Painting: The Canal Chroniclers

During the 1700s, when rococo ruled Europe, Venice had become its royal city. Carpaccio (1455-1525) had combined the bustle of Venetian business with Renaissance grandeur; Titian (1477-1576) and Tintoretto (1518-1594) mastered the region’s robust vitality. Marco Ricci (1676-1729) and

Canaletto (1697-1768) developed the vedute, or picture-postcard views, and the capriccio, or fantasy. But it was a dynasty of hard-working artists—the Guardis—that brought Venetian painting to its final fruition. Currently, a display of more than 200 oils and 800 graphics by the Guardis (see opposite page) has drawn 110,000 visitors to Venice’s historic Palazzo Grassi, and quickened interest in which of the Guardi brothers, Gian Antonio or Francesco, was the better.

The founder of the painting Guardis was the brothers’ father Domenico, who moved to Venice from Vienna in 1702.

Papa Guardi set up a bottega, or combination studio and art shop, in an alley on the wrong side of the Grand Canal. His first son, Gian Antonio, became master of the bottega and a member of the Venetian Academy long before Francesco, who was 14 years younger. Gian Antonio enjoyed local patronage, turning out blousy, soft-focus baroque scenes based on the mythological tales and Roman historical moments fashionable to the Venetian nobility.

By his contemporaries, Francesco was considered little more than a second-rate Canaletto. Only in 1840 did an Italian art expert defy professional opinions by recognizing his “magical” vision. But Canaletto had copied the architecture of Venice so meticulously, often through an image-flattening camera obscura, in effect, a camera without film, that the city could be reconstructed from his elevations. The more empathetic eye of Francesco Guardi never saw the great bell tower in the Piazza San Marco in the same proportions twice, added nonexistent stories onto buildings and exaggerated the chevron-shaped bridges over the canals for the sake of a painting’s mood. In his own day, this earned him criticism for “faulty perspective.” Actually, Francesco’s nervous flecks of light—his sparkling surfaces that gave stone walls the shimmer of oil-soaked gauze and wavelets on the lagoon the glitter of semiprecious gems—reflect the attitudes of a transitory world charmed more by elegance than substance.

Until the 20th century, Gian Antonio was considered the greater Guardi; Francesco was forgotten. Then the critics of the world united for a second look. Wrote Bernard Berenson of the younger Guardi: “He had a great predilection for the picturesque and for what we might call instantaneous effects. He thus anticipated the romantic impressionist painters of the 19th century.” In fact, Francesco Guardi was the last master of the Venetian school.

A younger brother, Nicolo, is today remembered as “an exquisite cabinet painter.” A sister, Cecilia, married the fabulous painter of soaring ceilings, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, who died in 1770. Guardi painted until his death in 1793. Four years later Napoleon’s power put an end to the Venetian Republic.