Preparations for the Feast of the Redeemer in Venice

This painting is dedicated to the Feast of the Redeemer held in Venice on every third Sunday in July to commemorate the city’s liberation from the 1576 plague. On that occasion, the church of the Redeemer was built on the Giudecca Island, and during the Feast a pontoon bridge is constructed from the church to the opposite bank of the canal. This is the spot from which Ciardi painted the scene. A crowd of men, women and children throng the Zattere along the Giudecca Canal to watch the preparations underway on the island where the church of the Redeemer can be glimpsed on the right. Rolling clouds block the sun and are reflected in the dark waters of the lagoon. This fine example of landscape painting reveals the painter’s interest in the life of the people and their traditional custums, a theme treated in other works of his, like The Acrobats (Rome, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna) shown in the exhibition devoted to him during the 10th Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte della Città di Venezia in 1912. In Preparations for the Feast of the Redeemer, which dates to the same decade, we find the Impressionist traits that modernise the pictorial language the artist had inherited from his father Guglielmo Ciardi.