(Nove 1824–1884 Venice)
Piazza San Marco looking east towards the Basilica, Venice,
oil on canvas, 70 x 95 cm, framed

We are grateful to Fabrizio Magani for suggesting the attribution of the present painting.

We are also grateful to Dario Succi for independently suggesting the attribution.

Francesco Zanin is a master whose catalogue is in part to be reconstructed. He was one of the important artists of nineteenth-century view painting (see: F. Magani, Francesco Zanin. Un “Canaletto” dell’Ottocento, Milan 2008).

The painting represents Piazza San Marco with certain architectural interventions from the nineteenth century, such as the neoclassical façade of the Palazzo Patriarcale to the left of the Basilica di San Marco, which was executed between 1837 and 1850 to the designs of Lorenzo Santi.

The composition derives from a painting by Michele Marieschi, which at the time belonged to the prestigious Barbini-Breganze collection and was acquired in 1852 by the German king William I of Württemberg. Subsequently the king donated the canvas, along with another two, to the Galley in Stockholm where it is conserved today (Staatsgalerie; see D. Succi, Michele Marieschi. Opera completa, Treviso 2016, no. 5). Only a few years earlier the canvas had been commentated on and published by Francesco Zanotto (F. Zanotto, Pinacoteca Barbini Breganze dichiarata con note illustrative da Francesco Zanotto, Venice 1847, no. 84). It was likely the fame of this group of works, then celebrated as a work by Canaletto, inspired Zanin´s composition. The present painting should therefore be dated to the early 1850s, before the Marieschi painting was sold from the Barbini-Breganze collection, making the present one of Zanin’s first works.

In the present painting, the artist refers to various aspects of eighteenth-century painting. The painter makes use of the eighteenth-century repertoire of varicoloured macchiette, or figures, which give cadence to the scene’s sense of perspectival depth. These figures are also animated in an entirely personal manner which suggests a narrative. Francesco Zanin thereby demonstrates his modernity, renewing the qualities that had made Venetian view painting of the previous century so successful, by deploying a fluid touch, clear light and by creating the effect of an airy summer sky. In this view, which is of painterly quality, Zanin uses his talent and his training in perspective to perpetuate eighteenth-century Venetian prototypes.

On his admission to the Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia, Francesco Zanin was taught by Francesco Lazzari, Federico Moja and Francesco Bagnara. The start of his independent career should be dated to the 1850s, when his name was associated with established artists such as Luigi Querena or Giovanni Grubacs. Zanin almost always exhibited in the annual exhibitions held by the Venetian Academy until the 1880s.

Zanin’s oeuvre is mostly dedicated to Venetian vedute in which he reinterpreted the taste of Canaletto. These views were mostly destined to supply a clientele of British tourists who were visiting the city along the same premise as the eighteenth-century Grand Tour. The present painting is therefore a reminiscence on the Venetian splendours of the previous century that had returned vigorously into fashion.