St. Peter's Basilica in Rome and the square in front of it, with the Colonnade designed by Bernini and realised by 1665, is investigated from an elevated point of view, shifted to the left, on the hill that formed the southern border of the Borgo district at the time. In the oval square, on the main axis, are the two fountains (the 'ancient' fountain by Maderno and the twin one by Bernini himself), as well as the obelisk of Heliopolis, brought to Rome by Caligula and placed in front of the basilica at the end of the 16th century. Outside and inside the Colonnade, gentlemen and commoners, gathered in small groups, bear witness to the tranquillity and exemplary peacefulness of the Roman citizenry. The choice of the elevated viewpoint to the left of the borough - emphasising the extension of the Palazzi Apostolici to the north, towards today's Rione Prati, then a rural area - finds an important precedent in a 1673 engraving by Giovanni Battista Falda . This invention, one of the first testimonies of the new arrangement given by Bernini to the square, was replicated on canvas several times, especially in the Venetian milieu and specifically by the masters who in the mid 18th century produced views of Rome and Venice for the princes of European courts. Among these was Jacopo Fabris, author of a Veduta di Piazza San Pietro (View of St. Peter's Square), made on the model of Falda's engraving and destined for King Christian VII of Denmark . Compared to Fabris's canvas and Falda's engraving, however, in the painting exhibited here, the point of view appears closer and the perspective is consequently dilated on the horizontal axis. In addition, the façade of the basilica lacks the columns of the portico (replaced by simple pilasters) and the tympanum, thus appearing much simplified compared to its real form. It is evident how the engraving model was overlaid with the memory of a study from life, which was probably compendious and therefore entailed inevitable approximations even in the final drafting of the composition: it is therefore clearly the work of an artist who had been to Rome, but who produced the canvas years after his stay, reworking drawings made on site. The luminous quality of the colour and the vibrant rendering of the human figures, deliberately shrunken - to emphasise the size of the Colonnade - but not without spirit, liken this canvas to a series of Roman views happily grouped in the catalogue of the Venetian painter Bernardo Canal (1664-1744), father of the much more famous Giovanni Antonio known as Canaletto. From the latter's baptismal certificate, notarised on 17 October 1697, we know of his father's profession as a painter, whose name, however, does not appear in the Fraglia registers until 1717 . It was probably the great fame acquired by Antonio that led Bernardo, by then aged 75, to the position of Prior in the College of Painters in 1739, to which he had been admitted only two years earlier. It is evident that the activity as a vedutista, for which he is remembered today and which must be limited to the last twenty years of his life, was undertaken on the impulse of the success of Canaletto's compositions. Bernardo in fact presents himself as an author of certain talent, but not particularly gifted in invention, since he usually designed his vedute taking as a model the studies of his son or of masters of the previous generation - and therefore his contemporaries - such as Luca Carlevarijs and Johann Richter. If the group of views of Venice - already conserved at Casa Salom and assigned to Bernardo by Giuseppe Fiocco and later by Rodolfo Pallucchini, in the two contributions that led to the rediscovery of his personality as an artist - are dependent on Richter's models, the views of Rome instead betray the strong influence of Canaletto's drawings: This is in this case a rather natural contingency, since Bernardo and Antonio, as we know, had worked together in Rome in the years 1719-20 on the stage sets for the operas Tito Sempronio Gracco and Turno Aricino by Alessandro Scarlatti. It is not surprising that the young Antonio's designs - which probably remained in the possession of his father, who at those dates must still have been considered the head of the workshop - were later reworked by Bernardo. This is the case with the pair of large canvases from the Szépművészeti Múzeum in Budapest (The Temple of Antoninus and Faustina and St. Mary of Aracoeli and the Capitol), already assigned by Klàra Garas and again more recently by Charles Beddington to Canaletto himself, but now almost unanimously referred to Bernardo and representing the most pertinent comparison for the canvas on display. The paintings in Budapest are based on two studies from life made in Rome by Antonio (Darmstadt, Hessisches Landesmuseum, inv. 2186; London, British Museum, inv. 1858-6-26-225), just as the view with The Arch of Septimius Severus, made known by Dario Succi and attributed to Bernardo, closely follows a famous Roman drawing by his son (London, British Museum, inv. 1858-6-26-223). The proximity of these works to the style of the paintings already Salom (two of which are dated '1735') leads us to place this group too in the fourth decade of the 18th century, fifteen years after Canaletto's studies. We do not know if the painting on display presupposes the existence of an earlier Canaletto work (only one sheet with the façade of St. Peter's has been attributed to Antonio so far, but it is presented frontally, from a point of view located in the square on the right side). The canvas certainly shares the compositional layout and scenographic solutions with the Budapest paintings, in which the point of view is placed further back and more diagonally than in the drawings - with the aim of increasing the effect of a backdrop. The zigzagging clouds, the grey-blue sky, the elongated figures of bystanders in the foreground and the, as mentioned, shrunken figures in the centre of the square, are peculiarities of Bernard's style that clearly betray his training as a stage designer. The approximations in the definition of the architecture are compensated for by a frank and free character, far from any affectation. Bernardo, heir to the tradition of the Baroque theatre, is thus witness to a different poetics from the expository clarity of the vedutists of the new century. The rapid passages of shadow, reminiscent of the chromatic solutions of Luca Carlevarijs, give this view a lyrical character, quite unusual in an era marked by the philosophical clarity of the Enlightenment.