43. View of Capitole Square,
the Cordonata, Rome. Private Collection.
The painting of scenery does not involve painting just any garden, or a classic public place, a common salon or living room, or even gangplanks along the lagoon. It requires a special savoir-faire and a talent for daring and original compositions. In the middle of the eighteenth century, Venice was more endowed with theatres than Paris, which only had about four or five, while there were seven or eight in the Venetian Republic. These playhouses bore the names of the parishes in which they were set up. The renowned Venetian stages were designated by the names San Moïse de Canale Reggio, San Samuelo, Sant’Apollinaire, Santa Marina, San Salvadore and San Fantino. There was certainly a lot of work in scenery renewal because programmes were frequently changed. Italian theatre, whose performances were often considered uncouth since they were similar to the burlesque farces, sometimes went off into a land of fantasy with their plays. Because it chose imaginary fairies as its characters, it required an unusual, mythical kind of scenery, populated with chimerical landscapes, phantasmagoric palaces and huge forests with delightful vistas of fantastic, dreamlike lands.
As he worked for a long time with Luca Calevaris, Canaletto’s father benefited from a superior cultural apprenticeship and technique. A first class artist, also known as Luca di cà Zenobio, he was not only a theatrical decorator but a very distinguished landscape artist, demonstrating incomparable perspective skill and engravings of a rare kind. In 1706, he published a collection, One Hundred Views of Venice, which featured boards cut with a maestria. The work conferred him the greatest of honours, assuring him even today the admiration of iconography collectors.
Early on, Canaletto worked alongside his father and acquired, through the exercise of his father’s trade, quickness of hand, a sure eye and skilled technique with the brush that are evident in the quality of his works. Indeed, between Bernardo Canal, who was his teacher, and Calevaris, who was friend and collaborator to him, Il Tottino found an environment that was favourable to his artistic development. At the same time, he was taught the architectural perspective of landscape and the harmony of interior designs in addition to techniques of burin and etching engraving that he was to bring up to a degree of perfection and originality that had never before been seen. Therefore, Canaletto’s youth was partially spent in his father’s studio where he painted wide, fanciful canvases to be used as backgrounds and supporting pieces bearing the scenic action of the Comedia dell’Arte. The masked characters (Pantalone, Harlequin, Punchinello, the Doctor from Bologna, Isabella, Flavio, Il Capitano, Pierrot and Scaramouch) interpreted, against these trompe l’œil stage backgrounds, plays that were hardly recognizable, always rushed, and often improvised before a noisy audience. Between the ages of sixteen and twenty, Canaletto painted his scenery with all that in mind. Without a doubt, this gave him a greater knowledge and flexibility in the exercise of the difficult science of perspective, which perhaps never underwent such great developments as it did in the eighteenth century.
But soon, tired of the rough art of theatrical perspective, typically exaggerated and far from reality, Il Tottino worked to move away from the artificial, ephemeral, and illusory style of theatrical painting so that he could paint with the traditional easel, as he felt he was born to do. The son wanted to go beyond what his father could accomplish, to achieve an art that was more refined, less precarious and better adapted to his desire for artistic synthesis. He had already felt a rising passion for every aspect of his beloved Venice, for whom he hoped to become the gifted portraitist.
His Beginnings and Rome
Venetian landscape painting, suffering a long evanescence for nearly a century, beginning around the death of Tintoretto, slowly began to show signs of new life, spurred on by some of the painters from Belluno, such as Sebastiano Ricci and his nephew Marco who sought to magnify nature and to populate it with archaeological monuments and allegorical, pastoral characters. Noticeable everywhere was the influence of Poussin and Claude Lorrain, who had, with so much sensitivity, ennobled the landscape by adding august structures from Antiquity and vaguely idyllic characters, shepherds and nude figures, placing their scenery on the scale of human proportions and conferring a special harmony to their poetic compositions.
Giovanni Paolo Pannini’s early works clearly influenced him and he was no less indifferent to the open, clear and undulating style of Tiepolo. In his writings on Canaletto, the Italian poet and painter Giovanni Andrea Zanotti explained that his dream of success was very quickly realized. In effect, his ambition consisted of quickly becoming a master painter of all the sights, views, perspectives, aspects, landscapes, characters, figures and scenery that his beloved Venice unveiled to him at all times of the day on his walks through the maze of its calli. He also loved unique, original techniques, suitable to precisely depict the architectural lines that he had decided to translate into a spellbinding portrait of sparkling colour. His pink and pearly white city, reflected in the zigzagged lapping of its waters, called him to be its painter. He was haunted by the variety of its incomparable lighting, by its smiles under the sun and its beauty just as picturesque from any point of view.
In Venice, Canaletto achieved a reputation for brilliance in a very short time. In particular, people thought he was unique and that he had new ideas about artistic arrangements, allowing them to appreciate even his early works. One might think that the few years he spent working on theatrical decorations would have sufficed to give him an awareness of his value as an artist. As soon as he finished the studies needed to strengthen his drawing technique, Canaletto, who was barely twenty-two, left for Rome.
By this time, he had already set foot upon the path to specialized pictorial art, a fact which must have secured him a professional reputation. He found that he was finally ready to leave his wings behind and move on, as he put it. So he left for the Eternal City and showed up at Pannini’s door. Pannini was twenty-eight at the time and his work was well known in Venice. He had also started out in theatrical scenery. Pannini was a total success and, of course, he didn’t at all regret that he had left his hometown of Piacenza. He had created a rather brilliant scenery design school that Roman artists used to attend, where he taught the science of perspectives. For pleasure, he would frequently walk through the ruins of Ancient Rome where he would work on his own projects, sketching the objects he found, such as the statue of Marcus Aurelius, the inside of Saint Peter’s and the Colosseum, of which he made a model in his studio.