Imaginary View with a Tomb by the Lagoon - Canaletto (c. 1740–1745)

the Lagoon, Canaletto

Oil on canvas

Private Collection

This intimate oil painting belongs to Canaletto's celebrated series of capricci — imaginary compositions in which invented architectural motifs are set within a Venetian lagoon landscape. The composition is dominated by a Roman sarcophagus raised on a high platform beneath a baldachin, accompanied by fragments of a colossal ancient building submerged into the earth and overgrown with vines, while church spires appear on the distant right and small figures animate the water's edge. Giovanni Antonio Canal (1697–1768), known as Canaletto, was the pre-eminent view painter of 18th-century Venice, celebrated for his vedute but equally accomplished in these fantastical hybrid landscapes that blend real architectural references from Venice, Rome, and the Italian mainland. The painting is closely related to a version of the same composition in the Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence, and to a drawing of the subject at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, attesting to the compositional type's broad appeal among Grand Tour collectors who prized such romantic, melancholy evocations of classical antiquity.