The scene features a crowd of Venetians who have assembled in St. Mark's Square to watch fireworks exploding against a blue and yellow sky.

A critic writing for the Literary Gazette complained about the placement of the two Shakespearean characters in the lower right corner, describing them as "perched, like sparrows, on a house-top".

John Eagles writing for Blackwood's Magazine unfavourably critiqued the painting as "a strange jumble -- 'confusion worse confounded."

John Ruskin wrote that the review had raised in him "black anger" and prompted him to write a response in defence of Turner.

[8] In The Washington Post, Paul Richard described the painting as an example of Turner's "poetic, visionary, cataclysmic pictures".