Fire in the Oil Depot at San Marcuola

Late in 1789, the year the Bastille fell in Paris, Venice had a disaster of its own to talk about. An oil depot caught fire in the San Marcuola quarter of Cannaregio, and in this small canvas the flames seem to burn on the water of the canal itself. Francesco Guardi was 77, and this is among the last pictures he painted before his death at the start of 1793. The museum points out that he does not tell the fire as a story. What he paints is the crowd, ordinary Venetians gathered along the burning canalside to watch the attempts to put it out, and able to do little more than watch. Guardi also drew the scene, and a pen-and-brush drawing of it belongs to the Metropolitan Museum in New York. The canvas hangs here on permanent loan from a Munich bank, which bought it in 1968.