The Portico with the Lantern, from Vedute

Employing a wide variety of tones and marks, Canaletto expertly depicted this imagined scene with its smattering of actual ancient ruins. A follower of the artist later copied this important etching to produce the nearly identical painting on the right. The painted version, however, omitted or reinterpreted most of the foreground figures. A new scene of a man standing next to an architectural fragment near the building to the right has also been added, emphasizing the visitor’s interest in the antique.