San Giorgio Maggiore: from the Bacino di S. Marco

Canaletto painted this view across the water in the late 1720s, and the church at its centre was already about 160 years old. Andrea Palladio began San Giorgio Maggiore in 1566 for the Benedictine monks who held the whole island, and its white temple front looks straight back at the Doge's Palace across the basin of Saint Mark. Canaletto framed it with clusters of moored boats on either side, so the eye has to cross open water to reach it. The slender bell tower beside the church is not the one that stands there now. That older tower collapsed in 1774, and the present one went up in its place in 1791. The canvas is thought to have been bought from the painter by Joseph Wenceslaus, Prince of Liechtenstein, an Austrian field marshal, though it can only be traced in the princely collection from 1873. It had a companion, a view of the Grand Canal, and both left the Liechtenstein collection around 1948. The companion came up at auction in London in 1991.