Veduta del Bacino di San Marco dalla Punta della Dogana

By the early 1740s the wars spreading across Europe were keeping the British travellers away from Venice, and those tourists had been the main buyers of Canaletto's city views. He painted this one around 1743, near the end of his Venetian years and just before he left to try his luck in London. It looks across the Basin of Saint Mark from the point of the customs house, the water crowded with boats under a bright midday sky. Contemporaries said he worked from drawings made with a camera obscura, a box with a lens that threw the scene onto paper so the proportions came out exact. It hangs in Milan beside its companion view, the two of them a matched pair over the same lagoon.