65. Alnwick Castle, Northumberland, c. 1752.

Oil on canvas, 113.5 x 139.5 cm.

Alnwick Castle, Alnwick.

 

 

On some days, it seemed as if the master had exhausted the themes that the multiform and polychromatic Venice of his times offered his brush. Over time, he shed the rigorous judgement learned from the techniques of the elder Pannini, who remained faithful to Rome under Caesar. Canaletto had begun to imagine, like Turner, Ziem and so many other contemplators of Venice’s many faces would later do, chimerical and imaginary visions of the city of Doges. He delighted in composing unusually inventive canvases, depicting rippling waters, fairytale horizons, superb, hypothetical architecture, marked by extravagant palaces and wide perspectives inspired by his capricious imagination. These scenes were certainly painted with the same creative liberty seen in his first works sixty years earlier, when he constructed geographically unknown towns in the backdrops of the San Salvador and San Moïse theatres. In these works, which gave him a rest from the astute precision of his Venice portraits, the old painter discovered a reflection of past ages. He found himself full of fire and fed by hope as he avidly watched the famous Luca Carlevaris descend from his gondola at the stairway of the Zenobio house, the noble family whose patronage had afforded him his very unusual surname.

 

Then came that luminous evening of April 20, 1768, while Venice shone under the pink twilight, the subtle hues of which Canaletto had observed so often in his camera obscura, an evening of peaceful tones, it was heard along the Piazzetta, at the Caffè Florian, at the Lido, and the Artists’ Café, near the Barettieri Bridge, often frequented by the painter, that none would ever again see that hard-working old man hanging about, pencil in hand, on his gondola studio that sat in the canal’s big double bends. Canaletto had just closed, forever, his eyes that had so idolized and reflected the beauty of his city’s image. With his death, a bit of the old Venetian Republic’s fading glory died too.

 

It occasionally arises, in the course of certain human destinies, that providential chance grants to one whom it favours a comfortable existence, garnished with the successes capping each of his or her enterprises, and over the course of which all events seem to affirm, if not an internal and ineffable happiness, at least a constant triumph gaining even the recognition of posterity. Canaletto seems to have been one of those lucky winners in the lottery of good fortune. Putting aside his undeniable talent, it was also thanks to an uninterrupted run of good luck that opened to him the paths to a great reputation that he knew this pleasurable life of ease, this labour repaid by the respect of his contemporaries and this renown for his great talent, all of which contribute still today to the immortality of his name and works. Having come to light in Venice, at the close of the seventeenth century, an hour quite favourable for taking the top rank in the new, eighteenth century Venetian school of painters, having received, at birth, the fortuitous name of “Canal”, immediately transformed into “Canaletto”, so marvellously appropriate in its synthesis to the most representative painter of the calli and canali of this glorious city, pearl of the admirable Orient of the Adriatic, having pushed himself, over a long life of seventy-one years, to paint with an equal awareness and a consistently explosive talent the portraits of his birth city (the Canaletti, as we now refer to his canvases), were there not, in this simple series of facts, many serendipitous windfalls and graceful smiles of fate?