The Piazza San Marco, Venice

Two years before Renoir painted San Marco, its front was at the centre of an international row. The architect Giovanni Battista Meduna, who had been shoring up the basilica's sinking foundations, had already rebuilt its south side, and in 1879 a restoration of the west front was planned. In England, the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, set up by William Morris, collected more than 2,000 signatures against it, John Ruskin's among them. Early in 1880 the Italian government announced that the work on the west front would stop, though whether the protest was the reason is still disputed. So the façade Renoir found when he reached Venice in late October 1881 was the old one, left as it was. He painted it in the midday sun and never reworked the canvas in the studio, and the pigeons crowding the square are single daubs of blue.