The drawing comes from the second period of Tiepolo’s production of vedute, made in the late 1750s. More specifically the artist started to depict landscapes with houses and towers between his return from Würzburg in 1753 and before his departure for Spain in 1762. The present sheet is indeed comparable with a series of drawings that were executed while he was working on the decoration of the Villa Valmarana and the Duomo of Udine, respectively in 1757 and 1759. They bear the same powerful penstrokes and striking chiaroscuro. Bernard Aikema asserts that the importance of these drawings lies in the fact that they do not depict ideal landscapes, like those executed by Marco Ricci earlier in the century, but are topographically accurate. The present drawing seems to have been rapidly sketched en plein air.

Tiepolo drew two series of landscapes: the first one, around 1735, depict narrow country views with no architectural elements; the second series is marked by a strong contrast between light and shade, typical of Tiepolo’s mature graphic work, and focus on architectural details. These drawings also recall the Dutch landscape tradition of the 17th century, examples of which Tiepolo could have seen in Venetian collections such as that belonging to the Sagredo family. The function of these drawings may have been to provide a stock of motifs that could be used later in paintings by the artist and his busy studio.