A drawing of a wide-angle view of Piazza San Marco in Venice. On the left is San Marco, and beyond the Palazzo Ducale and the Piazzetta. In the centre is the Campanile, with the Libreria beyond. To the right is the the Procuratie Nuove. At the far right is the church of San Geminiano. Piazza San Marco is populated with many figures.

The view is based around a simple elevation of the Procuratie Nuove, seen from a slight angle but not diminishing perspectivally. To this Canaletto added on the left a view of the façade of San Marco and down the Piazzetta, and on the right a splayed view of the west end of the Piazza with the church of San Geminiano. The two sides of the image are not in themselves impossible, but when looking from one side to another the inconsistency in the representation of the Procuratie Nuove becomes apparent.

Canaletto executed a number of similar paintings of the view. The composition is particularly close to the version in the Cleveland Museum of Art, but here Canaletto has lengthened the Procuratie to make the pictorial effects even more extreme. The extensive pencil underdrawing shows that he had at first considered drawing the Campanile even higher and including the third flagpole in the right foreground.

A smaller version of the Cleveland oil painting was at Sotheby's on 5 July 1989 (Lot 74). A copy of the drawing by Bellotto is in Darmstadt (AE 2211).

Catalogue entry adapted from Canaletto in Venice, London, 2005