The view is north-east from the Canale della Giudecca south of the Seminario Patriarcale, seen at the left-hand edge; looking past the porch of the Dogana, aligned with the campanile of San Marco (St Mark’s) beyond, the domes of the Basilica are to their right. The south front of the long, low Dogana is laterally compressed. The Zecca (mint) and Libreria Sansoviniana are loosely washed in as a single mass at the centre, with the Palazzo Ducale (Doge’s Palace) to their right barely articulated except for a few vertical pencil strokes summarily indicating the building’s Molo arcade, while the Riva degli Schiavoni waterfront across the Bacino to the right fades out beyond the masts of moored boats; see the technical notes below for further discussion.
The Turner scholar C.F. Bell annotated Finberg’s 1909
Inventory entry (‘The Giudecca, with the Dogana and Campanile beyond. Cf. Oil painting of “Venice from the Giudecca,” R.A., 1840’): ‘no this is taken from due south of the tower of the Dogana’.
1 Finberg meant
Venice, from the Canale della Giudecca, Chiesa di S. Maria della Salute, &c., exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1840 (Victoria and Albert Museum, London; engraved 1859–61: Tate impression
T06361).
2 The present view corresponds quite closely to the central section of the painting, which is dominated by the brilliant white forms of the Salute, out of sight here to the left. If there was any conscious link in Turner’s mind, it would have been of a retrospective character, as the painting had been shown a few months before the present tour.
Ian Warrell has noted ‘Turner’s fondness for these moorings at the eastern end of the Giudecca canal’, linking this to some of the other colour studies grouped here (Tate
D32163,
D32170,
D32172,
D32174; Turner Bequest CCCXVI 26, 33, 35, 37).
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