The Venice of Our Dreams


Is it annoying to hear the gleeful comments of museum visitors trying to determine the precise location of Harry's Bar and the Danieli Hotel, or grinning with delight at realizing that a certain painting (Michele Marieschi's "The Bacino di San Marco," 1739-40) looks like it must have been painted from the Hotel Cipriani's motorboat dock? I think not. Indeed, the joy of recognition is part of what gives extra life to the delightful exhibition "Venice: Canaletto and His Rivals" at Washington's National Gallery of Art. Generally arranged in chronological order, the 50 paintings provide both a rich visual feast and an understanding of the competitive market challenges faced by the one pre-eminent artist in a familiar niche of Italian art: the vedutisti , or painters of cities and seascapes.

The show's title aptly suggests that Giovanni Antonio Canal (1697-1768), generally known as Canaletto, was so important to our mental picture of La Serenissima—that magical floating city—as to make of his contemporaries simply rivals. On some levels the case is easily made. The Venice of our dreams and visions is probably more Canaletto's than anyone else's—not only because we've seen these paintings in most of the world's great museum collections, but also because they speak to our memories. After all, they were commissioned as tourist art before the age of photography and postcards, when souvenirs of Venice were actually made in Italy, rather than in China.

Canaletto, 'The Piazza San Marco, Looking East' (c. 1723)
Canaletto, 'The Piazza San Marco, Looking East' (c. 1723) Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid. Photo: Jose Loren

But this exhibition is about more than an especially familiar niche in 18th-century Italian painting. The earliest work on view, by a Netherlandish artist, Gaspar van Wittel (known as Gaspare Vanvitelli)—"The Molo from the Bacino di San Marco" (1697)—seems to set the challenge for the rest of the artists in this exhibition, and we're off to watch what rivalry means. Vanvitelli's painting feels more accurate and straightforward than Canaletto's dramatic, even somber, "The Piazza San Marco, looking East" (1723). And yet even in his early—and faintly dour—works, Canaletto gives us views that are more sensuous and appealing than those of his rivals.

Indeed, Venice is so much about atmosphere and light that we revel in Canaletto's ways of playing with our emotions, as in the dramatic view of "The Campo Santi Giovanni e Paolo" (1725), where Verrocchio's majestic equestrian bronze of Bartolomeo Colleoni, ordinarily a commanding presence of that vista, seems incidental here—as does Pietro Lombardo and Mauro Codussi's magnificent early-16th-century facade of the Scuola Grande di San Marco facing us. Painting the same scene 20 years later, Canaletto's nephew (and student), Bernardo Bellotto, brightens the mood a bit but still focuses on atmospherics, rather than the monuments we would see while ambling through the piazza. This is the artist telling us what we ought to see—as any good souvenir seller would—and our accepting it because that is the way we want to remember things.

There's also the artist as Photoshop master. Important monuments are compressed to ensure their inclusion—sort of like huddling your family close together so that everyone will fit into the snapshot. This can lead exhibition viewers to spend a lot of time trying to figure out how many domes the Basilica San Marco actually has, or the height and true location of the Campanile, at the intersection of the Piazzetta (which leads to the lagoon) and the Piazza San Marco. And there are puzzling omissions from these scenes, as when Sansovino's exquisite Loggetta, at the base of the Campanile—which competes well with its neighboring buildings when one is actually in situ—is reduced to an inconsequential blur by both Canaletto and Belloto. It's a tribute to the power of this exhibition that gallery visitors can be seen looking at (and often recognizing) details, discussing experiences, and—most significantly—moving their eyes from one of the views to another, checking out how different artists treat similar scenes. Here is that rare and exciting moment in a museum: people carefully examining the paintings.

Venice: Canaletto And His Rivals

  • National Gallery of Art
  • Through May 30

The rivals fare pretty well here, although Marieschi's two views of the Rialto Bridge (c. 1736) have a kind of surreal spatial effect, and after the joy of "seeing Venice without all those tourists" there's something disconcerting about the several paintings that depict festivals and historical events. Antonio Joli manages to paint an official procession into a spectacularly exaggerated perspective of "The Courtyard of the Doge's Palace" (c. 1742), which works to better effect than Marieschi's view of the same architecture without all the people, and is also more effective than Canaletto's "Reception of the French Ambassadors" (c. 1727).

Taking these "other" artists seriously is one of the show's major rewards. Another is the chance to see Bellotto's paintings cheek-by-jowl with his more famous uncle's. It's a great opportunity to understand how differently artists can present the feel of light—which is, after all, a Venetian essence. Bellotto gives us a silvery Venice, especially evident in his "Entrance to the Grand Canal, Looking East, With Santa Maria Della Salute" (c. 1743); Canaletto generally sticks with a more golden glow. These are early works for Bellotto, where he succeeds at a kind of drama not seen in his better-known and magnificent views of Dresden and Warsaw. But they ask us to reconsider our memories, as does the exhibition's wrap-up artist—the last of these great view-makers, Francesco Guardi. Guardi's paintings here seem moody and even sad—as if the celebratory atmosphere had changed. And it had; Venice continued its decline.

This rich exhibition, accompanied by a splendidly illustrated and informative catalog by Charles Beddington, reminds us that few places on earth are so much about imagined vision—the artists' and ours.


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