A capriccio, plural capricci, is a landscape or cityscape rendered more fancifully than the accurate topographical view, or veduta, that made painters like Canaletto famous in the first place. A typical capriccio might combine several accurately painted buildings with an invented or imagined setting, ancient ruins, unbuilt designs, structures moved from their real locations, arranged to form a coherent and visually satisfying composition rather than a documentary record^[4]. The genre was popular precisely with the same Grand Tour patrons who bought straightforward vedute, since a fantastical Venetian scene could hang comfortably alongside a real one, both serving as evidence of taste and travel rather than strict topographical accuracy. Painters including Giovanni Paolo Pannini in Rome and Canaletto's own contemporaries in Venice worked in both modes, moving between faithful views and invented architectural fantasies depending on the commission^[4].

This capriccio brings together two places that never shared a skyline: Palladio's design for a stone Rialto Bridge, a project intended for Venice, and buildings drawn from Vicenza, the mainland city where Palladio built most of his surviving work. Canaletto returned to the Palladian Rialto design more than once, including in a related capriccio that set the same unbuilt bridge within an imagined lagoon setting rather than the streets of Vicenza^[1]. The stone Rialto Bridge itself has a real and much-contested history: after a fire destroyed the earlier structure, multiple architects submitted grand designs for its replacement, and for reasons of cost and, according to one contemporary account, favouritism rather than merit, the most ambitious proposals were passed over in favour of a plainer final design^[5]. Palladio's version was one of several that never left the drawing board, which is precisely what made it suitable material for a capriccio: a real, documented design that could only ever be seen by inventing a picture for it.

Canaletto typically began with drawings made on location, which he brought back to his studio and reworked into finished paintings, often using a camera obscura, a darkened box fitted with a lens that projected an image of the subject for the artist to trace, in the same way Vermeer had used one decades earlier^[2]. The device let him fix the relative scale and focus of buildings at different distances with unusual precision, but his finished vedute were never simple transcriptions: he exercised considerable selectivity over which details to include, omit or rearrange to produce a coherent, appealing image rather than a literal record^[2]. That combination of documentary skill and compositional invention made him the leading painter of Venetian scenic views during his lifetime, and over his career he produced more than a thousand paintings and drawings, sold chiefly to British visitors for whom a Canaletto became the era's equivalent of a souvenir photograph^[3].