The Island of Anconetta

This is not the Venice of the Grand Canal and the great festivals. Guardi has gone out to the edge of the lagoon, to a small island called the Anconetta on the water road toward Mestre, and painted a modest church and a few plain houses under a wind-bent tree. He turned seriously to view-painting in the 1760s, and pictures like this show why he is loved for it. The buildings and the reflections are laid in with quick, flickering touches rather than drawn tight, so the whole scene seems to shiver in the light. It is a small canvas, barely half a metre wide. The collector Michelangelo Guggenheim gave it to the Accademia in 1903.