Canaletto’s pendant capriccios of the Venetian lagoon (Metropolitan Museum of Art and St Louis Art Museum, formerly Lord Byron collection) are among the finest examples of a fluid technique employed by the artist which has received little attention among scholars. Different from the bravura performances where the free-handling of the brushwork is rendered evident by the irregular and patchy application of paint used by eighteenth-century artists like Fragonard, Canaletto preferred a more fluid effect to create a smooth surface, as disclosed by science conservation analysis. This is particularly evident on a group of pictures representing imagined views of the lagoon. The artist deliberately approached painting experimentally from the early 1740s, when he returned to paint capricci of the Venetian lagoon and simultaneously began to use this technique. All the while, he started to experiment with etching: a comparative analysis of his use of painting, etching and drawing media, shows how he often alternated between different languages within the same medium.
This paper analyses the conceptual complexity of Canaletto’s material and technical experimentation as a strategy to evoke the materiality of the Venetian environment in pictorial form. It argues that the ‘liquidity’ of Canaletto’s paintings of the early 1740s was a response to his re-invention of the Venetian capriccio in the natural environs of the city, considered as a space of movement and instability, if not fragility. In this sense, the self-reflexive nature of these works does not reside in the use of individual metapictorial devices, but rather in composition and facture, that is to say, in the way in which material process joins the imaginative procedure of the capriccio. Following Gottfried Boehm semiotic argument that images imply a ‘double visibility’, this paper brings into focus the relationship between the material elements of the picture and the iconographic elements that compose the landscape. It ultimately argues that the eighteenth-century notion of the radical alterity of the lagoon environment was rendered on the material level by the radical experimentation with ‘liquid paint’. In more general terms, this paper suggests that in the eighteenth century, imaginative landscapes provided a platform for material experimentation.
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Camilla Pietrabissa is postdoctoral fellow in the History of Art at Università di Venezia (IUAV). She received her PhD from the Courtauld in 2019, which she is turning into a book currently titled Rococo landscapes. Painting suburban nature in eighteenth-century Paris. Her interests include the visual culture of prints and drawings, and the representation of landscape in early modern Europe. Currently she is organising an international conference on ‘Landscape drawing in the making: materiality – practice – experience, 1500–1800’ due to take place in March 2024 in Venice.
Short publications list:
Book: Disegni di natura urbana. L’immagine dei dintorni di Parigi nel primo Settecento, Torino: Fondazione 1563 per l’Arte e la Cultura, 2021.
Essays: C. PIETRABISSA, ‘La scena “viva”. Gli spettacoli di Servandoni e Vaucanson a Parigi nel 1738’, Studiolo n°19 (2023) (forthcoming).
C. PIETRABISSA, ‘Drawings travel: Canaletto’s views between Venice and London’, Mobilités artistiques, edited by M. Schneider, Paris: Centre Allemand d’Histoire de l’Art (forthcoming).
C. PIETRABISSA, ‘Venice as the archetypal waterscape of the 21st century: Aleksandra Mir’s postcards for the 53rd Biennale’, OBOE Journal n° 3 / 1 (2022), p. 52–65.
C. PIETRABISSA, ‘The eternal event. Urban void and image temporality from the Renaissance to 2020’, Visual Culture Studies n° 2 (2021) edited by Tarcisio Lancioni and Federica Villa, p. 15–33.
C. PIETRABISSA, ‘Cutting down the interpretation of drawings. The case of Watteau’, in Engramma n° 180 (2021): Borders cuts images, edited by Linda Bertelli and Maria Luisa Catoni, online open access.
C. PIETRABISSA, ‘Paysages savants: les environs de Paris dans les arts graphiques et les guides imprimés’, Dix-huitième siècle n° 50 (2018): Les lieux de l’art, edited by Fabrice Moulin, Elise Pavy-Guilbert and Pierre Wachenheim, p. 57–70.
Canaletto’s capriccios of the Venetian lagoon are among the finest examples of a fluid technique employed by the artist which has received little attention among scholars. This paper analyses the conceptual complexity of the artist’s material and technical experimentation as a strategy to evoke the materiality of the Venetian environment. It argues that the ‘liquidity’ of Canaletto’s paintings of the early 1740s was a response to his re-invention of the Venetian capriccio in the natural environs of the city. The self-reflexive nature of these works resides in the way in which material process joins the imaginative procedure of the capriccio.