Martín Rico was the most cosmopolitan Spanish landscape artist of his generation. He learned Romanticism from Genaro Pérez Villaamil, his teacher at the Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in Madrid, but his views of the River Guadarrama painted before obtaining a grant to study landscape painting abroad, in 1861, already show that he was headed towards realism. In 1862 he moved to Paris and travelled to Switzerland to paint with Alexandre Calame, and on returning to France his style drew even closer to that trend. After 1869, in part due to the influence of Mariano Fortuny, with whom he painted in Granada in 1871, he began to use a very luminous palette, the result of working in the open air with precise, confident strokes, which constituted Rico's greatest contribution to the landscape art of his day. On a trip to Venice in 1873 he discovered what would become his favourite city, where churches and palaces reflected in the canals were captured in very harmonious compositions that often included gardens.

Rico's work in the Banco Santander Collection, one of his few Venetian pieces that do not show water, is among the largest compositions produced during this mature period of his career. It is undoubtedly one of the two works commissioned by Alejandro de Mora y Riera, 2nd Marquess of Casa Riera, for the sum of fifteen thousand francs, the highest amount the artist ever received for one of his paintings. His predilection during this period for St. Mark's Basilica, shared by other painters at a time when those in favour of its restoration were engaged in a heated debate with John Ruskin, inspired him to make its Byzantine domes the focus of his composition. The artist chose a point of view situated south of the palace: behind the empty space in the foreground, accentuated by the receding pavement, we see the facade with the clock, the Foscari Arch, the Senator's Courtyard and the Giants' Staircase, and above them the domes, painted with sharp clarity. The small figures—one of which leans over a richly coloured carpet, in the manner of Fortuny—animate the composition and avoid the coldness of an empty architectural view. Precision and skill in the depiction of sculptures is highly characteristic of Rico, who often studied them in his sketchbooks and later, in his paintings, managed to convey a strong sense of rounded fullness through the interplay of light and shadow, as illustrated by the architectural elements in this piece. The gradual transition from the intense blue of the sky at the top to the brighter atmosphere around the domes is typical of the works he painted during his stay on the French Riviera in 1881 and the years that followed. [Javier Barón Thaidigsmann]