_Francesco Guardi_ (Venetian: 1712-1793).
Francesco Guardi was a scholar and imitator of Canaletto. "Less
prized during the heyday of his master's fame, he has been
steadily acquiring reputation on account of certain qualities
peculiar to himself. His draughtsmanship displays an agreeable
stateliness; his colouring a graceful gemmy brightness and
a glow of sunny gold. But what has mainly served to win for
Guardi popularity, is the attention he paid to contemporary
costume and manners. Canaletto filled large canvases with
mathematical perspectives of city and water. At the same time
he omitted life and incident. There is little to remind us that
the Venice he so laboriously depicted was the Venice of perukes
and bagwigs, of masks and hoops and carnival disguises. Guardi
had an eye for local colour and for fashionable humours" (J. A.
Symonds, "Pietro Longhi," in the _Century Guild Hobby Horse_,
April 1889).
Notice the effect of light on the Church of St. Mark at the end of the
square: "Beyond those troops of ordered arches there rises a vision out
of the earth, and all the great square seems to have opened from it in
a kind of awe, that we may see it far away;--a multitude of pillars
and white domes, clustered into a long low pyramid of coloured light"
(_Stones of Venice_, vol. ii. ch. iv. § 14).