Venezia, la Piazzetta

Corot is remembered for soft, silvery landscapes, trees dissolving into misty light, so this crisp view of Venice can come as a surprise. He worked it up around 1840 from studies made on the spot during his years in Italy in the 1830s. He counts out the stones of the Piazzetta, the pale flank of the Doge's Palace, the small figures crossing the square in their careful clothes, all with a precision that looks back to Canaletto, the Venetian who a century earlier had built a whole trade on views exactly this clear. Most of Corot's Italian pictures are looser and hazier than this. Here he held every edge in place.