Canaletto [antikvár]

IntroductionGiovanni Antonio Canal was born in Venice on October i8th 1697. His parents belonged to a respectable and well-defined class of Venetian society, and there are documents which show that the family was in possession of some property.Bernardo Canal, the father, was a scene-painter. Theatrical sets were at that time complicated and highy fanciful: a typical backdrop would have a soaring perspective of arches, and a near-impossible combination of architectural details. The Bibiena family (from Rome) was particularly notable for this kind of fantasy and influenced theatrical design all over Italy (figure 2). Any artist might find such scene-painting an avid or frivolous exercise, but it would at least provide a worthwhile lesson in the problems of perspective. Antonio Canal therefore began his artistic career by assisting his father in the theatre, and the diminutive name Canaletto seems to have been adopted fairly early in order to distinguish the son from father.In 1719, they both travelled to Rome where they are known to have made sets for two operas by Scarlatti (Tito Sempronico Gracco and Turno Aricino) which were performed during the carnival of 1720. Canaletto was still working in the theatre, but he was anxious to use his talents in other directions. Contemporary writers, Zanetti for example, record that he was painting landscapes and sketching the ruins of Rome, but no paintings of this period are known. It is not even certain that the series of Roman drawings usually attributed to him, now in the British Museum and at Darmstadt, are in fact the work of his hand. If the attribution is correct, they indicate that Canaletto acquired early experience in topographical draughtsmanship. His later, highly accomplished views of Venice would seem to point to this and it seems probable that the Roman sketches provided him with subject material which he was to use some twenty years later.Canaletto was probably back in Venice by 1720, since in the register of the Brotherhood of Painters, the Fittori nella Fraglia nelVanno i68y, appears the entry: 'Canal, Antonio, 1720'. Certainly he had returned by 1722, when his name appears together with other artists involved in a project supervised by Owen McSwiney. Several years earlier Mc-Swiney had left England following bankruptcy while manager of the Queen's Theatre in London. He travelled in France and Italy, arranging for performances of Italian operas in London and he also acted as artistic agent to the Earl of March (later Duke of Richmond). The commission in which Canaletto was involved was to be a series of paintings, each depicting the tomb of a notable Englishman in a landscape and/or architectural setting. Twenty-four paintings were eventually executed, of which Canaletto collaborated in two. He apparently stopped working for McSwiney after a short time, presumably in order to attend to the demands of other patrons. For example, the four views of Venice, formerly in the Liechtenstein Collection, must have been completed not later than 1723 because the pavement of the Piazza San Marco was re-laid in that year and one of the views shows the old brick paving that was replaced (see note to plate i).Canaletto's career as a painter of views had begun. In 1725 he was commissioned to provide two pairs of paintings for Stefano Conti, a merchant from Lucca. These paintings (now in the Pillow Collection, Montreal) are very well documented. Each pair has a memorandum, signed and dated by the artist, giving a description of each canvas, stating the price and acknowledging receipt of the payment. The prices are high, and suggest that Canaletto already had plenty of work and had achieved a certain recognition. Various other letters of this time, in particular those from McSwiney to the Duke of Richmond, indicate that Canaletto was not an easy person to deal with. For example, on