Venice

47 x 60.9 cm.Signed bottom right: CAFFIThe imposing dome of Santa Maria della Salute emerges from a purplish fog that is gradually lifting, dissolving in the early morning sunshine as the sun timidly casts its first rays on the buildings and waters of the Grand Canal. The warm light of dawn spreads out, chasing away the dark, while a clear and limpid blue sky begins to form in the distance. The first rays of the sun strike the canal with its host of boats and figures and the water embraces them, allowing itself to be pierced by them and reflecting them as it changes its colour from murky grey into a sharp, bright green. This is the wonderful scene depicted in The Grand Canal in Venice with Santa Maria della Salute, a hitherto unpublished painting which, in terms of its painterly quality, of its skilled, emotional depiction of its detail and its figures, and of its flowing brushwork embellished by rapid, airy strokes and light velature, is unquestionably one of the most significant and poetic works in Ippolito Caffi