1 According to Pompeo Molmenti, the ambassador landed at the Molo on 16 May 1729 for his first audience at the palace, though it is not known how long he stayed.2 These three gondolas appear again in Marieschi’s smaller canvas of the same view of San Stae, in a Parisian private collection, as well as in his view of the Bacino di San Marco, also in a private collection.3 Toledano considers all these three paintings to be mature works, datable to the end of Marieschi’s life, on account of the vibrant impasto of the facades and the sensitive rendering of the shimmering water, while Pedrocco and Montecuccoli date all three works more specifically to 1735 on the basis that the gondolas are also seen in Marieschi’s painting in Claydon House, Buckinghamshire, the Rialto Bridge with the arrival of Archbishop Francesco Antonio Correr (1676–1741), an event that took place on 7 February of that year.4 Given their appearance at both this and the 1729 state event, and given that the Imperial ambassador was almost certainly not still in Venice in 1735, it seems most plausible that by this time the gondolas were simply used by the state for particular official occasions. Whatever the precise date, this beautiful view is clearly a mature expression of Marieschi’s style, characterised by flickering brushwork, strong shadows and deep, dynamic space which gives his work a highly personal, almost romantic quality.

1. See W. G. Constable (rev. J. G. Links), Canaletto, Oxford, 1989, vol. 1, plate 66, vol. II, p. 369, no. 355.
2. Pompeo Molmenti, Venice, the Decadence, Venice, 1908, p. 107, n. 1.
3. Toledano 1995, pp. 118–19, no. V.41, illustrated; Toledano 1995, p. 42, no. V.1.e, illustrated.
4. Toledano 1995, p. 75, no. V.14, illustrated. A payment for this work was made by Marshall Schulenburg on 2 April 1737.

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