Last days of the Campanile, St Mark's, Venice

The inscription on the mount of this painting reads: ‘The fall of the great bell tower is rightly regarded as a calamity in the artistic world. Venice loses her most conspicuous landmark and the key of her pictorial composition ... Sitting at its foot, but a week or two before its collapse, I was haunted as never before by a vague sense of uneasiness as to its foundations and the awful consequences of its fall; that it should have settled down, as if in utter weariness, crushing nothing but that lovely dream of colour – the Loggetta – and causing no loss of life must be regarded as providential ...’