Canaletto and the image of Venice

Canaletto & the Art of Venice at The Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace (19 May – 12 November) showcases one of the most important collections of 18th century Venetian art in the world.  More than 200 paintings, drawings and prints – all from the Royal Collection – explore how Antonio Canaletto (1697 – 1768) and his contemporaries captured the allure of this most evocative of cities.

As much as to any artist, the exhibition serves as testament to Joseph Smith, collector, dealer, artist’s patron-cum-agent, and (when he had time) British consul in Venice from 1744 to 1760. Smith’s collection was bought almost in its entirety by George III in 1762 to furnish the newly purchased Buckingham House (later Buckingham Palace).  In fact the paintings now on display were a £10,000 royal afterthought once the bibliophile King George had secured Smith’s magnificent Library.

The Porte Del Dolo c.1740, etching

The artists of this last great cultural flowering of the maritime Republic – before it was swallowed up into Napoleon’s European empire – shared a sense of theatre, and an appreciation of  the interplay of light and colour. The son of a leading theatrical scene painter, Canaletto elevated landscape painting while his peers concentrated on their more respectable ‘histories’, allegories and portraits. His market was foreigners, particularly the British – who (encouraged by Consul Smith) snapped up his glistening veduti of canals, palaces, churches and piazzas. Canaletto’s architecture is a glorious backdrop to the regular festivals, masques and ceremonies of the Venetian calendar.

With his nephew Bernardo Bellotto, Canaletto started making etchings in the early 1740s, mostly real and semi-imaginary landscapes inspired by the Venetian mainland. The 31 plates resulting from a journey the two artists made along the Brenta canal were published as a set in 1744 – a kind of prospectus – with an engraved title page dedicated to Smith.

Title plate with a dedication to Joseph Smith 1744, etching

Almost inevitably, these black and white compositions are a little overshadowed by the larger, showy, brightly painted canvasses hanging in the adjacent rooms. After all, the prints were not originally intended for framing and display like pictures, but were bound in an album on Smith’s shelves. Nonetheless the true print lover cannot help but be impressed by the range of light and shade skilfully evoked by varying the space between sinuous etched parallel lines. There is very little of the sometimes rather crude cross-hatching employed by northern printmakers to produce tone.

Final word goes to Canaletto’s large canvasses showing Grand Tourists pottering about the classical ruins of Rome. Each little group has a dedicated guide, identifiable by his sober black attire, pointing out the arches and antiquities half-buried in silt.

The Arch of Septimius Severus 1742, oil on canvas

The Cult of Byron

I spied this lithograph of George Gordon Byron (1788-1824) and his mistress Marianna Segati at a general antiques fair recently.

Lord Byron and Marianna. Lithograph with original colour by hand, by an unidentified printmaker. Possibly after William Drummond (fl. 1800-1850). [London: n.d., c.1840.]

The legendary Romantic poet is interrupted by his devoted lover as he writes to fellow poet Thomas Moore from Venice around 1817.  The letterpress caption is a quote from that very same letter, as reported by Moore in his Letters and Journals of Lord Byron (London: John Murray, 1830). Segati was Byron’s first mistress in Venice, the wife of his landlord, a draper near the Piazza San Marco. He wrote to his half-sister Augusta that “we are one of the happiest—unlawful couples this side of the Alps”, but was soon to become infatuated with Margarita Cogni, the wife of a baker.

Of course, as much as his words, the iconography of Byron shaped both perceptions in his lifetime and his legacy after his premature death of fever in Missolonghi in 1824. Famous in his lifetime after the publication of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812), and increasingly notorious when the scathing satire Don Juan (1819-24) appeared, he became an instant legend when he gave his life in the cause of liberation (of Greece).

Printed images of Byron circulated widely during his lifetime, and increasingly throughout the European Continent after his death – portraits of Byron were probably more numerous in the middle of the 19th century than of any other individual, except perhaps Napoleon.

Thomas Phillips‘ two portraits were exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1814 and caused a sensation. His Byron in exotic Albanian dress in 1814 was of particular appeal to popular Romantic sentiment and spawned a glut of engravings after the original passed to Byron’s daughter, Ada, in 1835.

Byron by Thomas Phillips, oil on canvas, 1813 [NPG 142]

My trimmed sheet credits no artist nor printmaker, and is undated. A mezzotint of c. 1840 by Georg Zobel after painter, draughtsman and lithographer William Drummond (fl. 1800-1850) depicts the same scene, with minor compositional differences and differences of detail.

I find the portrayal of the sitters in my print rather revealing, and helpful when it comes to putting a date on it.  Not intended for fine art lovers, this is barely a portrait at all, in the truest sense of the word. The black hair, curly and slightly wild, the big collar, are really mere signifiers: these were the characteristics the contemporary viewer expected to see in a Romantic poet, especially in Byron. Segati is allowed almost zero personality. The full, round faces are imbued with an early expression of the sentimentality that would come to characterize much Victorian popular art. Both protagonists are almost infantilized. Tenderness and affection are emphasized, and any hint of sexual desire relegated. This is a watered-down, family-friendly Byron.

This lithograph, published I would guess in the first few years of Victoria’s reign, seems to me to reflect the ambivalence towards the legacy of this reckless libertine in the face of a new morality.  Heroes of the Victorian age were Christian and of upright character, and ultimately they were team players.  For many years Byron’s individuality and uncompromising commitment to personal liberty sat rather uncomfortably with the official culture. That in part explains why it took until 1969 for the Byron memorial to be dedicated in Westminster Abbey.

My print is for sale as part of my Stock Showcase here:  Byron and Marianna