99. The Porta Portello, Padua, c. 1741-1742.

Oil on canvas, 62 x 109 cm.

National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

 

 

Quite often, writers have praised the purity of Italian nights; nights illuminated just enough to preserve the colours of the objects whose contours they blur. Like Cairo, Venice could be nicknamed “Queen of the Night”. Under the sky’s sparkling stars, the waters endlessly lap while moonbeams, surfacing through breaks in the clouds, hang their silver strips of colour on small, cresting waves. On top of this magical mirror surrounded by indistinct forms, the gondolas silently glide, like cradles and caskets floating on a nameless river that leads to Eternity. Under the light of the moon, the buildings, which are always so interesting to look at in broad daylight, take on a magical appearance. The scene is totally enchanting, although against the universal silence, the wind weakly echoes a boatman’s refrain. On some nights Venice slept not, celebrating its increasing number of festivals. The city lent its ears some nights to harmonious symphonies echoing throughout the marble palaces with a particular colour of sonority; on others, it celebrated religious feast days with white nights.

 

At Christmas, the doge and the senate made night-time pilgrimages aboard the Republic’s golden gondolas to the brightly lit San Giorgio Maggiore church. A bridge was built between Venice and the Giudecca Canal so that the crowds could celebrate in the Church of the Holy Redeemer. Canaletto depicted this scene in one of his canvases. Likewise, he preserved the memory of Saint Martha’s Vigil. In this painting, the moonlight dominates so strongly that the boats can move about without need of lanterns to light the way, while, on the shore among the large concourse of spectators, only a few tents are illuminated.[20] Accompanying these scenes from Venice, whose sheer number entails a monotonous fastidiousness, Canaletto’s oeuvre also offers a series of imaginative paintings that are no less interesting.

 

Though the discipline assumed by this docile observer did not suppress his inventive faculties, his fantasies never display the solemn, grandiose character of Piranesi compositions. In the words of Lanzi, they offer an ingenious mélange of the ancient and modern, of the fictive and real, so fortuitously combined that “most of their viewers believe they have rediscovered nature where connoisseurs perceive a work of art”. Had not Canaletto learned his taste for this kind of arrangement during his early education in the theatre under his father’s guidance? Furthermore, do we not find in his paintings from this latter genre certain reminders of his former occupation? Cited as works of real interest are his paintings in which he replaced the Rialto Bridge with a model of the Palladio and others where he grouped the Vicenza cathedral and the Chericato palace, buildings that were designed by the same architect, in the same landscape. Zanotti does not accord even the slightest praise to an important panel that Canaletto painted for the Fine Arts Academy. The artist had made use of an opulent, Tuscan style vestibule leading out to a garden and enlivened by several characters, such as is seen in canvases executed by Count Algarotti. The latter, one of the most cultured minds in Venice who, throughout his life, reconciled a passion for scientific precision with a taste for fine arts and poetry, professed the most flattering praise for Canaletto’s work.

 

All of the painter’s works, whether they represent well-known places or monuments created in his unique imagination, belie a knowledge of both his own artistic theory and the science of artistic practices. And one will recall that in order to achieve the most integral exactness and to shorten the preliminary task of organizing, he had the aid of his camera obscura. Now known for having popularized its use, he only turned to it in order to tastefully interpret the mathematical givens of line and measure. His artistic qualities were all learned; it is assumed that they resulted more from his efforts than his natural gifts. Although, in his personality, he seems to have attached a major importance to pure skills in his profession, the overall excellence of his paintings and the colours he uses to vary the tiresome symmetry of architectural landscapes merit much artistic appreciation. Besides, does not his true superiority surface when one compares him to some of his contemporaries from the Netherlands, like Van Wytel and Berkeyden? There happens to be a lot of difference between his wonderful candour and the minute exactness of these two, that is to say, between the Venetian’s brilliant interpretations and the overly exact reproductions of the Dutch artists whose conscientiousness borders on slavishness.