St Benedetto, Looking towards Fusina

Turner exhibited this Venice scene in 1843, when he was 68 and his paintings were dissolving almost entirely into light and water. The view looks down the Giudecca Canal towards Fusina on the mainland, though the buildings on either side have thinned to pale suggestions and the gondolas drift in a haze of sky. The title itself is a puzzle. The young critic John Ruskin, who that same year published the first volume of Modern Painters defending Turner against his mockers, pointed out that there was no church of San Benedetto anywhere in this view. Turner had worked the picture up in the studio from a pencil sketch made in Venice a few years before, long after he had left the city behind.