_Canaletto_ (Venetian: 1697-1768).
Antonio Canale, commonly called Canaletto,[95] was born in
Venice, lived in Venice, and painted Venice. His pictures (of
which the one before us is among the best) are in some respects
very like the place, but most of those who love it best soon
find much that is wanting in Canaletto's representations. "The
effect of a fine Canaletto," says Ruskin, "is, in its first
impression, dioramic. We fancy we are in our beloved Venice
again, with one foot, by mistake, in the clear, invisible film
of water lapping over the marble steps of the foreground. Every
house has its proper relief against the sky; every brick and
stone its proper hue of sunlight and shade; and every degree
of distance its proper tone of relieving air. Presently,
however, we begin to feel that it is hard and gloomy, and that
the painter, compelled by the lowness of the utmost light at
his disposal to deepen the shadows, in order to get the right
relation, has lost the flashing, dazzling, exulting light
which was one of our chief sources of Venetian happiness.
But we pardon this, knowing it to be unavoidable, and begin
to look for something of that in which Venice differs from
Rotterdam, or any other city built beside canals. We know that
house, certainly; we never passed it without stopping our
gondola, for its arabesques were as rich as a bank of flowers
in spring, and as beautiful as a dream. What has Canaletto
given us for them? Four black dots. Well; take the next house.
We remember that too; it was mouldering inch by inch into
the canal, and the bricks had fallen away from its shattered
marble shafts, and left them white, skeleton-like; yet, with
their fretwork of cold flowers wreathed about them still,
untouched by time, and through the rents of the wall behind
them there used to come long sunbeams, greened by the weeds
through which they pierced, which flitted and fell, one by
one, round those grey and quiet shafts, catching here a leaf
and there a leaf, and gliding over the illumined edges and
delicate fissures, until they sank into the deep dark hollow
between the marble blocks of the sunk foundation, lighting
every other moment one isolated emerald lamp on the crest of
the intermittent waves, when the wild sea-weeds and crimson
lichens drifted and crawled with their thousand colours
and free branches over its decay, and the black, clogging,
accumulated limpets hung in ropy clusters from the dripping
and tinkling stone. What has Canaletto given us for this? One
square red mass, composed of--let me count--five-and-fifty,
no; six-and-fifty, no; I was right at first, five-and-fifty
bricks, of precisely the same size, shape, and colour, one
great black line for the shadow of the roof at the top, and
six similar ripples in a row at the bottom! And this is
what people call 'painting nature'! It is, indeed, painting
nature, as she appears to the most unfeeling and untaught of
mankind. The bargeman and the bricklayer probably see no more
in Venice than Canaletto gives--heaps of earth and mortar,
with water between--and are just as capable of appreciating
the facts of sunlight and shadow, by which he deceives us,
as the most educated of us all. But what more there is in
Venice than brick and stone--what there is of mystery and
death, and memory and beauty--what there is to be learned or
lamented, to be loved or wept--we look for to Canaletto in
vain" (_Modern Painters_, vol. i. sec. ii. pt. i. ch. vii. §
7, first edition). Canaletto's pictures of Venice in this room
should be compared with Turner's. It is impossible to get a
more instructive instance of the different impression made on
different minds by the same scenes. Canaletto drew, says one
of his admirers (_Lanzi_, ii. 317), exactly as he saw. Well,
what he did see we have shown us here. What others have seen,
those who have not been to Venice can discover from Turner's
pictures, from Shelley's and Byron's verse, or Ruskin's prose.
"Let the reader restore Venice in his imagination to some
resemblance of what she must have been before her fall. Let
him, looking from Lido or Fusina, replace, in the forest of
towers, those of the hundred and sixty-six churches which the
French threw down; let him sheet her walls with purple and
scarlet, overlay her minarets with gold, ... and fill her
canals with gilded barges and bannered ships; finally, let him
withdraw from this scene, already so brilliant, such sadness
and stain as had been set upon it by the declining energies of
more than half a century, and he will see Venice as it was seen
by Canaletto (as it might have been seen by him, Ruskin means);
whose miserable, virtueless, heartless mechanism, accepted
as the representation of such various glory, is, both in its
existence and acceptance, among the most striking signs of the
lost sensation and deadened intellect of the nation at that
time.... The mannerism of Canaletto is the most degraded that
I know in the whole range of art. Professing the most servile
and mindless imitation, it imitates nothing but the blackness
of the shadows; it gives no single architectural ornament,
however near, so much form, as might enable us even to guess
at its actual one; ... it gives the buildings neither their
architectural beauty nor their ancestral dignity, for there is
no texture of stone nor character of age in Canaletto's touch;
which is invariably a violent, black, sharp, ruled penmanlike
line, as far removed from the grace of nature as from her
faintness and transparency: and for his truth of colour let
the single fact of his having omitted all record whatsoever
of the frescoes, whose wrecks are still to be found at least
on one half of the unrestored palaces, and, with still less
excusableness, all record of the magnificent coloured marbles"
(_Modern Painters_, vol. i. pt ii. sec. i. ch. vii. § 30).
Stated in the fewest words, the difference between Canaletto
and the others is this: To Canaletto Venice was a city of murky
shadows, to them it is a city of enchanted colour. But his
pictures satisfied the taste of his time, as the great number
of them still extant testifies. Moreover his fame extended
beyond his own country. There was an English resident at Venice
who engaged Canaletto (who started in life at his father's
profession, that of scene painter) to work for him at low
prices, and then used to retail the pictures at an enormous
profit to English travellers. At last Canaletto came to England
himself, and was given many commissions; but after two years he
returned to Venice, as it was still Venetian pictures that his
patrons wanted. How completely the public taste has now changed
is shown by the fact that the Venice of all the most popular
painters to-day, of whatever nation, is the Venice of Ruskin
and Turner. Canaletto's pictures, however, will always possess
one element of interest, apart from any fluctuations in taste.
Within his limits they are historical records of the appearance
of Venice in his time; and as more and more of the old Venice
is destroyed, Canaletto's pictures will increase in interest.
For though he is mechanical, yet his mechanism is very good.
He was, by the way, the first to apply the camera obscura to
linear perspective, and he painted in a workmanlike manner, so
that his pictures endure.[96]
An interesting piece of "old Venice." Beyond the canal is what is
now the National Gallery of Venice--the Academy of Arts--but was
in Canaletto's time still the Scuola della Carità, the conventual
buildings of the Brotherhood of our Lady of Charity. Notice the green
grass in the little square: the Campo, as it is called (the field), is
now covered with flagstones (there is a sketch of this spot among the
Turner drawings given by Ruskin to the University Galleries at Oxford:
see _Guide to the Venetian Academy_, p. 34).