Venedig, Santa Maria della Salute

Signac spent the spring of 1904 in Venice with a sketchbook and a box of watercolours and came home with something like 200 sheets. Only 11 oil paintings came out of that trip, and every one of them was built afterwards in the studio, stroke by stroke, from the watercolour notes. That is why the surface here is so even, a mosaic worked out at a desk. The canvas has been in Munich since 1982, when a private owner handed it to the Bavarian collections. The domed church Signac picked out sits at the mouth of the Grand Canal, and Venice built it as a vow. The city had lost roughly a third of its people to plague in 1630 and 1631, and promised the Virgin a church if the dying stopped.