# The Grand Canal at the Fish Market \(Pescheria\) [View the canonical artwork record]() ## Artwork - Artist: [GUARDI, Francesco]() - Date: 1751-1800 - Technique: Oil on canvas, 56 x 75 cm ## Commentary The Grand Canal at the Fish Market \(Pescheria\) c. 1765 Oil on canvas, 56 x 75 cm Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan 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. ## Related artworks - [An Architectural Caprice]() - [Audience Granted by the Doge]() - [Bacino di San Marco with San Giorgio and the Giudecca]() - [Bridge at Dolo]() - [Campo Santi Giovanni e Paolo]() - [Canal Grande with Santa Lucia and the Scalzi Church]() - [Capriccio with Venetian Motifs]() - [Carnival Thursday on the Piazzetta]() - [Church of Santa Maria Zobenigo]() - [Doge Alvise IV Mocenigo Appears to the People in St Mark's Basilica in 1763]() - [Fire in the Oil Depot at San Marcuola]() - [Fire in the San Marcuola Oil Depot]() ## Attribution [Web Gallery of Art]()