James Mallord William Turner (1775 -1851 ) made many visits to Venice and painted some of his best-known works there. This 1842 view is of the city's back door--in contrast to the usual scenes of the Grand Canal, the Basin of S. Marco, and the Rialto Bridge (all of which Turner also painted). It looks onto the Campo Santo--literally "holy ground"-- on the right, the walled cemetery island of San Michele. Venice actually occupies 117 tiny islands, prone to flooding, saved (partially) from the ravages of the Adriatic tides only by a long barrier island, the Lido. Given this watery environment, burials in residential areas are especially unwise, and ancient Italo-Roman tradition is to isolate cemeteries from the city proper. On the left are buildings of the Cannareggio district, partly deliniated in pencil. (A work of about the same date in the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College treats the architecture in the same way). In the foreground, working gondolas--rather like trucks--take piles of goods across the water.Even this alley view conveys the magical quality of Venetian light and the romantic allure of the city called La Serenissima, the most serene. The angelic, double-sailed boat, reflected in the still water, is a bright and poetic focal point among the softly blurred, low horizontals of the distant architecture. Sky occupies the majority of the canvas, with gathering wispy clouds that read simultaneously as landscape elements and the self-conscious tracks of the artist's hand.
This is my favorite painting at the Toledo Museum of Art. When I worked there, I visited it often--when I was stuck, frustrated, uninspired, often after the galleries closed to the public and it was lit with only the indirect glow of the laylights above. Had the building caught fire, I would have run to retrieve it. While I could say even more about it, for reasons I can't explain it comforted me, then as now, beyond words.
