Boats in Venice are painted with watercolours and tempera on hand-made paper of gentle light brick colour. The depicton as a whole is surrounded with a dotted pattern which functions as a frame. There is Mušič’s signature in the right-hand corner, and lower left is his autograph of the title of the painting.
The painter lined six barges of different size and colour on the sea level, fastened close one by the other to the canal. They are of the type of traditional multi-colour wooden vessel, Italian bragozzo, adorned with burgees, that was used until the 1960’s by the fishermen in the Venetian lagoon as well as in the north part of the Adriatic and along the coast of Istria.
The bragozzi are set in front of the backdrop of Venetian buildings: on the left, there is part of the customs house Dogana da Mar with the identifiable golden ball of the dome; the building is situated on the far edge of Punta della Dogana. Dominant on the right side of the watercolour is the camapanile on St. Mark’s Square.
The medium of watercolour enabled the painter to achieve the impression of a transparent vision of Venetian canals, and tempera emphasized the multi-colour character of fishermen’s boats.
Zoran Mušič painted the series of watercolours of Venetian vedute, with unusually vivid colours for him, between 1947 and 1949, when he returned to Venice after the horrifying experience of the internment in the concentration camp of Dachau. At that time, he wrote: “Daylight and sunshine at last – everywhere around. … Can it be true that nobody controls me?”