Page of The Bacino di San Marco by RICHTER, Johan in the Web Gallery of Art, a searchable image collection and database of European paintings and sculptures (1100-1850)

Pixel Size(861,605)

The Bacino di San Marco

c. 1740
Oil on canvas, 57 x 81 cm
Private collection

The painting shows the profile of Venice as it appears from the present-day Giardini when approaching the city by boat from the Lido. To the far left is the island of San Giorgio Maggiore, with the church of the same name and the complex of the Benedictine monastery. Just to the right of the island appear the Magazzini del Sal, dazzlingly illuminated, the Dogana and Santa Maria della Salute on the spit of land known as the Dorsoduro. The Campanile of San Marco looms right on the vertical axis, counterbalancing the predominant horizontals. On the right, the Riva degli Schiavoni stretches beyond the church of the Pieta.

The glassy green surface of the water with the dark bank in the foreground, the contrasting light on the various buildings and the snow-white clouds lend the painting an atmosphere all its own. The boat and the shadows in the foreground are motifs which also occur in works of late seventeenth-century Dutch painters of harbour views such as Abraham and Johannes Storck, who may have served Richter as a source of inspiration.

Typical of Richter's work are the boats in the foreground painted horizontal to the picture plane. The present canvas occupies a special position among Richter's identified works. He usually worked in the style of Carlevaris, whom he imitated deceptively well. However, in this picture Canaletto's spacious views of the Lagoon were his principal source of inspiration. The remarkable colour combination — green and black — recalls Canaletto's work of the early 1730s. Richter, who died in 1745, must have painted this view of the Bacino toward the end of his career.