Giacomo Guardi
Venice 1764 – Venice 1835

View of the Piazza San Marco Looking Towards the Basilica and Campanile

brown ink, grey and black wash on cream paper, watermark FC with a crown topped by a fleur-de-lis

10 7/8 x 16½ inches (274 x 419 mm.)

PROVENANCE: G. Powell Harper, from whom purchased by P. & D. Colnaghi & Co. Ltd., London where acquired by J. Farne, October, 1948; Private Collection, Ohio until the present time

Francesco Guardi’s (1712 – 1793) studio was among the most successful in Venice in the selling of vedute views to both visiting and resident foreigners. Giacomo Guardi was Francesco’s youngest son. Trained by his father he assisted in the workshop’s production of these famous views. During the last decade of Francesco’s life it is unclear to what degree Giacomo assisted his father and the drawings at least to some extent must be viewed as communal productions.¹ Sometimes it is quite clear that two hands are at work on the same sheet, while others are more oblique. Upon Francesco’s death Giacomo inherited the studio.

Carrying on the traditions of the studio, Giacomo’s work, as reflected by our drawing, is indebted compositionally as well as stylistically to that of Francesco. The subject of the Piazza San Marco is the quintessential Venetian view. Taken from a high vantage point the scene encompasses the most important church in Venice, San Marco, the Piazza which is the open square, flanked on the left by the Procuratie Vecchie and on the right by the Procuratie Nuove which are the chief government buildings. The bell tower of the basilica, the Campanile, is a soaring presence on the right side of the composition. Giacomo has filled the square with the vibrancy of everyday life. More than a hundred gentlemen wearing the traditional costume of a cape and three-cornered hat, ladies, street vendors, children and dogs course through the scene. The natural progression of the sun divides the square in half, its intensity underlined by the placement of the majority of the figures in the shade.

Quite siginificantly this drawing’s provenance includes Colnaghi during a period when James Byam Shaw (1903 – 1992) was its drawings specialist as well as director from 1937 – 1968. Shaw was the first serious scholar of Guardi drawings and the first to publish them in The Drawings of Francesco Guardi in 1951. In the book Shaw noted the importance of Giacomo being the only copyist of Francesco’s drawings during his lifetime as well as for quite some time afterwards. He regarded Giacomo’s work as “free copies and quite individual in style”.

Drawings by Giacomo can be found in the Louvre, Paris; the Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin; the Albertina in Vienna and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

¹ J. Byam Shaw, The Drawings of Francesco Guardi, Faber and Faber, London, 1951, p. 50.

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