67. Warwick Castle, East Façade, 1748-1749.

Oil on canvas, 73 x 122 cm.

Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Birmingham.

 

 

The life of such a painter, smitten so by his model that he continuously reproduced all her traits, expressions, characters, faces, profiles and physiognomies varying with the enveloping light of the lagoons, could have been nothing other than prodigiously productive. The quantity of his scenic portraits of the Doge’s city was so considerable that today there are few galleries in Europe and America that cannot boast some of his works. All of them are authentic and, generally speaking, cannot be disputed. However, copies, imitations, and replicas produced by unknown disciples and very skilful counterfeiters do abound. But the master’s mark of quality stands out so clearly, so convincingly and so inalienably in his oeuvre that, truthfully speaking, confusion comes rarely to the eye of the connoisseur.

 

Canaletto was a patient and meticulous artist. He assiduously applied himself to developing and tuning up his talent, which was honest, conscientious, and, on occasion, rather fanciful. It is to his credit that, up until his very last hour, he never gave in to any carelessness to which the popularity of his mastery and the growing number of amateur enthusiasts throughout Europe, wishing to possess his canvases, could have dragged him. Also to his credit, he shared his talent wisely in his refusal to tarnish his artistic value by undertaking minor projects simply for financial gain. It is certainly true that he frequently, and pleasurably, returned to certain outstanding compositions offered by the Grand Canal, such as his views of the Salute church, the customs house, the Piazzetta, the Doges’ Palace, the Procuratie arches, the Rialto Bridge, and others. But with ease he differentiated each of these works, perspicaciously choosing specific angles that would lend each canvas a uniqueness of expression; for as much, we would certainly regret the loss of even one of these works.

 

He pursued his sage artistic career, at every moment of his life, with prudence and contemplation. He was not an impulsive, capricious, whimsical, frivolous or fickle soul, but an attentive and minute worker who took great pains to always improve and to ameliorate his technique with perfection as his constant goal. A realist in his singular and obstinate manner of detailing his canvases, a lover of truth, exactness, accuracy and soundness in the composition of his scenes produced with a desire for resemblance, he sought to reconstruct, with his rare sensibility, the enchantment of lighting and atmosphere that bathes so variously, from one day or hour to the next, the most magnificent urban scenery in the world. Canaletto did not exhibit, like the fiery Tiepolo and the lavish Guardi, a taste for magnifying his visions with impetuous ardour, peculiar to those kinds of brilliant virtuosos. He didn’t have the temperament of an illustrator passionate for exuberant colours and the cinematic. Architectural precision dominated his work, disciplined his methods of execution, regulated the flow of his talent and presided over his composition and the thoughtful order of his distribution of colours. His true personality was hardly just to be found in the art of interpreting Venetian skies, so delightfully iridescent with any cloud arrangement.

 

It also asserted itself in the pictorial techniques he used for bodies of water and canals, the aspects of which he most fortunately knew how to vary by using a process that was his alone. Living and working in the midst of a capricious generation hungry for surprises, he seemed almost excessively methodical as he reproduced, with no anxiety or worries, every aspect of the city of Venice.

 

His tendency to constantly work explains the brevity of art historians regarding Canaletto’s life. However, although biographical details escape the most painstaking research, and although Canaletto, the man, remains a mystery, few artists are as omnipresent in museums and the most important collections. In Paris as in Saint Petersburg, in England as in Germany, one can easily get acquainted with his style based on works that are as significant as they are interesting. One might say of Canaletto the same thing that Zanetti wrote about Vittore Carpaccio: “Aveva in cuore la Veriia” (“He had truth in his heart”). Canaletto, of course, always preserved the truth inside his heart. His optical chamber gave him a mirror image of his naked goddess who he worshipped by painting all of her various faces. Canaletto comes easily to mind when reading the pages that Ruskin devoted to the pleasures of viewing in his study of modern painters. He noticed that visual pleasures, grouped and combined in such a way so that one exalts the other to a degree that chance can not produce, determined not only a feeling of deep affection for the object in which they resided, but also an intelligence of design and the adaptations of this object to our desires. It is from this kind of artistic intelligence that the joy, admiration and gratitude that Canaletto preserved before his Venice, up until his last hour, were born. As her portraitist, Venice was the eternal object of his inclinations, desires, attention, and passionate love.