Milagro de un santo dominico (¿Gonzalo de Amarante?)

Francesco Guardi is remembered for sunlit views of Venice, the lagoon and the Grand Canal, tourists' postcards before there were postcards. This is the other Guardi. In 1763 he was working on the island of Murano, in the church of San Pietro Martire, on a religious scene of a Dominican saint performing a miracle before a crowd of the sick and the poor. The handling is loose and shadowy, closer to the restless manner of the older painter Alessandro Magnasco than to Guardi's bright cityscapes. Even the saint is uncertain; the museum records him only as possibly Gonzalo of Amarante. The quick, flickering brushwork is the same he used on the water of the lagoon, turned here to candlelight and gloom.