Venice: Canaletto and his Rivals at The National Gallery

Venice – the city of water – is the birthplace of opera music and artistic movements including Renaissance painting, but one of its most overt artistic legacies is the 18th century age of the Veduta (view) paintings.

Tourists of the period, particularly aristocratic Englishmen, saw view paintings as souvenirs of their travels. Suddenly there was a huge market for scene paintings as artists reached for fame and commissions through their portraits of beautiful landmarks including the Grand Canal, the Piazza San Marco, the Rialto and the Molo.

Venice: Canaletto and his Rivals cleverly displays these scene paintings – juxtaposed to show how these artists responded to the same view through their own personalities – giving gallery visitors our own tour of the marvellous sites of Venice.

Artists such as Luca Carlevarijs, Michele Marieschi, Bernardo Bellotto and Francesco Guardi painted their version of the same Venetian scenery. One man obsessed and inspired by his contemporaries was Giovanni Antonio Canal (known as Canaletto) who rapidly became the leading scene painter.

Canaletto began his career as a painter of theatrical scenery and by the time he started painting the city in the early 1720s view painting had become a competitive trade.

The first room to the exhibition shows Carlevarijs’ The Piazza San Marco, looking East (about 1710-15) next to what Canaletto had tried to eclipse. Carlevarijs liked to depict famous sites and ceremonies in his work.

Swedish artist John Richter was the other rival who made view painting a special genre. His painting The Entrance to the Grand Canal, Looking East, with the Bridge of Boats for the Feast of the Madonna della Salute shows he held an interest in views that went beyond the city itself.

Canaletto’s version of the same scene, in 1729 – displayed next to Richter’s – shows how his style was developing. The painting is in a smaller format showing maturity and a good business sense too – the size of it made it much easier to export. The picture, drenched in sunshine, replaces the oppressive atmosphere of his earlier work in the early 1720s.

Soon Canaletto overshadowed both the men who had inspired him and rapidly developed his own style. He captured everyday life through natural elements with everything in his pictures defined by light.

The largest room of the exhibition depicts the most glamorous paintings of Venice’s ceremonies and festivals, in particular Ascension Day. These paintings of the classic events are realised on a colossal scale.

Canaletto’s The Reception of the French Ambassador Jacques-Vincent Languet, Comte de Gergy, at the Doge’s Palace, is a masterpiece depicting a flotilla of boats accompanying the Doge to a ceremony, where he tosses a wedding ring into the Adriatic waters – symbolising Venice’s relationship with the sea.

A pioneering composition by Carlevarijs, The Reception of the British Ambassador Charles Montagu (1707-08) depicts a similar event. The interpretations of these painters can be compared in their skill of showing numerous figures among the visual spectacle.

Throughout his career, Canaletto’s main rival emerged as Marieschi. Although a seemingly superficial artist, Marieschi was a faster painter and worker in scenography who was able to produce more paintings and sell them at a cheaper price. Marieschi died in 1740 at the age of 32, no doubt leaving a relieved Canaletto to dominate the industry.

The second biggest competitor was Francesco Guardi – 10 years Canaletto’s junior. He started painting in his late 40s and outlived Canaletto by 25 years. He was one of the last artists to see Venetian view painting to its end.

But towards the end of his lifetime Canaletto continued to create striking compositions, even though the demand for view paintings started to decline across Europe.

Looking at these impactful paintings now, it is clear that Canaletto was the eminent painter of Venice’s social and architectural beauty. It does not matter if we have been to the floating city or not, the attention to detail encapsulates its splendour.

Open 10am-6pm (9pm Friday). Admission £6-£13.20 (free for under-12s, family ticket £24, unlimited entry £15-£30). Book online.

By Laura Burgess by culture24.org.uk

800 Unpublished Drawings from the Venetian 19th-Century to Go on View

Francois Vervloet (1795-1872), “Barche a Venezia”. Matita e biacca su carta. Venezia, Museo Correr.

VENICE.- As part of the programme of developing the vast patrimony of its collections, the Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia is presenting a vast exhibition of nineteenth century drawings at the Correr, most of which are on display for the very first time. It includes works by artists such as Caffi, Pividor, Guardi, Moro, Bosa, Vervloet and to name but a few.

Coordinated by Giandomenico Romanelli, the exhibition is installed in the Hall of Honour and the Museum’s large exhibition area on the second floor. They are all in some way connected to Venice: either the subject of the works is Venetian, they were conceived and completed in Venice, or they are about Venice, inspired by the city and its monumental and social aspects as a subject of exercise or poetical sensations.

The Venice that appears in the nineteenth-century drawings of the Correr is surprising: both modern and ancient, distracted and suffering, secret and well-known; it reveals the nerves and muscles of a body in suffering that refuses to yield, full of life and dynamic. Above all, there are outbursts of reality, of what is true, going beyond rhetoric and regrets, beyond nostalgia and laments.

A Venice that is unusual and full of fascination during the years of Ruskin and the first big, controversial restoration projects, the affirmation of tourists seeking sensations that differ from those of the Grand Tour of the Enlightenment.

It is a season of studies and research; a nineteenth century that is starving for history and industry, contradictory and fragile, unsure and headstrong. In a word, Modern.

The collection of drawings from the Venetian nineteenth century at the Correr is one of the biggest on the graphic scene of that century.

It consists in several hundred sheets of different quality and kinds that – maybe because they have been obscured by the fame of the vast collections of drawings from the eighteenth century – have never received the attention they deserved and were thus considered a ‘lesser’ patrimony’ for years and therefore mainly used as a source of documentation.

However, the outstanding importance of these collections gradually became clear from various points of view.

Names: it starts with the youngest (and least skilled) of the Guardi family, Giacomo (1764-1835), who followed in his father’s footsteps and wandered around the city, making hundreds of sketches, impressions, and caricatures until he perfected the view- memory, the “postcard”, with subjects he repeated dozens of times but which became both original and curious with his incessant wanderings in search of a more modern expressive interpretation. Then come the thousands of drawings, both big and small, notes or completed drafts, studies, and details by a famous engraver and illustrator, Giovanni Pividor (1812-1872) who creates a Venice, with its corners and its architecture, an inexhaustible reportage: a meticulousness bordering on the obsessive, light as a feather, or structured and pictorial in “fine” inks as is the case in his rich album “Souvenir de Venise”, most of which has never been published.

We then come to the great Ippolito Caffi (1809-1866), both resurgent and heroic, in love with ‘people’: commoners resting, Austrian police, sailors waiting to be signed up, someone from the Orient, masks: Venice that is both supine and inclined to outbursts of pride, during the nineteenth century when she was both skinflint and servile, seeking redemption in jeers and gestures of rebellion. Sketchbooks with watercolours and veduta barely outlined on the small forerunners of today’s moleskins, memories, the notes of a great landscape painter who had freed himself of ‘eighteenth-century’ fascination.

A novelty (at least for the wider public) is the collection of over two hundred drawings by the Flemish artist François Vervloet (1795-1872). Seduced by the camera obscura, the urban landscape, ’objective vedutism’, he tackled Rome with the landscape of the Nordic Pensionnaires (French, Danes, Germans and Scandinavians), and in Naples with what was almost the naive landscape of the South, as well as with the odd, eccentric Englishman. He arrived in Venice – where he was also to die – in 1872, leaving not only his drawings but also a detailed personal diary of great interest, in which he jotted down what was both important and trivial, meetings, exchanges of opinion, and experiences at the art markets. Vervloet did not limit himself to glimpses and views: he would enter sacristies, study relics and candelabras, or outline a gilded hedgehog or marble volute.

Another novelty that is not to be missed is the drawings and watercolours by Eugenio Bosa (1807-1875). No veduta or monuments but a city made of beggars and fishermen, misery and suffering, one glass too many to forget hunger, an argument outside someone’s home, but also the odd moments of rest and tranquillity: a trip to the Lido, having a chat next to a well-head, a dog playing, children laughing and crying, the lottery being drawn in Saint Mark’s Square, winners and losers in annual rowing races.

Other artists appear with smaller amounts of material but of increasing breadth. They include Luigi Querena (1820-1887) who specialises in a particular genre, short lived but extremely successful: panoramas, the 360° perspective portrayals of a city or landscape, or historical events, which were to reach its height of success in the early and middle nineteenth century, in France, Belgium and England especially.

Finally, thanks to the great generosity of a private collector, there is one more novelty: around eight unpublished drawings in pencil by Giacomo Favretto (1849-1887) reveal the fleeting details, glimpses, secret portraits, impressions jotted down unseen in the Venetian cafés, in other words, in places of socialisation and learning (reading the newspapers, the Gazettes, magazines, literature), places for prudent political activities, or rather, weaving plots, spying, seduction and betrayals. Not only the important Cafés in Saint Mark’s Square (Florian, Quadri, Aurora and Vittoria) but also in the Giardini and Giardinetti, Caffè Orientale and many other places that made the history of this city – and not always in unimportant things, for example the Biennale.

by www.artdaily.org

Ringling Museum of Art shows ‘Venice in the Age of Canaletto’

SARASOTA

Canaletto was an anomaly, both of his time and apart from it. His fame derives from his elegant depictions of Venice, his hometown, yet his clientele was not, for the most part, Venetian. He was a successful artist whose art didn’t generally reflect the conventions of the era in which he lived.

“Venice in the Age of Canaletto” at the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art presents paintings by Canaletto and some of his contemporaries along with period decorative objects that provide context.

The 18th century saw Venice at its most glorious culturally. It was no longer the great military power or international trading center it once was and by century’s end, it would be conquered by Napoleon Bonaparte.

Venice may have been on its way to a political and financial flameout but it was considered one of the most beautiful cities in the world, an absolute must-see for any discerning traveler. Its citizens lived in luxury and style, continuing to support ambitious projects of public, private and religious buildings.

In the early 1700s, “Italy” as a unified country was more than 100 years away. It was, as it had been for a millennium, a collection of independent villages and city-states. Venice had evolved into one of its most dazzling, built as a maritime power over lagoons that gave the impression to those entering it for the first time of a shimmering mirage rising from the water.

Giovanni Antonio Canal (1697-1768), born into an old Venetian family, is considered one of the great landscape painters of Western art who influenced artists both in Europe and the United States for 200 years after his death. He was the son of a successful theatrical scene painter and was called “little Canal” or Canaletto. It seems that a 1719 trip to Rome with his father to work on a theatrical project started him on his path as a famous landscape painter. There he was inspired by artists working in the landscape genre called vedute, “views,” which were not considered top-tier forms of art but potentially very lucrative.

With the help of an expatriate British entrepreneur, Canaletto began attracting the attention of wealthy English collectors who made fashionable Grand Tours through Italy, especially Venice, and wanted to document their travels in style.

Luca Carlevaris (1663-1729) was already making a small fortune in Venetian landscapes before his young rival blew him out of the water. Looking at both artists’ work, you can see why. Carlevaris is faithful to architectural details and good at evoking a sense of the city’s grandeur yet he paints with a subtle, miasmic haze over everything. Today we would call it pollution. Canaletto lets the sun pour in, depicting only meteorologically perfect days. He also injects more personality into his scenes. The buildings, broad expanses of water and great piazzas are the stars but he loves the bit players, too. People (and they are literally little people in his big-scale paintings) populate the locations doing what they normally do, whether it’s hanging laundry or oaring a gondola. He may have left his dad’s profession but he paints as if his world were still a stage.

Venetians themselves wouldn’t have cared much about a painting of the Piazza San Marco; they saw it every day. They invested in lavish furnishings for their palazzos, and because their windows looked out onto the same views Canaletto painted, they opted for religious and mythological scenes painted with lush flourishes by fellow greats such as Tiepolo whose style, you will see, is utterly different. The exhibition also gives us good examples of their lifestyle with settees and chairs upholstered in silk, gilded tables and fine porcelain. They would have had gorgeous glass from the nearby Murano glass studios. Here, a tiny glass garden is arranged on a tabletop as it would have been back then, a dream of flowers and enclosures in a city that had no lawns.

Abroad, owning a Canaletto conferred great status. British dukes and earls lined castle walls with them; those of lesser means bought etchings of his paintings. In 1746 Canaletto moved to England. Tourism to Italy had been halted by war so he followed his clients, painting their grand vistas, estates and public buildings. He did well financially but his works began to become formulaic. He was even accused of being an imposter by an art critic. He refuted the claim but his reputation was tarnished.

Almost 10 years later, he came home and returned to replicating his beloved city. Works from the 1760s suggest burnout. The people in them have become dabs of paint rather than fully realized portraits in miniature; the telling details of daily life are repetitive and the water has a still, dirgelike quality. Still, his Venice is beautiful, drifting, as was Canaletto, into the twilight of greatness.

By Lennie Bennett, Times Art Critic  www.tampabay.com