Venice: Saint Mark's Looking toward San Giorgio Maggiore, in Moonlight
Medium
albumen print
Dimensions
image: 42.3 × 53.7 cm · matted: 61 × 76.2 cm
Classification
Photograph
Department
Photography
Museum
Cleveland Museum of Art
Credit
Dudley P. Allen Fund
Accession Number
2009.350
Tags
male
About this artwork
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 misse...