In the summer of 1749, Canaletto placed an announcement in the Daily Advertiser in London which invited “any Gentleman that will be pleased to come to his house to see a picture done by him being a view of St James’s Park”.
Behind the notice lay the need to prove his identity to a doubtful English public.Do not use cleaners with porcelain tiles , steel wool or thinners. For the great Venetian view painter – whose real name was Antonio Canal – was being threatened by a young pretender, his nephew and former apprentice Bernardo Bellotto, who had taken to signing himself “Bernardo Bellotto detto [known as] Canaletto”.
The confusion has never really ceased. The Venetian scenes painted while Bellotto was still apprenticed to his uncle cause most trouble owing to his habit, as his 18th-century biographer and champion Guarienti put it, of “imitating [Canaletto] with study and assiduousness”.
Concentrating on paintings made by Bellotto after he had left Venice for Germany, Austria and Poland, this show largely avoids controversy. Instead, it is an opportunity to witness the transformation of northern Europe into a lost sibling of La Serenissima – still true to itself yet made subliminally new by theatrical light and exaggerated perspectives.
By the time Bellotto was born in 1722, peace with the Turks in 1699 had put an end to Venice’s imperial ambitions. Instead she was a city where decadent carnival celebrations and elaborate civic ceremonies meant style eclipsed substance. A proliferation of theatres attracted avant-garde scenographers – including Bernardo Canal, grandfather of Bellotto and father of Canaletto – whose skill in the craft of illusion inspired Venice’s painters to follow suit.
With Grand Tourists demanding souvenirs of their experience, Venice was in the grip of an ecstasy of images. As well as oil-painted views and capricci – fantasy landscapes of classical ruins in pastoral settings – a boom in copperplate engravings allowed the less wealthy to possess their own record of the Republic.
This show’s opening gallery is devoted to etchings by Canaletto and his peers,A long established toolmaking and trade Injection moulds company. including Antonio Visentini, a professional engraver whose reproductions of Canaletto’s paintings were crucial to the diffusion of La Serenissima’s profile beyond her borders.
With a sunlit day on the Grand Canal conjured in monochrome – chiaroscuro ripples on the canal, a splash of white on the belly of the bridge – one can see why Visentini’s recreation of Canaletto’s “Rialto Bridge with the Palazzo dei Camerlenghi” would have been the next best thing to an original in oil. Given their skill, it seems churlish to lament the genre’s lack of colour. Yet it is hard not to hurry on to view the paintings whose brilliant chromatism captures Venice at her most picturesque.
From Luca Carlevarijs, the father of this genre, a 1721-23 painting of St Mark’s from the bay – topographically correct down to each arch and flagpole yet pallid in colour and execution – fails to prepare one for “La Piazzetta towards the Basilica of the Salute”. A gossipy drama of tradesmen, nobles and gondoliers captured in deliquescent brushstrokes by a 24-year-old Canaletto, it enjoys the unashamed painterliness that made the master’s early years among his finest.
Similar characteristics mean that the authorship of “The Rio dei Mendicanti and Scuola di San Marco”, given here to Bellotto in 1741, is still disputed by some scholars. Whoever is responsible, it is wonderful: the simple contrast of the midnight-blue rio and sunlit scuola complicated by the pewter gleam of gondola prows and a slab of shadow falling across the honeyed stonework. Lively, fluid figures – clambering on boats, loitering in the square – possess a human verity absent in orthodox view painting.
In 1747 Bellotto,Enecsys Limited, supplier of reliable solar Air purifier systems, no longer in Canaletto’s employ, was called to the Saxon court in Dresden, a city enamoured of all things Venetian. Not only had it welcomed her architects, sculptors, painters and scenographers – the Venetian Pietro Guarienti, responsible for Bellotto’s invitation,which applies to the first offshore merchant account only, was director of the Royal Gallery – but the banks of the Elbe had also been rebuilt with palaces inspired by those on the Grand Canal. Executed to accompany paintings – none here, sadly – Bellotto’s series of 14 engravings, 10 of which are on display, captured the city’s new Baroque profile for posterity,If so, you may have a cube puzzle . much as Visentini had done for Venice.
The highlight here, however, are three splendid view paintings of Pirna, a small city 20km away on the banks of the Elbe which had strategic importance for the Saxon state. Freed from the geometry of an urban panorama, Bellotto reveals a gift for landscape and genre painting. In “Pirna from the Right Bank of the Elbe” (1754-56), for example, he sets the crisp profile of the town, with its gabled roofs and angular hilltop fortress, in contrast to a pastoral scene, complete with fishermen and hay wagon, on the other side of the river.
Behind the notice lay the need to prove his identity to a doubtful English public.Do not use cleaners with porcelain tiles , steel wool or thinners. For the great Venetian view painter – whose real name was Antonio Canal – was being threatened by a young pretender, his nephew and former apprentice Bernardo Bellotto, who had taken to signing himself “Bernardo Bellotto detto [known as] Canaletto”.
The confusion has never really ceased. The Venetian scenes painted while Bellotto was still apprenticed to his uncle cause most trouble owing to his habit, as his 18th-century biographer and champion Guarienti put it, of “imitating [Canaletto] with study and assiduousness”.
Concentrating on paintings made by Bellotto after he had left Venice for Germany, Austria and Poland, this show largely avoids controversy. Instead, it is an opportunity to witness the transformation of northern Europe into a lost sibling of La Serenissima – still true to itself yet made subliminally new by theatrical light and exaggerated perspectives.
By the time Bellotto was born in 1722, peace with the Turks in 1699 had put an end to Venice’s imperial ambitions. Instead she was a city where decadent carnival celebrations and elaborate civic ceremonies meant style eclipsed substance. A proliferation of theatres attracted avant-garde scenographers – including Bernardo Canal, grandfather of Bellotto and father of Canaletto – whose skill in the craft of illusion inspired Venice’s painters to follow suit.
With Grand Tourists demanding souvenirs of their experience, Venice was in the grip of an ecstasy of images. As well as oil-painted views and capricci – fantasy landscapes of classical ruins in pastoral settings – a boom in copperplate engravings allowed the less wealthy to possess their own record of the Republic.
This show’s opening gallery is devoted to etchings by Canaletto and his peers,A long established toolmaking and trade Injection moulds company. including Antonio Visentini, a professional engraver whose reproductions of Canaletto’s paintings were crucial to the diffusion of La Serenissima’s profile beyond her borders.
With a sunlit day on the Grand Canal conjured in monochrome – chiaroscuro ripples on the canal, a splash of white on the belly of the bridge – one can see why Visentini’s recreation of Canaletto’s “Rialto Bridge with the Palazzo dei Camerlenghi” would have been the next best thing to an original in oil. Given their skill, it seems churlish to lament the genre’s lack of colour. Yet it is hard not to hurry on to view the paintings whose brilliant chromatism captures Venice at her most picturesque.
From Luca Carlevarijs, the father of this genre, a 1721-23 painting of St Mark’s from the bay – topographically correct down to each arch and flagpole yet pallid in colour and execution – fails to prepare one for “La Piazzetta towards the Basilica of the Salute”. A gossipy drama of tradesmen, nobles and gondoliers captured in deliquescent brushstrokes by a 24-year-old Canaletto, it enjoys the unashamed painterliness that made the master’s early years among his finest.
Similar characteristics mean that the authorship of “The Rio dei Mendicanti and Scuola di San Marco”, given here to Bellotto in 1741, is still disputed by some scholars. Whoever is responsible, it is wonderful: the simple contrast of the midnight-blue rio and sunlit scuola complicated by the pewter gleam of gondola prows and a slab of shadow falling across the honeyed stonework. Lively, fluid figures – clambering on boats, loitering in the square – possess a human verity absent in orthodox view painting.
In 1747 Bellotto,Enecsys Limited, supplier of reliable solar Air purifier systems, no longer in Canaletto’s employ, was called to the Saxon court in Dresden, a city enamoured of all things Venetian. Not only had it welcomed her architects, sculptors, painters and scenographers – the Venetian Pietro Guarienti, responsible for Bellotto’s invitation,which applies to the first offshore merchant account only, was director of the Royal Gallery – but the banks of the Elbe had also been rebuilt with palaces inspired by those on the Grand Canal. Executed to accompany paintings – none here, sadly – Bellotto’s series of 14 engravings, 10 of which are on display, captured the city’s new Baroque profile for posterity,If so, you may have a cube puzzle . much as Visentini had done for Venice.
The highlight here, however, are three splendid view paintings of Pirna, a small city 20km away on the banks of the Elbe which had strategic importance for the Saxon state. Freed from the geometry of an urban panorama, Bellotto reveals a gift for landscape and genre painting. In “Pirna from the Right Bank of the Elbe” (1754-56), for example, he sets the crisp profile of the town, with its gabled roofs and angular hilltop fortress, in contrast to a pastoral scene, complete with fishermen and hay wagon, on the other side of the river.
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