Venice: Saint Mark's Looking toward San Giorgio Maggiore, in Moonlight (c. 1870): Art, History and Details

Venice: Saint Mark's Looking toward San Giorgio Maggiore, in Moonlight (c. 1870) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Carlo Naya (Italian, 1816–1882).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

This romantic view of a nearly empty, moonlit Piazza San Marco is a tourist’s dream of Venice—and dream it is, rather than reality. The light-sensitive coatings of photographic negatives around 1870 were unable to record such detail in the dark, so Carlo Naya photographed his celebrated nocturnes during the day then manipulated the exposure in the darkroom. The highlights on the water and on the columns on the right, along with all the gaslight flames, were hand painted on the negative (he missed one lamp on the left). The sun, conveniently hidden behind a cloud, becomes the moon.

Object facts

• Title: Venice: Saint Mark's Looking toward San Giorgio Maggiore, in Moonlight
• Date: c. 1870
• Creator attribution: Carlo Naya (Italian, 1816–1882)
• Culture: Italy, 19th century
• Type: Photograph
• Technique: albumen print
• Dimensions: Image: 42.3 x 53.7 cm (16 5/8 x 21 1/8 in.); Paper: 42.3 x 53.7 cm (16 5/8 x 21 1/8 in.); Matted: 61 x 76.2 cm (24 x 30 in.)
• Collection: Photography
• Department: Photography
• Accession number: 2009.350

A detail from the museum

Nowadays Venice usually receives between 26 and 30 million visitors annually.

Collection credit

Dudley P. Allen Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Chiodini, Elisabetta. Il mito di Venezia: da Hayez alla Biennale. Novara : METS percorsi d'arte, 2021.
• Tannenbaum, Barbara. “Paper Airplanes.” Cleveland Art: Cleveland Museum of Art Members Magazine 61, no. 1 (Winter 2021): 22.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.