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The painting is the companion-piece of The Grand Canal, Looking toward the Rialto Bridge, also in the Brera.
Formerly considered an imitator of Canaletto, Guardi is actually a romantic interpreter of Canaletto's "scientific" views. In his hands the crystalline geometry of buildings is dissolved in atmospheric colour. Guardi is a "virtuoso," like those eighteenth-century musicians who went from execution to interpretation, to variation, to improvisation, and sometimes even to creative invention. His variations, with respect to Canaletto, concern not only the technique of painting, but also the perspective framework.
The composition of this work is less rigidly constructed and less scientific, with a multiplicity of vanishing points that slow down and articulate the scene in more dramatic form. An outstanding passage is on the right where the shifting of the vanishing points creates a succession of images and conveys the sense of the canal's turn.
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