Vista Alegre Crystal Única Large Vase Caneleto Blue

Product Information

As part of the Met's Open Access policy, you can freely copy, modify and distribute this image, even for commercial purposes. API Charles Beddington has published and lectured widely on Canaletto and other 18th-century Italian view painters. Amanda Bradley is Assistant Curator of Pictures and Sculpture, The National Trust.

Frances Vivian. Il Console Smith mercante e collezionista. Vicenza, 1971, p. 32, maintains that the views engraved by Visentini for the 1942 edition of "Prospectus Magni Canalis" passed through Consul Smith's hands.

While his commercially focused paintings were looked down on by leading figures of Venice’s art world – Canaletto was only admitted into the Venetian Academy in the final decade of his life in the 1760s – his work became a window into his beguiling, vibrant city. A series of architectural structures dominate the canvas of Canaletto's Architectural Capriccio. The largest building, occupying the right foreground of the canvas, features an arch under which one man sits while another two figures are seen passing through. The "Capriccio" of the painting's title acts to inform the spectator that the painting is in fact a fantasy; albeit a fantasy grounded in reality.

The most celebrated view painter of eighteenth-century Venice, Canaletto was particularly popular with British visitors to the city. This wonderfully fresh and well-preserved canvas shows one of the city's most emblematic locations, the Piazza San Marco. Canaletto reduced the number of windows in the bell tower and extended the height of the flagstaffs, but otherwise he took few liberties with the cityscape. In fact, this painting can be situated among the artist’s other views of the square because of his meticulous documentation of various stages in the laying of its pavement between 1725 and 1727. View more Listen The Piazza San Marco looking towards the Basilica San Marco and the Campanile by Canaletto. From the Woburn Abbey Collection Constable, W.G (1962). Canaletto, Giovanni Antonio Canal 1697-1768, Volume One: Life and Work, The Plates. Oxford, Clarendon Press. p.9. ISBN 0198173245.Much of Canaletto's early artwork was painted "from nature", differing from the then customary practice of completing paintings in the studio. Some of his later works do revert to this custom, as suggested by the tendency for distant figures to be painted as blobs of colour – an effect possibly produced by using a camera obscura, which blurs farther-away objects – although research by art historians working for the Royal Collection in the United Kingdom has shown Canaletto almost never used a camera obscura.

Bernardo Bellotto, also known as "Canaletto" in Germany and Poland, was Canaletto's nephew and pupil [24] We have a magnificent view of the Grand Canal in Venice during the annual regatta, which was held on 2 February and attracted large numbers of visitors each year. All eyes are on the one-oared gondolas racing up the middle of the canal. Just right of centre two craft swing around the bend, tilted and almost touching, trying to catch up with the leaders. Another boat follows on the far right. Spectators cheer from windows and balconies, from gondolas and lavishly decorated bissone (eight- or ten-oared boats). After returning from Rome in 1719, he began painting in his topographical style. His first known signed and dated work is Architectural Capriccio (1723, Milan, in a private collection). Studying with the older Luca Carlevarijs, a well-regarded painter of urban cityscapes, he rapidly became his master's equal.At the height of Canaletto's fame, his workshop offered the finest training a view painter could receive. He taught his nephew Bernardo Bellotto (1721–1780), whose views are sometimes confused with those of his uncle. A unique characteristic of Bellotto's style is his vibrant blue sky, seen most dramatically in The Piazzetta, Looking North (c. 1743). Only limited biographical details exist about Giovanni Antonio Canal, the artist better known as Canaletto. His parents, mother Artemisia Barbieri, and father Bernardo Canal (the mononym Canaletto simple means "Little Canal"), were members of an upper-class Venetian society which, according to art historian and Canaletto specialist, Bożena Anna Kowalczyk, included "noblemen and attadini originarii ('original citizens')." Canaletto was in fact proud of his ancestry and would later boast of depicting "the Canal family's coat of arms (a silver shield surmounted by a blue roe) into the works he was especially proud of." Indeed, in seeking to authenticate an unsigned and undated painting gifted to the University of Aberdeen (known only as "Ruins of the Temple") Art Historian John Gash, and leading Canaletto scholar Charles Beddington, were able to authenticate the painting of Roman ruins by this means. As Gash was able to explain, "Occasionally, Canaletto did sign his works but not in this example. However in the middle of the painting is a ruin which displays the coat of arms of his family. It's unlikely someone else would include that, so it acts as a kind of surrogate signature." The city that modern writers, film-makers and artists have portrayed is a place of shadows and memories, a ludicrously beautiful, impossible city where dream and reality are hard to tell apart. You can find that same mystery within the rational, meticulous views of Canaletto, but 24 views are quite a lot. And I am glad the city’s history did not stop in 1731 but has come into modern times when we plebeians can go there, too – even if we do spoil the view. The Ponte delle Guglie (‘bridge of the obelisks’) spans the water. We can just make out the tiny silhouettes of people crossing it, while others emerge into the sunlight along the waterfront. Beyond this is an area known as the ghetto, where, from the early sixteenth century, the Jewish population was forced by decree to live. City of Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. "Treasures from Midland Homes," November 2–December 2, 1938, one of nos. 151– 55, 157–61, 164–68, 170–74 (as "Twenty Views of Venice," by Canaletto, lent by the Exors. of Sir R. G. Harvey, Bt.).