CANALETTO (VENICE 1697-VENICE 1768)
Padua: The Benavides garden, with a classical arch and a statue of Hercules
c.1742-5RCIN 907563
The drawing shows the garden of the sixteenth-century Palazzo Mantova Benavides in Padua. A well-dressed visitor to the garden is dwarfed by Bartolomeo Ammanati’s marble sculpture of Hercules. Canaletto (or Joseph Smith) apparently found the statue too dominant, as the sheet was cut into two pieces and the rejected part placed in another volume in Smith’s library.