This remarkable painting of spectators watching a fire raging through the San Marcuola district of Venice is a late work by Francesco Guardi, born on this day 310 years ago. Guardi used to get lumped in with Canaletto as another accomplished vedutista, but it soon became apparent that he was a much more interesting and original figure than that. Many of his paintings are 'caprices', imaginary scenes built around an architectural landscape of his own invention rather than what was before his eyes. With his free brushwork and subdued palette, he created a pictorial world far removed from Canaletto's crisply linear topographical works, something closer to Piazzetta.
I would place the picture above with Domenico Tiepolo's The New World (below) as one of the great paintings of the Venetian decadence. Both show the backs of a gawping crowd, gawping at the last novelties and spectacles of a world that is passing away, a decadent, outworn society amusing itself as it awaits its inevitable fate (The New World was completed in the year in which Venice fell to Napoleon). Both are infused with a very Venetian melancholy, the feeling of Browning's 'A Toccata of Galuppi's'. 'Dust and ashes, dead and done with, Venice spent what Venice earned...'
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