Two white hands come up out of the Grand Canal at night, lit hard from above, with the moored gondolas under their blue covers sitting between them and the camera. The palazzo behind is doing what Venetian palazzi do at that hour, which is glow. Nobody in the frame. Just the hands, the boats, the water shivering the lights back at you. The piece is Lorenzo Quinn’s Support, installed against the corner of Ca’ Sagredo in May 2017 and left up until late November.

Stand on the San Marco side of the Grand Canal, put the Rialto Bridge in the middle distance, let the palace fronts run away on both sides, and you have made a picture that was commercially standardised nearly three hundred years ago. The composition is not a discovery. It is an inheritance. The veduta, the topographical city view, became a Venetian export industry in the first half of the eighteenth century.