Una veduta di Dolo sul naviglio del Brenta

Most of Canaletto's buyers were British visitors on the Grand Tour, and this is the road many of them took into Venice. The Brenta was the slow canal that carried travellers down from Padua to the lagoon, its banks lined with the summer villas of rich Venetians. Dolo was a working town along the way, with locks and watermills to manage the water levels, and Canaletto painted it around 1727 with the same care he gave the Grand Canal itself. The buildings lean and crowd a little, the reflections break in the current, and a few figures go about the day on the quay. He came back to this view more than once, and other painters, among them his nephew Bernardo Bellotto and the younger Francesco Guardi, took up the same composition. The canvas has been damaged and restored over the centuries, but the wide Venetian sky still fills much of it.