Vista del Gran Canal

By the late 1720s Canaletto had turned the city of Venice into a business. Wealthy young Englishmen came south on the Grand Tour and wanted a picture of the place to carry home, and Canaletto sold them exactly that, painted with a jeweller's precision. This view looks up the Grand Canal from the Palazzo Balbi toward the Rialto bridge, a stretch of water he clearly knew would sell, because he painted almost the same scene more than once, changing only the boats in the foreground and the fall of the light. The topography is close to exact. He is thought to have worked with a camera obscura, a lens-and-mirror box that cast the view onto a surface, to keep the perspective true. Most of his best pictures left Venice almost as soon as they were dry. This one reached the Uffizi only in 1798, long after his death.