石匠的院子

Around 1725, the church of San Vidal in Venice was being repaired, and the little square in front of it, the Campo San Vidal, had been turned into a temporary workshop for the masons cutting stone for its new facade. Canaletto painted it exactly like that, mid-job. Blocks of stone lie scattered across the foreground, a workman leans over his chisel by a rough wooden hut, and washing hangs from the windows of the ordinary houses around the square. This is not the postcard Venice Canaletto would later sell by the dozen to English travellers. There is no ceremony, no glittering canal traffic, just a working city on a grey morning. Across the Grand Canal you can see the church of Santa Maria della Carita with its tall brick campanile. That tower fell down in 1744, taking the houses at its foot with it, so the view he recorded here no longer exists.