Venice.Ducal Palace: Sala del Maggior Consiglio. Four pictures on ceiling (second from the four corners of the sala). On left as you face the Paradiso: 1. Pope Alexander III. giving the Stocco, or Sword, to the Doge as he enters a Galley to command the Army against Ferrara; 2. Victory against the Milanese; 3. Victory against Imperial Troops at Cadore; 4. Victory under Carmagnola, over Visconti. These four are all very rich in colour.Chiesetta: Circumcision; Way to Calvary.Sala dell’ Scrutino: Padua taken by Night from the Carraresi.
Leandro da Ponte.
Venice.Sala del Maggior Consiglio: The Patriarch giving a Blessed Candle to the Doge.Sala of Council of Ten: Meeting of Alexander III. and Doge Ziani. A fine decorative picture, running the whole of one side of the sala.Sala of Archeological Museum: Virgin in Glory, with the Avogadori Family.
Palma Giovine.
Dresden.Presentation of the Virgin.Florence.Uffizi: S. Margaret.Munich.Deposition; Nativity; Ecce Homo; Flagellation.Venice.Academy: Scenes from the Apocalypse; S. Francis.Ducal Palace: The Last Judgment.Vienna.Cain and Abel; Daughter of Herodias; Pietà; Immaculate Conception.
Il Padovanino.
Florence.Uffizi: Lucretia.London.Cornelia and her Children.Paris.Venus and Cupid.Rome.Villa Borghese: Toilet of Minerva.Venice.Academy: The Marriage of Cana; Madonna in Glory; Vanity, Orpheus, and Eurydice; Rape of Proserpine; Virgin in Glory.Verona.Man and Woman playing Chess; Triumph of Bacchus.Vienna.Woman taken in Adultery; Holy Family.
Pietro Liberi.
Venice.Ducal Palace: Battle of the Dardanelles.
Andrea Vicentino.
Venice.Museo Civico: The Marriage of a Dogaressa.
G. A. Fumiani.
Venice.San Pantaleone: Ceiling.Church of the Carità: Christ disputing with the Doctors.
A. Balestra.
Verona.S. Tomaso: Annunciation.
G. Lazzarini.
Venice.S. Pietro in Castello.The Charity of S. Lorenzo Giustiniani.
Sebastiano Ricci.
Venice.S. Rocco: The Glorification of the Cross.Gesuati: Pope Pius V. and Saints.London.Royal Hospital, Chelsea: Half-dome.
G. B. Pittoni.
Vicenza.The Bath of Diana.
G. B. Piazetta.
Venice.Chiesa della Fava: Madonna and S. Philip Neri.Academy: Crucifixion; The Fortune-Teller.
Rosalba Carriera.
Venice.Academy: pastels.Dresden.Pastels.
TIEPOLO
We have already noted that to establish the significance of any period in art, it is necessary that the tendencies should unite and combine in some culminating spirits who rise triumphant over their contemporaries and soar above the age in which they live. Such a genius stands out above the eighteenth century crowd, and is not only of his century, but of every time. For two hundred years Tiepolo has been stigmatised as extravagant, mannered, as just equal to painting cupids, nymphs, and parroquets. In the last century he experienced the effect of the profound discredit into which the whole of eighteenth-century art had fallen. In France, David had obliterated Watteau; and the reputation of Pompeo Battoni, a sort of Italian David, effaced Tiepolo and his contemporaries. When the delegates of the French Republic inspected Italian churches and palaces, and decided what works of art should be sent to the Louvre, they singled out the Bolognese, the Guercinos and Guidos,the Carracci, even Pompeo Battoni and other such forgotten masters, a Gatti, a Nevelone, a Badalocchio; but to the lasting regret of their descendants, they disdained to annex a single one of the great paintings of the Venetian, Gianbattista Tiepolo.
Eastlake only vouchsafes him one line as “an artist of fantastic imagination.” Most of the nineteenth-century critics do not even mention him. Burckhardt dismisses him with a grudging line of praise, Blanc is equally disparaging, and for Taine he is a mere mannerist, yet his influence has been felt far beyond his lifetime; only now is he coming into his own, and it is recognised that theplein-airartist, the luminarist, the impressionist, owe no small share of their knowledge to his inspiration.
The name of Tiepolo brings before us a whole string of illustrious personages—doges and senators, magnificent procurators and great captains—but we have nothing to prove that the artist belonged to a decayed branch of the famous patrician house. Born in Castello, the people’s quarter of Venice, he studied in early youth with that good draughtsman, Lazzarini. At twenty-three he married the sister of Francesco Guardi; Guardi, who comes between Longhi and Canale and who is a better painter than either. Tiepolo appeared at a fortunate moment. The demand for a facile, joyous genius was at its height. The life of the aristocracy on thelagoons was every year growing more gay, more abandoned to capricious inclination, to light loves and absurd amusements. And the art which reflected this life was called upon to give gaiety rather than thought, costume rather than character. Yet if the Venetian art had lost all connection with the grave magnificence of the past, it had kept aloof from the academic coldness which was in fashion beyond the lagoons, so that though theatrical, it was with a certain natural absurdity. The age had become romantic; the Arcadian convention was in full force, Nature herself was pressed into the service of idle, sentimental men and women. The country was pictured as a place of delight, where the sun always shone and the peasants passed their time singing madrigals and indulging in rural pleasures. The public, however, had begun to look for beauty; the traditions which had formed round the decorative schools were giving way to the appreciation of original work. Tiepolo, sincere and spontaneous even when he is sacrificing truth to caprice, struck the taste of the Venetians, and without emancipating himself from the tendencies of the time, contrives to introduce a fresh accent. All round him was a weak and self-indulgent world, but within himself he possessed a fund of buoyant and inexhaustible energy. He evokes a throng of personages on the ceilings of the churches and palaces confided to his fancy. His creationsrange from mythology to religion, from the sublime to the grotesque. All Olympia appears upon his ample and luminous spaces. It is not to the cold, austere Lazzarini, or to the clashing chiaroscuro of Piazetta, or the imaginative spirit of Battista Ricci, though he was touched by each of them, that we must turn for Tiepolo’s derivation. Long before his time, the kind of decoration of ceilings which we are apt to call Tiepolesque; the foreshortened architecture, the columns and cornices, the figures peopling the edifices, or reclining upon clouds, had been used by an increasing throng of painters. The style arose, indeed, in the quattrocento; Mantegna, the Umbrians, and even Michelangelo had used it, though in a far more sober way than later generations. Correggio and the Venetians had perfected the idea, which the artists of the seventeenth century seized upon and carried to the most intemperate excess. But Tiepolo rose above them all; he abandoned the heavy, exaggerated, contorted designs, which by this time defied all laws of equilibrium, and we must go back further than his immediate predecessors for his origins. His claim to stand with Tintoretto or Veronese may be contested, but he is nearest to these, and no doubt Veronese is the artist he studied with the greatest fervour. Without copying, he seems to have a natural affinity of spirit with Veronese and assimilates the ample arrangement of his groups, the graceof his architecture, and his decorative feeling for colour. Zanetti, who was one of Tiepolo’s dearest friends, writes: “No painter of our time could so well recall the bright and happy creations of Veronese.” The difference between them is more one of period than of temperament. Paolo Veronese represented the opulence of a rich, strong society, full of noble life, while Tiepolo’s lot was cast among effeminate men and frivolous women, and full of the modern spirit himself, he adapts his genius to his time and devotes himself to satisfy the theatrical, sentimental vein of the Venice of the decadence. Full of enthusiasm for his work, he was ready to respond to any call. He went to and fro between Venice and the villas along the mainland and to the neighbouring towns. Then coveting wider fields, he travelled to Milan and Genoa, where his frescoes still gleam in the palaces of the Dugnani, the Archinto, and the Clerici. At Würzburg in Bavaria he achieved a magnificent series of decorations for the palace of the Prince-Archbishop. Then coming back to Italy, he painted altarpieces, portraits, pictures for his friends, and a fresh multitude of allegorical and mythological frescoes in palaces and villas. His charming villa at Zianigo is frescoed from top to bottom by himself and his sons, and has amusing examples of contemporary dress and manners.
When the Academy was instituted in 1755,Tiepolo was appointed its first director, but the sort of employment it provided was not suited to his impetuous spirit, and in 1762 he threw up the post and went off to Spain with his two sons. There he received a splendid welcome and was loaded with commissions, the only dissentient voice being that of Raphael Mengs, who, obsessed by the taste for the classic and the antique, was fiercely opposed to the Venetian’s art. Tiepolo died suddenly in Madrid in 1770, pencil in hand. Though he was past seventy, the frescoes he has left there show that his hand was as firm and his eye as sure as ever.
His frescoes have, as we have said, that frankly theatrical flavour which corresponds exactly to the taste of the time. Such works as the “Transportation of the Holy House of Loretto” in the Church of the Scalzi in Venice, or the “Triumph of Faith” in that of the Pietà, the “Triumph of Hercules” in Palazzo Canossa in Verona, or the decorations in the magnificent villa of the Pisani at Strà, are extravagant and fantastic, yet have the impressive quality of genius. These last, which have for subject the glorification of the Pisani, are full of portraits. The patrician sons and daughters appear, surrounded by Abundance, War, and Wisdom. A woman holding a sceptre symbolises Europe. All round are grouped flags and dragons, “nations grappling in the airy blue,” bands of Red Indians in their war-paint andhappy couples making love. The idea of the history, the wealth, the supreme dignity of the House is paramount, and over all appears Fame, bearing the noble name into immortality. In Palazzo Clerici at Milan a rich and prodigal committee gave the painter a free hand, and on the ceiling of a vast hall the Sun in a chariot, with four horses harnessed abreast, rises to the meridian, flooding the world with light. Venus and Saturn attend him, and his advent is heralded by Mercury. A symbolical figure of the earth joys at his coming, and a concourse of naiads, nymphs, and dolphins wait upon his footsteps. In the school of the Carmine in Venice Tiepolo has left one of his grandest displays. The haughty Queen of Heaven, who is his ideal of the Virgin, bears the Child lightly on her arm, and, standing enthroned upon the rolling clouds, hardly deigns to acknowledge the homage of the prostrate saint, on whom an attendant angel is bestowing her scapulary. The most charmingamorettiare disporting in all directions, flinging themselves from on high in deliciousabandon, alternating with lovely groups of the cardinal virtues. At Villa Valmarana near Vicenza, after revelling among the gods, he comes to earth and delights in painting lovely ladies with almond eyes and carnation cheeks, attended by their cavaliers, seated in balconies, looking on at a play, or dancing minuets, and carnival scenes with masques and dominoes andfêteschampêtres, which give us a picture of the fashions and manners of the day. He brings in groups of Chinese in oriental dress, and then he condescends to paint country girls and their rustic swains, in the style of Phyllis and Corydon.
Sometimes he becomes graver and more solid. He abandons the airy fancies scattered in cloud-land. The story of Esther in Palazzo Dugnano affords an opportunity for introducing magnificent architecture, warriors in armour, and stately dames in satin and brocades. He touches his highest in the decorations of Palazzo Labia, where Antony and Cleopatra, seated at their banquet, surrounded by pomp and revelry, regard one another silently, with looks of sombre passion. Four exquisite panels have lately been acquired by the Brera Gallery, representing the loves of Rinaldo and Armida, and are a feast of gay, delicate colour, with fascinating backgrounds of Italian gardens. The throne-room of the palace at Madrid has the same order of compositions—Æneas conducted by Venus from Time to Immortality, and other deifications of Spanish royalty.
Tiepolo.ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA.Palazzo Labia, Venice.
Now and then Tiepolo is possessed by a tragic mood. In the Church of San Alvise he has left a “Way to Calvary,” a “Flagellation,” and a “Crowning of Thorns,” which are intensely dramatic, and which show strong feeling. Particularly striking is the contrast between therefined and sensitive type of his Christ and the realistic and even brutal study of the two despairing malefactors—one a common ruffian, the other an aged offender of a higher class. His altarpiece at Este, representing S. Tecla staying the plague, is painted with a real insight into disaster and agony, and S. Tecla is a pathetic and beautiful figure. Sometimes in his easel-pictures he paints a Head of Christ, a S. Anthony, or a Crucifixion, but he always returns before long to the ample spaces and fantastic subjects which his soul loved.
Tiepolo is a singular contradiction. His art suggests a strong being, held captive by butterflies. Sometimes he is joyous and limpid, sometimes turbulent and strong, but he has always sincerity, force, and life. A great space serves to exhilarate him, and he asks nothing better than to cover it with angels and goddesses, white limbs among the clouds, sea-horses ridden by Tritons, patrician warriors in Roman armour, balustrades and columns andamoretti. He does not even need to pounce his design, but puts in all sorts of improvised modifications with a sure hand. The vastness of his frescoes, the daring poses of his countless figures, and the freedom of his line speak eloquently of the mastery to which his hand had attained. He revels, above all, in effects of light—“all the light of the sky, and all the light of the sea; all the light of Venice ... in which he swims as in a bath.He paints not ideas, scarcely even forms, but light. His ceilings are radiant, like the sky of birds; his poems seem to be written in the clouds. Light is fairer than all things, and Tiepolo knows all the tricks and triumphs of light.”[6]
Nearly all his compositions have a serene and limpid horizon, with the figures approaching it painted in clear, silvery hues, airy and diaphanous, while the forms below are more muscular, the flesh tints are deeper, and the whole of the foreground is often enveloped in shadow. Veronese had lit up the shadows, which, under his contemporaries, were growing gloomy. Tiepolo carries his art further on the same lines. He makes his figures more graceful, his draperies more vaporous, and illumines his clouds with radiance. His faded blue and rose, his golden-greys, and pearly whites and pastel tints are not so much solid colours as caprices of light. We have remarked already that with Veronese the accessories of gleaming satins and rich brocades serve to obscure the persons. In many of Tiepolo’s scenes the figures are lost in a flutter of drapery, subject and action melt away, and we are only conscious of soft harmonies of delicious colour, as ethereal as the hues of spring flowers in woodland ways and joyous meadows. With these delicious, audacious fancies, put on witha nervous hand, we forget the age of profound and ardent passion, we escape from that of pompous solemnity and studied grace, and we breathe an atmosphere of irresponsible and capricious pleasure. In this last word of her great masters Venice keeps what her temperament loved—sensuous colour and emotional chiaroscuro, used to accentuate an art adapted to a city of pleasure.
The excellence of the old masters’ drawings is a perpetual revelation. Even second-class men are almost invariably fine draughtsmen, proving that drawing was looked upon as something over which it was necessary for even the meanest to have entire mastery. Tiepolo’s drawings, preserved in Venice and in various museums, are as beautiful as can be wished; perfect in execution and vivid in feeling. In Venice are twenty or thirty sheets in red carbon, of flights of angels, and of draperies studied in every variety of fold.
Poor work of his school is often ascribed to his sons, but the superb “Stations of the Cross,” in the Frari, which were etched by Domenico, and published as his own in his lifetime, are almost equal to the father’s work. Tiepolo had many immediate followers and imitators. The colossal roof-painting of Fabio Canal in the Church of SS. Apostoli, Venice, may be pointed out as an example of one of these. But he is full of the tendencies of modern art. Mr. Berenson, writing of him, says he sometimes seems morethe first than the last of a line, and notices how he influenced many French artists of recent times, though none seem quite to have caught the secret of his light intensity and his exquisite caprice.
PRINCIPAL WORKS
Aranjuez.Royal Palace: Frescoes; Altarpiece.Orangery: Frescoes.Bergamo.Cappella Colleoni: Scenes from the Life of the Baptist.Berlin.Martyrdom of S. Agatha; S. Dominia and the Rosary.London.Sketches; Deposition.Madrid.Escurial; Ceilings.Milan.Palazzi Clerici, Archinto, and Dugnano: Frescoes.Brera: Loves of Rinaldo and Armida.Paris.Christ at Emmaus.Strà.Villa Pisani: Ceiling.Venice.Academy: S. Joseph, the Child, and Saints; S. Helena finding the Cross.Palazzo Ducale: Sala di Quattro Porte: Neptune and Venice.Palazzo Labia: Frescoes; Antony and Cleopatra.Palazzo Rezzonico: Two Ceilings.S. Alvise: Flagellation; Way to Golgotha.SS. Apostoli: Communion of S. Lucy.S. Fava: The Virgin and her Parents.Gesuati: Ceiling; Altarpiece.S. Maria della Pietà: Triumph of Faith.S. Paolo: Stations of the Cross.Scalzi: Transportation of the Holy House of Loretto.Scuola del Carmine: Ceiling.Verona.Palazzo Canossa: Triumph of Hercules.Vicenza.Museo Entrance Hall: Immaculate Conception.Villa Valmarana: Frescoes; Subjects from Homer, Virgil, Ariosto, and Tasso; Masks and Oriental Scenes.Würzburg.Palace of the Archbishop: Ceilings; Fêtes Galantes; Assumption; Fall of Rebel Angels.
PIETRO LONGHI
We have here a master who is peculiarly the Venetian of the eighteenth century, a genre-painter whose charm it is not easy to surpass, yet one who did not at the outset find his true vocation. Longhi’s first undertakings, specimens of which exist in certain palaces in Venice, were elaborate frescoes, showing the baneful influence of the Bolognese School, in which he studied for a time under Giuseppe Crispi. He attempts to place the deities of Olympus on his ceilings in emulation of Tiepolo, but his Juno is heavy and common, and the Titans at her feet appear as a swarm of sprawling, ill-drawn nudities. He shows no faculty for this kind of work, but he was thirty-two before he began to paint those small easel-pictures which in his own dainty style illustrate the “Vanity Fair” of his period, and in which the eighteenth century lives for us again.
His earliest training was in the goldsmith’s art, and he has left many drawings of plate, exquisite in their sense of graceful curve andtheir unerring precision of line. It was a moment when such things acquired a flawless purity of outline, and Longhi recognised their beauty with all the sensitive perception of the artist and the practised workman. His studies of draperies, gestures, and hands are also extraordinarily careful, and he seems besides to have an intimate acquaintance with all the elegant dissipation and languid excesses of a dying order. We feel that he has himself been at home in the masquerade, has accompanied the lady to the fortune-teller, and, leaning over her graceful shoulder, has listened to the soothsayer’s murmurs. He has attended balls and routs, danced minuets, and gossiped over tiny cups of China tea. He is the last chronicler of the Venetian feasts, and with him ends that long series that began with Giorgione’s concert and which developed and passed through suppers at Cana and banquets at the houses of Levi and the Pharisee. We are no longer confronted with the sumptuosity of Bonifazio and Veronese; the immense tables covered with gold and silver plate, the long lines of guests robed in splendid brocades, the stream of servants bearing huge salvers, or the bands of musicians, nor are there any more alfresco concerts, with nymphs and bacchantes. Instead there are masques, the life of the Ridotto or gaming-house, routs and intrigues in dainty boudoirs, and surreptitious love-making in that city of eternal carnival where thebautawasalmost a national costume. Longhi holds that post which in French art is filled by Watteau, Fragonard, and Lancret, the painters offêtes galantes, and though he cannot be placed on an equal footing with those masters, he is representative and significant enough. On his canvases are preserved for us the mysteries of the toilet, over which ladies and young men of fashion dawdled through the morning, the drinking of chocolate innégligé, the momentous instants spent in choosing headgear and fixing patches, the towers of hair built by the modish coiffeur—children trooping in, in hoops and uniforms, to kiss their mother’s hand, the fine gentleman choosing a waistcoat and ogling the pretty embroideress, the pert young maidservant slipping a billet-doux into a beauty’s hand under her husband’s nose, the old beau toying with a fan, or the discreet abbé taking snuff over the morning gazette. The grand ladies of Longhi’s day pay visits in hoop and farthingale, the beaux make “a leg,” and the lacqueys hand chocolate. The beautiful Venetians and their gallants swim through the gavotte or gamble in the Ridotto, or they hasten to assignations, disguised in widebautiand carrying preposterous muffs. The Correr Museum contains a number of his paintings and also his book of original sketches. One of the most entertaining of his canvases represents a visit of patricians to a nuns’ parlour. The nuns and their pupils lend an attentiveear to the whispers of the world. Their dresses are trimmed withpoint de Venise, and a little theatre is visible in the background. This and the “Sala del Ridotto” which hangs near, are marked by a free, bold handling, a richness of colouring, and more animation than is usual in his genre-pictures. He has not preserved the lovely, indeterminate colour or the impressionist touch which was the natural inheritance of Watteau or Tiepolo. His backgrounds are dark and heavy, and he makes too free a use of body colour; but his attitude is one of close observation—he enjoys depicting the life around him, and we suspect that he sees in it the most perfect form of social intercourse imaginable. Longhi is sometimes called the Goldoni of painting, and he certainly more nearly resembles the genial, humorous playwright than he does Hogarth, to whom he has also been compared. Yet his execution and technique are a little like Hogarth’s, and it is possible that he was influenced by the elder and stronger master, who entered on his triumphant career as a satirical painter of society about 1734. This was just the time when Longhi abandoned his unlucky decorative style, and it is quite possible that he may have met with engravings of the “Marriage à la mode,” and was stimulated by them to the study of eighteenth-century manners, though his own temperament is far removed from Hogarth’s moral force and grim satire.His serene, painstaking observation is never distracted by grossness and violence. The Venetians of his day may have been—undoubtedly were—effeminate, licentious, and decadent, but they were kind and gracious, of refined manners, well-bred, genial and intelligent, and so Longhi has transcribed them. In the time which followed, ceilings were covered by Boucher, pastels by Latour were in demand, the scholars of David painted classical scenes, and Pietro Longhi was forgotten. Antonio Francesco Correr bought five hundred of his drawings from his son, Alessandro, but his works were ignored and dispersed. The classic and romantic fashions passed, but it was only in 1850 that the brothers de Goncourt, writing on art, revived consideration for the painter of a bygone generation. Many of his works are in private collections, especially in England, but few are in public galleries. The National Gallery is fortunate in possessing several excellent examples.
Pietro Longhi.VISIT TO THE FORTUNE-TELLER.London.(Photo, Hanfstängl.)
PRINCIPAL WORKS
Bergamo.Lochis: At the Gaming Table; Taking Coffee.Baglioni: The Festival of the Padrona.Dresden.Portrait of a Lady.Hampton Court.Three genre-pictures.London.Visit to a Circus; Visit to a Fortune-Teller; Portrait.Mond Collection: Card party; Portrait.Venice.Academy: Six genre-paintings.Correr Museum: Eleven paintings of Venetian life; Portrait of Goldoni.Palazzo Grassi: Frescoes; Scenes of fashionable life.Quirini-Stampalia: Eight paintings; Portraits.
CANALE
While Piazetta and Tiepolo were proving themselves the inheritors of the great school of decorators, Venice herself was finding her chroniclers, and a school of landscape arose, of which Canale was the foremost member. Giovanni Antonio Canale was born in Venice in 1697, the same year as Tiepolo. His father earned his living at the profession, lucrative enough just then, of scene-painting, and Antonio learned to handle his brush, working at his side. In 1719 he went off to seek his fortune in Rome, and though he was obliged to help out his resources by his early trade, he was most concerned in the study of architecture, ancient and modern. Rome spoke to him through the eye, by the picturesque masses of stonework, the warm harmonious tones of classic remains and the effects of light upon them. He painted almost entirely out-of-doors, and has left many examples drawn from the ruins. His success in Rome was not remarkable, and he was stilla very young man when he retraced his steps. On regaining his native town, he realised for the first time the beauty of its canals and palaces, and he never again wavered in his allegiance.
Two rivals were already in the field, Luca Carlevaris, whose works were freely bought by the rich Venetians, and Marco Ricci, the figures in whose views of Venice were often touched in by his uncle, Sebastiano; but Canale’s growing fame soon dethroned them, “i cacciati del nido,” as he said, using Dante’s expression. In a generation full of caprice, delighting in sensational developments, Canale was methodical to a fault, and worked steadily, calmly producing every detail of Venetian landscape with untiring application and almost monotonous tranquillity. He lived in the midst of a band of painters who adored travel. Sebastiano Ricci was always on the move; Tiepolo spent much of his time in other cities and countries, and passed the last years of his life in Spain; Pietro Rotari was attached to the Court of St. Petersburg; Belotto, Canale’s nephew, settled in Bohemia; but Canale remained at home, and, except for two short visits paid to England, contented himself with trips to Padua and Verona.
Early in life Canale entered into relations with Joseph Smith, the British Consul in Venice, a connoisseur who had not only formed a fine collection of pictures, but had a gallery from which he was very ready to sell to travellers.He bought of the young Venetian at a very low price, and contrived, unfairly enough, to acquire the right to all his work for a certain period of time, with the object of sending it, at a good profit, to London. For a time Canale’s luminous views were bought by the English under these auspices, but the artist, presently discovering that he was making a bad bargain, came over to England, where he met with an encouraging reception, especially at Windsor Castle and from the Duke of Richmond. Canale spent two years in England and painted on the Thames and at Cambridge, but he could not stand the English climate and fled from the damp and fogs to his own lagoons.
To describe his paintings is to describe Venice at every hour of the day and night—Venice with its long array of noble palaces, with its Grand Canal and its narrow, picturesque waterways. He reproduces the Venice we know, and we see how little it has changed. The gondolas cluster round the landing-stages of the Piazzetta, the crowds hurry in and out of the arcades of the Ducal Palace, or he paints the festivals that still retained their splendour: the Great Bucentaur leaving the Riva dei Schiavoni on the Feast of the Ascension, or San Geremia and the entrance to the Cannaregio decked in flags for a feast-day. From one end to another of the Grand Canal, that “most beautiful street in the world,” as des Commines called it in1495, we can trace every aspect of Canale’s time, when the city had as yet lost nothing of its splendour or its animation. At the entrance stands S. Maria della Salute, that sanctuary dear to Venetian hearts, built as a votive offering after the visitation of the plague in 1631. Its flamboyant dome, with its volutes, its population of stone saints, its green bronze door catching the light, pleased Canale, as it pleased Sargent in our own day, and he painted it over and over again. The annual fête of the Confraternity of the Carità takes place at the Scuola di San Rocco, and Canale paints the old Renaissance building which shelters so much of Tintoretto’s finest work, decorated with ropes of greenery and gay with flags,[7]while Tiepolo has put in the red-robed, periwigged councillors and the gazing populace. Near it in the National Gallery hangs a “Regatta” with its array of boats, its shouting gondoliers, and its shadows lying across the range of palaces, and telling the exact hour of the day that it was sketched in; or, again, the painter has taken peculiar pleasure in expressing quiet days, with calm green waters and wide empty piazzas, divided by sun and shadow, with a few citizens plodding about their business in the hot midday, or a quiet little abbé crossing the piazza on his way to Mass. Canale has made a special study of the light on wall and façade, and of the transparentwaters of the canals and the azure skies in which float great snowy fleeces.
His second visit to England was paid in 1751. He was received with open arms by the great world, and invited to the houses of the nobility in town and country. The English were delighted with his taste and with the mastery with which he painted architectural scenes, and in spite of advancing years he produced a number of compositions, which commanded high prices. The Garden of Vauxhall, the Rotunda at Ranelagh, Whitehall, Northumberland House, Eton College, were some of the subjects which attracted him, and the treatment of which was signalised by his calm and perfect balance. He made use of the camera ottica, which is in principal identical with the camera oscura. Lanzi says he amended its defects and taught its proper use, but it must be confessed that in the careful perspective of some of his scenes, its traces seem to haunt us and to convey a certain cold regularity. Canale was a marvellous engraver. Mantegna, Bellini, and Titian had placed engraving on a very high level in the Venetian School, and though at a later date it became too elaborate, Tiepolo and his son brought it back to simplicity. Canale aided them, and hiseaux-fortes, of which he has left about thirty, are filled with light and breadth of treatment, and he is particularly happy in his brilliant, transparent water.
The high prices Canale obtained for his pictures in his lifetime led to the usual imitations. He was surrounded by painters whose whole ambition was limited to copying him. Among these were Marieschi, Visentini, Colombini, besides others now forgotten. More than fifty of his finest works were bought by Smith for George III. and fill a room at Windsor. He was made a member of the Academy at Dresden, and Bruhl, the Prime Minister of the Elector, obtained from him twenty-one works which now adorn the gallery there. Canale died in Venice, where he had lived nearly all his life, and where his gondola-studio was a familiar object in the Piazzetta, at the Lido, or anchored in the long canals.
His nephew, Bernardo Belotto, is often also called Canaletto, and it seems that both uncle and nephew were equally known by the diminutive. Belotto, too, went to Rome early in his career, where he attached himself to Panini, a painter of classic ruins, peopled with warriors and shepherds. He was, by all accounts, full of vanity and self-importance, and on a visit to Germany managed to acquire the title of Count, which he adhered to with great complacency. He travelled all over Italy looking for patronage, and was very eager to find the road to success and fortune. About the same time as his uncle, he paid a visit to London and was patronised by Horace Walpole, but in the full tide of successhe was summoned to Dresden, where the Elector, disappointed at not having secured the services of the uncle, was fain to console himself with those of the nephew. The extravagant and profligate Augustus II., whose one idea was to extract money by every possible means from his subjects, in order to adorn his palaces, was consistently devoted to Belotto, who was in his element as a Court painter. He paints all his uncle’s subjects, and it is not always easy to distinguish between the two; but his paintings are dull and stiff as compared with those of Canale, though he is sometimes fine in colour, and many of his views are admirably drawn.
SOME WORKS OF CANALE
It is impossible to draw up any exhaustive list, so many being in private collections.
Dresden.The Grand Canal; Campo S. Giacomo; Piazza S. Marco; Church and Piazza of SS. Giovanni and Paolo.Florence.The Piazzetta.Hampton Court.The Colosseum.London.Scuola di San Rocco; Interior of the Rotunda at Ranelagh; S. Pietro in Castello, Venice.Paris.Louvre: Church of S. Maria della Salute.Venice.Heading; Courtyard of a Palace.Vienna.Liechtenstein Gallery: Church and Piazza of S. Mark, Venice; Canal of the Giudecca, Venice; View on Grand Canal; The Piazzetta.Windsor.About fifty paintings.Wallace Collection.The Giudecca; Piazza San Marco; Church of San Simione; S. Maria della Salute; A Fête on the Grand Canal; Ducal Palace; Dogana from the Molo; Palazzo Corner; A Water-fête; The Rialto; S. Maria della Salute; A Canal in Venice.
FRANCESCO GUARDI
An entry in Gradenigo’s diary of 1764, preserved in the Museo Correr, speaks of “Francesco Guardi, painter of the quarter of SS. Apostoli, along the Fondamenta Nuove, a good pupil of the famous Canaletto, having by the aid of the camera ottica, most successfully painted two canvases (not small) by the order of a stranger (an Englishman), with views of the Piazza San Marco, towards the Church and the Clock Tower, and of the Bridge of the Rialto and buildings towards the Cannaregio, and have to-day examined them under the colonnades of the Procurazie and met with universal applause.”
Francesco Guardi was a son of the Austrian Tyrol, and his mountain ancestry may account, as in the case of Titian, for the freshness and vigour of his art. Both his father, who settled in Venice, and his brother were painters. His son became one in due time, and the profession being followed by four members of the familyaccounts for the indifferent works often attributed to Guardi.
His indebtedness to Canale is universally acknowledged, and perhaps it is true that he never attains to the monumental quality, the traditional dignity which marks Canale out as a great master, but he differs from Canale in temperament, style, and technique. Canale is a much more exact and serious student of architectural detail; Guardi, with greater visible vigour, obliterates detail, and has no hesitation in drawing in buildings which do not really appear. In his oval painting of the Ducal Palace (Wallace Collection) he makes it much loftier and more spacious than it really is. In his “Piazzetta” he puts in a corner of the Loggia where it would not actually be seen. In the “Fair in Piazza S. Marco” the arch from under which the Fair appears is gigantic, and he foreshortens the wing of the royal palace. He curtails the length of the columns in the piazza and so avoids monotony of effect, and he often alters the height of the campaniles he uses, making them tall and slender or short and broad, as his picture requires. At one time he produced some colossal pictures, in several of which Mr. Simonson, who has written an admirable life of the painter, believes that the hand of Canale is perceptible in collaboration; but it was not his natural element, and he often became heavy in colour and handling. In 1782 he undertook acommission from Pietro Edwards, who was a noted connoisseur and inspector of State pictures, and had been appointed superintendent in 1778 of an official studio for the restoration of old masters.
Edwards had important dealings with Guardi, who was directed to paint four leading incidents in the rejoicings in honour of the visit of Pius IV. to Venice. The Venetians themselves had become indifferent patrons of art, but Venice attracted great numbers of foreign visitors, and before the second half of the eighteenth century the export of old masters had already become an established trade. There is no sign, however, that Joseph Smith, who retained his consulship till 1760, extended any patronage to Guardi, though he enriched George III.’s collection with works of the chief contemporary artists of Venice. It is probable that Guardi had been warned against him by Canale and profited by the latter’s experience.
We can divide his work into three categories. 1. Views of Venice. 2. Public ceremonies. 3. Landscapes. Gradenigo mentions casually that he used the camera ottica, but though we may consider it probable, we cannot trace the use of it in his works. He is not only a painter of architecture, but pays great attention to light and atmosphere, and aims at subtle effects; a transparent haze floats over the lagoons, or the sun pierces though the morning mists. His four large pendants in the Wallace Collectionshow his happiest efforts; light glances off the water and is reflected on the shadowed walls. His views round the Salute bring vividly before us those delicious morning hours in Venice when the green tide has just raced up the Grand Canal, when a fresh wind is lifting and curling all the loose sails and fluttering pennons, and when the gondoliers are straining at the oars, as their light craft is caught and blown from side to side upon the rippling water. The sky occupies much of his space, he makes searching studies of it, and his favourite effect is a flash of light shooting across a piled-up mass of clouds. The line of the horizon is low, and he exhibits great mastery in painting the wide lagoons, but he also paints rough seas, and is one of the few masters of his day—perhaps the only one—who succeeds in representing a storm at sea.
Often as he paints the same subjects he never becomes mechanical or photographic. We may sometimes tire of the monotony of Canale’s unerring perspective and accurate buildings, but Guardi always finds some new rendering, some fresh point of interest. Sometimes he gives us a summer day, when Venice stands out in light, her white palaces reflected in the sun-illumined water; sometimes he is arrested by old churches bathed in shadow and fusing into the rich, dark tones of twilight. His boats and figures are introduced with great spirit andbrio, and arealive with that handling which a French critic has described as hisgriffe endiablée.