Seeing Venice: Bellotto's Grand Canal

Bernardo Bellotto's magnificent View of the Grand Canal provides a rich visual record of life in eighteenth-century Venice. This painting - one of the most popular in the Getty Museum - is so sweeping in its scope and so detailed that it requires repeated viewings to take in its portrait of daily life in Venice in the 1780s.

Seeing Venice: Bellotto's Grand Canal presents Bellotto's great painting in a series of beautiful details that allow the reader to examine the painting closely and enjoy the colorful and busy goings-on of Venetian life captured so unforgettably by Bellotto.

The book jacket unfolds to become a small poster of the painting in its entirety. Accompanying these delightful images is a lyrical essay by noted American poet Mark Doty. Together, Bellotto's painting and Doty's prose make for an unforgettable encounter with the art and life of Venice.