Painting: From Venice with Love

To Nietzsche, seeking a synonym for music, the answer was “always and only Venice.” But it is a painter’s city. Lodged between water and sky, the seaport that calls itself Serenissima is an unending symphony of light. Its sun-mellowed stones and shimmering canals, its façades etched in chiaroscuro against sea-fresh skies, its wide horizons and weirdly shifting perspectives have challenged and eluded more artists than any other city in the world. Of all the painters who have attempted to capture the visual music of Venice—and some of the greatest have been Venetians—none was better attuned than Giovanni Antonio Canal, better known by his nickname Canaletto.

Canaletto’s Venice was the 18th century’s most worldly and sensual city. In the last, decadent century of its independence, the old republic was all pageantry and intrigue. From Piazza San Marco to the Rialto, it was a gaudy blur of masquers and courtesans, actors, singers and sightseers. As the sunny antithesis of London, and most colorful way-point of the Grand Tour, Casanova’s Venice even then drew 30,000 Englishmen a year. So many top-chop Londoners returned with Canaletto’s etchings and oil paintings that an Englishwoman visiting the city for the first time in 1785 wrote that the artist’s “views of this town are most scrupulously exact, to such a degree that we knew all the famous towers, steeples, etc., before we reached them.”

The First Postcards. Most visitors took home oil-painted vedute, facile, panoramic views of the city that predated the picture postcard. Canaletto was a vedutista with vision. Trained in theatrical scene painting, disciplined by Roman academicians, influenced by Dutch artists’ oils of classical ruins, he swiftly caught the eye of visiting and resident English milords, who collected and commissioned such far-from-vedute fantasies as Tomb of Lord Sowers (see opposite page), a highlight of North America’s first comprehensive Canaletto retrospective, which opened this week in Toronto.

Such was his fame in England that Canaletto’s patrons persuaded him to stay there and paint their murky land. His precise, atmospheric views of London, painted in the 1740s and ’50s, helped shape English landscape painting, lured later artists such as Turner and Whistler to Venice to seek new understanding of light and water. But the essential music of Venice, if not its counterpoint—sun-stippled plazas, majestic palaces, bustling, brightly clad people—always escaped them. In later life, painting steadily until his death in 1768, Canaletto essayed fanciful variations on his theme with almost surreal capriccios, whose brooding ruins bespoke the ancient grandeur that dissolved in carnival.

Practical Romance. Elsewhere, Leibnitz and Newton were demonstrating man’s command of his environment through advances in science. Sir Christopher Wren had surpassed romantic vision with brick and stone. Napoleon was soon to end forever Europe’s old order. And in Venice, where romance had always been well salted with practicality, Canaletto’s lucid art bridged the opposed worlds. He stands to this day, as it was said of his city, “between the morning and the evening lands.”