El Campo di Rialto

The man who ordered this view was not Venetian. Sigismund Streit was a merchant born in Berlin who had made his fortune in Venice, and he wanted Canaletto to record the square where he did his business. So instead of the usual postcard of the Rialto bridge, we get the market square behind it, with the long arcade that housed the Banco del Giro, the Venetian state bank. Look into the crowd and, among the traders, a few men in long robes and tall pointed hats stand out, Armenian merchants whom Streit names in his own written notes on the city. Canaletto painted this in his sixties, back home after nearly ten years working in England, in the cool, dry, exact manner of his late years.