Campo San Giovanni e Paolo, Venice

The limited facts surrounding Marieschi’s life – which ended when he was barely forty-three – are well-known. One of eight children, and the son of a craftsman, he is thought to have trained and practised as a set-designer, recorded as an associate of Francesco Tasso in 1731, until turning his hand to vedute. He quickly established his reputation as a view painter by the mid-1730s, adding lustre to the genre with his lively brushwork. Few of his view pictures have early recorded provenance, and his only known patron was the great collector Count Johann Matthias von der Schulenburg. It has also been established with near certainty that Marieschi focused his energies exclusively on painting landscape and architecture, working in tandem with a number of different figure painters to complete the staffage in his vedute.
This fine view is taken from in front of the Scuola Grande di San Marco, with the church of Santi Giovanni and Paolo to the right, opening onto one of the grandest, and most important, squares in Venice. On the right is Andrea del Verrocchio’s renowned equestrian statue of the condottiero Bartolomeo Colleoni, completed in 1496. Marieschi made an etching of the view for his Magnificentiores Selectioresque Urbis Venetiarum Prospectus, which was key in disseminating the composition to a broader public, though Canaletto had earlier established the standard view in the 1720s with two large format pictures (W.G. Constable, Canaletto, Oxford, 1962, II, nos. 304-305). Here, in order to give the façade of the church itself greater prominence, Marieschi chose to slightly alter the perspective, setting the right aisle, as we look, fractionally deeper and in so doing offers a clearer view of the façade itself. With the light falling from the left, Marieschi distinguishes his views from Canaletto’s versions, which are invariably lit from the right.