Michele Marieschi

For a few years in the 1730s, if you wanted a painted view of Venice and could not get a Canaletto, you went to Michele Marieschi. He worked the same trade, the vedute, precise topographical views of the canals, churches and palaces that visitors carried home like postcards, and his hand was loose and quick where Canaletto's was cool and exact.

Marieschi came up partly through the theatre, painting stage scenery, and it shows in his taste for steep viewpoints and inventive architecture. Alongside real Venice he painted capricci, imaginary scenes that assemble Gothic arches, obelisks, staircases and ruins into places that never existed but feel Venetian. Several hang here, dated around 1741, the same year he published Magnificentiores Selectioresque Urbis Venetiarum, a set of etchings of the city he designed and cut himself.

He died in Venice in 1743, only about 32 years old, and that early death is part of why he is less known than he should be. His output was small, and for a long time his best canvases were quietly resold under Canaletto's more valuable name, so recovering which pictures are actually his has been the work of later scholars.