The eighteenth century was marked in Venice by a partial revival of the
art of painting. Four contemporary masters--Tiepolo, Canaletti, Longhi,
and Guardi--have left abundance of meritorious work, which illustrates
the taste and manners of society, shows how men and women dressed and
moved and took their pastime in the City of the Waters, and preserves
for us the external features of Venice during the last hundred years of
the Republic.[91]
As an artist, Tiepolo was undoubtedly the strongest of these four. In
him alone we recognise a genius of the first order, who, had he been
born in the great age of Italian painting, might have disputed the palm
with men like Tintoretto. His frescoes in the Palazzo Labia,
representing the embarkation of Antony and Cleopatra on the Cydnus, and
their famous banquet at Canopus, are worthy to be classed with the
finest decorative work of Paolo Veronese. Indeed, the sense for colour,
the robust breadth of design, and the firm, unerring execution, which
distinguish that great master, seem to have passed into Tiepolo, who
revives the splendours of the sixteenth century in these superbly
painted pageants. It is to be regretted that one so eminently gifted
should have condescended to the barocco taste of the age in those many
allegories and celestial triumphs which he executed upon the ceilings of
palaces and the cupolas of churches. Little, except the frescoes of the
Labia reception-hall, survives to show what Tiepolo might have achieved
had he remained true to his native instinct for heroic subjects and for
masculine sobriety of workmanship.
Of Canaletti it is not necessary to say much. The fame which he
erewhile enjoyed in England has been obscured of late years--to some
extent, perhaps by the fussy eloquence of Mr. Ruskin, but really by the
finer sense for landscape and the truer way of rendering nature which
have sprung up in Europe. Canaletti's pictures of Venetian buildings and
canals strike us as cold, tame, and mechanical, accustomed as we are to
the magic of Turner's palette and the penetrative force of his
imagination.
Guardi, the pupil and in some respects the imitator of Canaletti, has
met with a different fate. Less prized during the heyday of his master's
fame, he has been steadily acquiring reputation on account of certain
qualities peculiar to himself. His draughtsmanship displays an agreeable
sketchiness; his colouring a graceful gemmy brightness and a glow of
sunny gold. But what has mainly served to win for Guardi popularity is
the attention he paid to contemporary costume and manners. Canaletti
filled large canvasses with mathematical perspectives of city and water.
At the same time he omitted life and incident. There is little to remind
us that the Venice he so laboriously depicted was the Venice of perukes
and bag-wigs, of masks and hoops and Carnival disguises. Guardi had an
eye for local colour and for fashionable humours. The result is that
some of his small pictures--one, for instance, which represents a
brilliant reception in the Sala del Collegio of the Ducal Palace--have a
real value for us by recalling the life of a vanished and irrecoverable
past. Thus Guardi illustrates the truth that artists may acquire
posthumous importance by felicitous accident in their choice of subjects
or the bias of their sympathies. We would willingly exchange a dozen
so-called "historical pictures" for one fresh and vivid scene which
brings a bygone phase of civilisation before our eyes.[92]
In this particular respect Longhi surpasses Guardi, and deserves to be
styled the pictorial chronicler of Venetian society in the eighteenth
century. He has even been called the Venetian Hogarth and the Venetian
Boucher. Neither of these titles, however, as I shall attempt to
demonstrate, rightly characterise his specific quality. Could his
numerous works be collected in one place, or be adequately reproduced,
we should possess a complete epitome of Venetian life and manners in the
age which developed Goldoni and Casanova, Carlo Gozzi and Caterina
Dolfin-Tron.