Grand Canal Looking east from Palazzo Bembo to Palazzo Vendramin-Calergi, mid 1730s, Woburn Abbey (Wikipedia Commons)
Canaletto cornered the early 18th century market in views of Venice, producing endless variations on a theme of canals, buildings and figures which enthralled British art lovers. The duke of Bedford, whose collection is showcased in the exhibition at Worcester Art Gallery, stacked them three high on his dining room walls at Woburn Abbey. George III hoovered up fifty paintings in 1762. Any Grand Touring aristocrat worth his salt would have brought one home, and there are still plenty in public collections throughout Britain. You might expect, therefore, that a roomful of Canaletto's might be familiar and a bit repetitive. You couldn't be more wrong. The Worcester exhibition is both startlingly unexpected and endlessly interesting.
The most striking thing about these various Venetian vedute is that they are not holiday brochure picture postcards - this is not a world of Mediterranean blues and sunlight water, it's not populated by brightly costumed, picturesque young ladies and local colour. Nor are they architecturally detailed cityscapes despite their precise topography. Canaletto sees Venice through an atmospheric haze which softens the blue sky and gives every scene a unifying and nostalgic calm, and an almost sepia-tinted warmth seeping through from the reddish-brown grounds he used. For canvasses often dominated by sky and water, these paintings have none of the cool clarity that we see in Guardi or Bellotto's work. The effect is to age Venice, giving a dusty patina to a city which was long past its heyday, even in the 1740s. But it also ruthlessly matter of fact: Canaletto refuses to romanticise and his Venice is never so much a city of courtesans and carnival, than of market traders and fishermen.
He carefully and consciously maintains this calm, pseudo-naturalism in his use of figures and incident: there is nothing overly dramatic, nothing that attracts the eye. Larger foreground boats act as visual stepping stones directing our gaze into the painting. Piazzas become chessboards on which a complex game is played out by figures in isolated groups, showing us their backs, anonymous under hats, often barely more than suggestive dabs of colour: all with the aim of moving our eye round the canvas. Architecture is never detailed enough to dominate, the greatest churches and palazzos just part of the staging of these precisely choreographed scenes.
You can lose yourself in this calmness. The only frustration of the exhibition are the rails which stop you getting up close to the picture surface. As it is you lean precariously inwards, drawn to details - dogs, washing hung out of windows, men tiling a roof. None of it's real, of course, the worst injustice would be to treat Canaletto's work as some kind of social history record. Much is made of his painting from life, but it's life carefully chosen and manipulated: these are never random snapshots. And it's the artifice, the inventiveness which is so endlessly appealing - that was where his skill really lay. He was also a master of the receding vista: subtle shifts of angle, roofline, sun and shadow, chimneys and pinnacles for height, glimpses of bridges, suggestions of spires and campaniles. The big open foregrounds funnel back with exaggerated perspective drawing your eye ever deeper into the painting.
The exhibition loses its way a little when the story moves to Britain. Canaletto followed his market and settled in London in 1746, recreating Venice on Thames. But an odd shift occurred in his work: almost to overcompensate for the duller English skies, his palette becomes brighter, sharper. Lighter underpainting and an increasingly obsessive use of white highlights give these paintings an artificial jauntiness, an almost rococo prettifying. The second room also tries to contextualise Canaletto's place in British landscape art - too great a task for a handful of paintings. There is a frankly laughable capriccio by William Marlow from the end of the century in which St Pauls is jarringly transported to a Venetian canal. It's all unnecessary. The Woburn pictures are enough in themselves. It might be easy to dismiss Canaletto as just a one trick pony - but, as this exhibition shows, it was a helluva trick.
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