CANALETTO AND HIS RIVALS AT THE NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON
CANALETTO AND HIS RIVALS AT THE NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON
Sponsored by Credit Suisse
Paul Murphy; The National Gallery, London
Canaletto (Giovanni Antonio Canal 1697-1768) was an Italian Rococo era painter whose views of Venice have come down to us as the epitome of view painting (vedute). They seem mathematically precise as to be miraculous, seeming to be the highest point of development of this technically exact genre. Was Canaletto really just a hack, churning out genre pieces for aristocratic clients in foreign countries (the artist was especially popular among English milordi)? Or is his work really an exploration of Venice, a city of poverty, squalor, disease, and his, Canaletto's, own place in society and all the social relations implied by his art?
Canaletto began his career like his rival and slightly younger contemporary Michele Marieschi (1710-1743) as a theatrical scene painter. This explains his willingness to tweak perspective, alter viewpoints or move buildings. He was given instruction in scene painting by his father, who worked in this trade. His father also created some undistinguished vedute. Canaletto never attended the academy where he would have been exposed to the works of the great masters, to concepts of art theory, instruction in technical aspects of painting, but in the theatre where a different scale of values operated and where different techniques of art were required. As a theatrical scene painter Canaletto would have been expected to operate with an instantaneous palette responsive to the demands on the night rather than to any art blueprint or rigid academic integrity. Canaletto also used optical devices, such as the camera obscura making swift drawings of complex Venetian cityscapes and views possible within limited timescales although he was also notorious for the length of time it took him to complete his orders.
The use of these devices may explain distortions in Marieschi's The Rialto Bridge from the Riva de Vin (circa 1737), for instance. Marieschi was a rival of Canaletto's early career in Venice. But there were many others, such as Johan Richter (1665-1745), a Scandinavian, born in Stockholm, credited with inventing the genre (although it was foreshadowed in earlier view paintings made in Venice.). There was also Gaspar van Wittel known as Gaspare Vanvitelli from Holland and therefore trained in the traditions of Flemish art but working mostly in Venice (1652/3-1736) and Luca Carlevarijs (1663-1730) born in Udine but also working mostly in Venice. At first glance their work seems indistinguishable from Canaletto’s, but on closer viewing stylistic imprints, vast differences in approach, materials and technique become clearer.
In Canaletto's middle period a further rival, Bernardo Bellotto (1722-1780), appeared, for he was indeed the artist's nephew. It is hard to know whether Bellotto was working for Canaletto, produced works under Canaletto's imprimatur, or whether Bellotto was really working autonomously, an authentic rival of Canelletto. Bellotto goes back to many scenes made by Canaletto to make more detailed views, but intrinsically there was little difference between the two artists. Bellotto was decidedly a follower of Canaletto.
The last of Canaletto's rivals was the Venetian artist Francesco Guardi, brother in law of Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1696-1770). Guardi's painting is raw, more immediate than Canaletto's. In paintings like Guardi's The Rialto Bridge from the North and The Palazzo dei Camerlenghi (1768-1793) Venice looks like an actualised city of poverty and squalor while Canaletto's seems completely idealised. Everything in Canaletto's painting is viewed through a glowing Rococo bloom.
However, the real rival to Canaletto is the festival itself, (the exhibition implies), and the main festival in the Venetian calendar was Ascension Day or the Festa da l'Ascenza, when the Doge threw a golden ring into the Lagoon. This festival was known as the 'Marriage to the Sea', in other words the wedding of Venice to the natural element. The gilded state barge bore the Doge and the Venetian Senate to the Lido where the ritual was to be performed. Canaletto captures this ritual in The Molo from the Bacino di San Marco on Ascension Day (1733-4), but Carlavarij's painting of the same event is even more aesthetised than Canalettos. It is as if an artistic event is occurring to be summarized in a further painting then repeated in yet another painting. The raw, visceral reality, dark odour coming off the lagoon is hardly suggested, but at times it is there too, real, impalpable and deadly. Canaletto's paintings are hardly realist documents although they certainly provide us with details of eighteenth-century Venice. Canaletto sought the approval of his foreign, mostly British, aristocratic clients who wanted scenes that confirmed their world and worldview. Scenes of poverty, squalor, disease, (especially given the polluted waters of Venice's lagoon) were excluded in favour of scenes of opulence, festival, grandiosity. Caneletto hardly manages narrative at all favouring views that are static even timeless, (apart from his painting The Stonemason’s Yard (1725) probably made for a Venetian rather than foreign patron, someone who was at home with the banal or sordid aspects of Venice.) No doubt this timeless quality was what his clients sought, for it confirmed their worldview that maintained that everything was essentially changeless. Views of sky and lagoon are uniformly blue or blue grey. This uniformity is almost a signature, for unthreatening banality was probably required of him and the other vedutti. Even a brilliant sunset in the manner of Turner is never contemplated, for this would be a decisive break with uniformity and banality, which is the most important point of the Rococo aesthetic. The artist is there merely to depict what can be observed between the sky and the lagoon, the more exaggeratedly realist the painting happens to be the better.
The individual is always delineated as part of a crowd, except when he or she happens to have some eccentric characteristic. Likewise Canaletto often portrays dogs with simian characteristics, underscoring their ridiculousness. Canaletto's patrons weren't interested at all in individuals but in the entire commune of Venice, so the paintings often exhibit the kind of gaiety and pleasure in simple peasant, or in this case urban, rituals to be found in the works of, for instance, Pieter Brueghal the Younger (1565-1636).
Canaletto was also depicting the Venice of Casanova (1725-1798). Casanova was a younger son and younger sons inadvertently became priests since they would hardly inherit land or property under the laws of primogeniture. As if to underline all the repression connected with the priesthood and religion generally, Casanova lived the life of a libertine heterosexually (and sometimes homosexually) hyperactive. At this time daughters were mostly unwanted and were often just left at the gates of orphanages. One of the paintings details a procession of such orphans.
Canaletto’s view paintings of Venice also lead onto depictions of Venice in films such as Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice or Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now. In these films a darker, pestilential aspect to the city is outlined, in fact all the aspects of Venice that Canaletto and the other vedute sought to ignore on behalf of their aristocratic clients. Visconti/Mann’s protagonist Aschenbach, whose decadence and decay is partly an extension of the city as it crumbles into the lagoon, is symbolic of a certain class whose destruction he also symbolizes. Whereas in Don’t Look Now Roeg’s protagonists encounter both pity and terror in the city summarized by the appearance of the two weird sisters. Again these were the aspects of Venice that Canaletto sought to marginalize in his view paintings of the city, but Canaletto’s paintings are also undeniably, possibly inadvertently, dark and atmospheric.
The exhibition ends with a comparison of three depictions of The Torre di Malghera by Canaletto, Belloto and Guardi, which is meant to summarize the ways that artists depict the same thing in entirely different ways. Belloto’s depiction made in 1744 is photographically exact emphasizing key architectural qualities of the building, whereas Canaletto’s made some ten years later offers us a depiction of the lagoon with the torre operating as a suitable framing device. Guardi’s, made sometimes in the 1770s, decides to almost ignore the torre, instead foregrounding the meeting of lagoon and sky. Guardi is telling us that the poetry of painting, its essential other-worldliness, is what inspires him, rather than the magnificent architectural, mathematical compositions of Canaletto and Belloto which are essentially concerned with the concrete roles that men and women play in the city and the marketplace for art and much else that the city encapsulates.
During the period international events dictated the course of Caneletto's career. The War of the Austrian Succession (1740-1748) blocked off trade routes, so Canaletto left for England in 1746. He was to stay away from Venice for nine years. Canaletto depended on trade routes, sea lanes being open, for many of his works were shipped to England after completion. In 1797 Napoleon's invasion brought the Venetian Republic, which had stood for a thousand years, to an end. Changes in the education system in Britain also hastened the end of vedute painting, but its imprint is still to be seen, in paintings and in cinema. Canaletto himself is thought to have died in the room where he was born, possessing little more than a change of clothes, with nothing to show for all his years of labour. Although he departs from our romantic image of the artist, he may indeed be closer to it than we know. His destiny is just as tragic as Rembrandt’s bankruptcy and last years of isolation.
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