Venice Through the Eyes of Canaletto and Turner

In the 18th century Venice was full of foreign visitors, many of them British. They wanted souvenirs, and the finest souvenir of Venice was a veduta, a painted view of the city.^{1, 4}

Giovanni Antonio Canal, known as Canaletto, was born in Venice in 1697. He started out painting theater scenery with his father, and in Rome, around 1719–20, he gave up the stage for views of real places.¹

Back in Venice he did something unusual for a painter of his time: he worked outdoors, from nature, and he insisted on reliable pigments. You can see it in the way sunlight, shadow and clouds play over his buildings.¹

In the 1730s, demand for his views was so high that Canaletto could no longer paint everything on the spot. He worked from drawings, sometimes even from other artists' engravings.¹

He used a camera ottica, a box with a lens that projected the view onto a sheet of ground glass, as a basis for his drawings, and he put buildings and figures in place with ruler and compasses. He produced so many views that people assumed he ran a large workshop, though there is no evidence of one.¹

Success did not make him easier to deal with. As early as 1727, one of his English patrons, Owen Mac Swinney, wrote:¹

J. M. W. Turner first came to Italy in the summer of 1819. He spent three months in Rome, visited Naples, Florence and Venice, and filled sketchbooks with about 1,500 drawings on the journey.²

He came back to Venice in 1833, and again around 1840.^{3, 5} Where Canaletto counted windows, Turner looked at the air between the buildings and the water beneath them.

This view started as a slight pencil drawing from Turner's first trip, in 1819. But the painting really comes from his second visit, in 1833. He showed it at the Royal Academy in London in 1835, to wide acclaim.³

The Met describes how the foundations of the palaces “merge into the waters of the lagoon” through delicate reflections, a skill Turner owed to years of painting the sea and to his work in watercolor.³

In 1833 Turner exhibited a Venetian view with a long title: Bridge of Sighs, Ducal Palace and Custom-House, Venice: Canaletti Painting. It names the older master, more than sixty years after his death. The painting is now at Tate, in London.⁵

Two ways of seeing the same city: one exact, one atmospheric. Venice has room for both.

A detailed, Canaletto-like view rewards a close look: hang it where people pass near it, in a hallway or beside a reading chair.

A soft, Turner-like haze works from across the room. It needs space around it and gentle light, and it calms a busy wall.