Canaletto and Bellotto: painters of the ideal

In the history of Venetian art there is no shortage of family connections. Jacopo Bellini had two sons who were both painters of the first rank – Gentile and Giovanni – and a son-in-law who was every bit as distinguished, Andrea Mantegna. Marietta Robusti was a gifted portraitist trained by her father Tintoretto. Giovanni Battista Tiepolo had two artist sons – Giovanni Domenico and Lorenzo – and painter brothers-in-law, too, Francesco and Giovanni Antonio Guardi. While the highly accomplished Sebastiano Ricci was the uncle of the landscapist Marco Ricci. So there was nothing unusual about the similarities between Antonio Canal (Canaletto) and his nephew Bernardo Bellotto. More unusual was the nature of their renown.

Canaletto (1697-1768) is well-known and well-represented in Britain and the United States – with examples of his work everywhere from the Royal Collection to the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore – while in central Europe it is Bellotto (1722-80) who is seen as the pre-eminent view painter of the early 18th century, with the majority of his paintings held in Poland, Austria, Russia and, above all, Dresden.

The reason for this separation is the Grand Tour. The British milordi for whom Venice, a floating pleasure palace, was a key stopover on their continental sojourn, bought Canalettos by the yard (sometimes in sets of 12 or even 24 paintings), and it was the British market that drew the painter to London in 1746. Bellotto’s patrons meanwhile were the courts and princelings of Central Europe. This geographical division means that uncle and nephew are rarely thought of as a pair. ‘Canaletto and Bellotto: Observation and Invention in Venice, London and Vienna’ at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna puts the relatives together again.

There is sometimes a dose of confusion about who was who: outside Venice, Bellotto was himself known as ‘Canaletto’ and, beneath his own name, would occasionally sign his works ‘called Canaletto’ to signify his artistic provenance. And there was a further link, too, that can be felt in the work of both men. Canaletto’s father Bernardo was a designer of stage sets and theatricality became a family trait. It is what stops their views from being static and the pleasure is as much in the detail of the staffage, the people who dot their scenes – actors on these real stages – as in the vistas themselves.

Bellotto trained in his uncle’s studio and was employed by him as an assistant. Venice, and Murano in particular, was then a centre for optical lens production, and Canaletto passed his technical methods, especially the use of the camera obscura, on to his nephew. What the exhibition is keen to point out is that neither man made paintings that are ‘photographic’ representations of the scene. While they utilised optical devices to make detailed architectural and perspectival sketches – the show includes a small portable camera obscura that may have been Canaletto’s own – they would usually make more than one from different viewpoints and then, by eye alone, combine them. In so doing they would change the position of buildings or their proportions, play with the lighting and add figures, all for purely aesthetic effect. So their use of optical aids should not be seen as diminishing their artistry.

The Canaletto-Bellotto partnership was ended by the War of Austrian Succession (1740-48) which turned off the flow of visitors to Venice. Some accounts suggest, however, that Canaletto grew tired of Bellotto’s increasing arrogance and threw him out. Whatever the truth, Canaletto travelled to England in search of his former patrons, not least the banker Joseph ‘Consul’ Smith who would come to own 50 of his paintings and 142 drawings, while the following year, 1747, Bellotto made for Dresden to take up his appointment as court painter to Augustus III, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland.

Canaletto treated London as a version of Venice. Many of his patrons admired the Venetian Republic’s constitution and he served up an anglophile equivalent. In Venice he had painted the Doge on board his magnificently gilded ceremonial barge, the ‘Bucintoro’, so in England he painted London: The River Thames on Lord Mayor’s Day (c.1748, now in the Royal Collection), in which the Lord Mayor’s own sumptuous barge floats on a river that is another Grand Canal. In place of the Doge’s Palace and St Mark’s Campanile, St Paul’s Cathedral – then less than 40 years old – and the spires of Wren and Hawksmoor’s City churches provide the backdrop, and the whole scene takes place under a warmly roseate sky.

When he painted Warwick Castle for its owner Lord Brooke he included a gondola in the moat, and when he painted the pleasure gardens of Vauxhall and Ranelagh he showed the settings for English disinhibition, the equivalents of Venetian carnival. In painting the newly completed Gothic-revival towers of Westminster Abbey he included in the foreground the ceremony of the Order of the Bath, itself only reconstituted some 20 years earlier: as with all his works, he was careful to combine modernity with antiquity.

In the exhibition, however, it is Bellotto who comes across as the more striking artist, and not just for his relative unfamiliarity. Where contemporary commentators suggested that Canaletto’s paintings had a luminosity as though the Sun shone from within them, Bellotto adopted a darker palette, a love of shadows (in particular jutting triangles of shade), and dramatic skies. He made numerous records of Dresden in this style – again combining viewpoints and playing with motifs – that were to prove vital in the reconstruction of the city following its firebombing in the Second World War.

It was war with Prussia that forced him out of the city. He made for Vienna, then under the rule of Francis I and Maria Theresa and basking in the mood of security that followed the defeat of the Ottomans at the Second Siege of Vienna (1683). A surge in confidence led to a boom in building, extending beyond the city’s fortified walls, views Bellotto painted. This optimistic mood was intensified following Austria’s defeat of Prussia at Kunersdorf in 1759 and in his Schönbrunn Palace with the Arrival of the Courier from the Battle of Kunersdorf Bellotto combined architecture and history in the making to show the very moment the carriage carrying news of the victory was announced.

Indeed, where Bellotto differed significantly from his uncle was in his treatment of the human figures peopling his scenes. Paintings such as View of Vienna from the Belvedere (1759-60) or Lobkowitz Square in Vienna (1758-61) are not just topographical vistas but subtle reinforcements of the social status quo: workmen and women go about their business – digging up weeds or fixing chimneys – as the nobility stroll through the gardens and streets. There is no disorder or resentment, the contrast between the fustian of one group and the finery of the other is not a cause for envy but a simple reflection of the preordained order. Soldiers and clerics are part of the mix, too. Indeed in some picture he would make this explicit, placing the gratin in bright sunlight and labourers in the shade.

Mozart was at work in Vienna at exactly the same time but with Bellotto there is no undercurrent, let alone explicit comment as there is in The Marriage of Figaro, of social friction. As he got older, Bellotto started to increase the size of some of his figures of working people. They are unmistakably portraits even if their subjects’ names are no longer known. He even painted a self-portrait in the guise of a Venetian ambassador, making clear just where he thought he fitted into this hierarchical world. Canaletto’s figures by contrast are never more than compilations of tiny indicative dots.

The exhibition also takes a detour into Bellotto’s use of various surveying instruments, such as graphometers and sighting boards, to ensure accuracy even if he did then alter his findings. If their scientific approach showed both Bellotto (at one point he was a geometry teacher) and Canaletto to be genuinely Enlightenment figures then they nevertheless subordinated their penchant for calibration to their art. In this they showed that the best vedute painters – Giovanni Paolo Pannini and Gaspar van Wittel among them – were more than mere souvenir artists. Under the guise of selling images of simple if picturesque reality, both Canaletto and Bellotto were really painters of the ideal.