St Mark's Square, Venice (Piazza San Marco) Stone Coaster

This design features a painting by the French Impressionist artist Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919). It is an elegant and colourful depiction of the main public square in Venice, Italy, which is known as Piazza San Marco (or, in English, St Mark's Square). The sky and ground are painted in blue while the detail is highlighted in red. The main building that can be seen in this painting is St Mark's Basilica (Basilica di San Marco), which is the cathedral church of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Venice; it is the most famous of the city's churches and one of the best known examples of Italo-Byzantine architecture. The original artwork was painted in 1881, and it is now housed in the Minneapolis Institute of Art.