The sight of the Basilica of San Marco and the Campanile flanked by the Procuratie Vecchie and the Procuratie Nuove from the West end of the Piazza down its central access has always been 'the quintessential Venetian view' (K. Baetjer and J.G. Links in the catalogue of the exhibition, Canaletto, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1989-90, p. 66), its popularity with eighteenth-century visitors as keen as it remains with their twentieth-century successors, to judge from the number of variants of the composition Canaletto painted throughout his career. The earliest of these and much the largest, indeed one of the masterpieces of Canaletto's first style, is the painting now in the Museo Thyssen, Madrid (Constable no. 1; no. 1 in New York 1989-90 exhibition cited above, illustrated in colour), which is datable c. 1723 as it shows the pavement of the piazza being laid, documented in that year. A version in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Constable no. 2, no. 27 in the 1989-90 New York exhibition, illustrated in colour) is generally dated to the late 1720s, and that in the series at Woburn Abbey (Constable no. 4) is documented to c. 1733-6. These are followed by the versions in the Fogg Art Museum (Constable no. 14) and at Milton Park (Constable no. 7), of which an engraving was published in 1742. Possibly the latest version is Constable no. 8 probably painted in England in the early 1750s.

The present picture forms part of a group of three versions datable on stylistic grounds to the early 1740s, the others being that in the Bisgood Collection (Constable no. 3) and that formerly in the Cartwright Collection and recently with Richard Green (Constable no. 5). While the figures in all three paintings are almost identical, the same ropes and cloths hang from the façade of the Procuratie Vecchie and the cloud formations are very similar, there are differences in the proportions and perspective of the buildings and in the relationships between the figure groups, the Bisgood picture includes three extra children towards the lower right and the Cartwright picture is unusual in omitting the horses on the façade of San Marco.

Wadham Knatchbull (1794-1876), the first recorded owner of the present painting, was the great-grandson of both the younger brothers of Sir William Knatchbull Wyndham, Bt., who was on the Grand Tour in 1758 and died without issue.