Canaletto

00:00:01
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class, A production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frye and I'm Tracy V.

00:00:15
Speaker 2: Wilson.

00:00:16
Speaker 1: I went to London recently.

00:00:18
Speaker 2: You did. That was fun, so naturally I'm going to do an episode on an Italian painter. But hear me out, it all makes sense. This particular painter had a strong following in Britain and I knew about him before. But while we were in London, we had lunch with a new friend, Mimi, and.

00:00:40
Speaker 1: Went to the National Gallery with her after that, and she specifically wanted to see the canilettos because she loves them, and so Mimi, this one is for you. And Canneletto is a pretty interesting story. So it all worked out just fine, little cross Europe story of art.

00:01:00
Speaker 2: Giovanni and Ottonio Canal was born October seventeenth or eighteenth, sixteen ninety seven in Venice, Italy, near Ponte de Rialto, that's on the east side of the Rialto Bridge. His family was in a pretty good financial standing. We're going to jump ahead in this story right out of the gate and say we don't really know exactly when Canal started going by Caniletto, Although the reason why is pretty easy to guess. The prevailing theory is that he was trying to avoid confusion with another painter named Bernardo Canal. That painter was also his father, so it makes sense that Giovanni would change his professional name to something that basically meant the little Canal. Giovanni had worked in Bernardo's studio as an assistant, so he was not just his father's son, but also his father's protege. We have so many examples of painters in history who kind of fit the struggling artist trope that you may wonder how Caneletto's family, which was all painters, had wealth. That's because Bernardo had become well known and successful in Venice as a painter of theatrical scenery. Bernardo was also so well respected that his name was often included in librettos for operas where he was painting this scenery.

00:02:18
Speaker 1: And in a city like Venice where opera was held in extremely high regard, this contributed to the family's standing. But the Canals were also from a noble family described as Origine Civezvendus, one of the city's original families.

00:02:34
Speaker 2: Starting in seventeen sixteen, Canletto was also working as a scene painter in Venice for operas. These operas were being staged by Sicilian composer Alessandro Scarlatti. This was a family affair. He was working alongside his father and his brother Christoforo in the Canal family business. But when the entire production moved to Rome in seventeen nineteen, which took the Canal family with it, it really shifted Canileto's career significantly.

00:03:04
Speaker 1: It's believed that while in Rome, Caniletto started to move from just doing theatrical work to painting canvases, and this is sometimes attributed to him having grown tired of the theater. But when you look at some of his paintings, you kind of can't help but think that they still could be backdrops if they were just a little bit larger, because many are fairly large and their city scapes usually. Canileto returned to Venice in the early seventeen twenties and studied briefly under Luca Carlavaris, known for his city scapes of Venice, But soon the student had surpassed the master and produced his first known work of architectural Capricio Circus seventeen twenty three.

00:03:48
Speaker 2: By the mid seventeen twenties he was painting city views on commission, and he was unusually successful really quickly. By seventeen twenty three he had completed four paintings which had been come the property of the Prince of Liechtenstein, Joseph vensel Ist. These images don't have formal titles, so they're normally noted by their contents and the directional point of view that these contents are seen through. These are the names as listed in a nineteen eighty nine exhibit catalog from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Piazza San Marco looking east along the central line, Grand Canal looking east from the Campo s View, Grand Canal looking northeast from the Palazzo Balbi to the rialto Ridge, and Rio Dementicanti looking south. These and several other paintings show the architecture of Venice with a really dramatic light and shadow. It's easy to think of them as specific moments in the day when the sun would be at a point in the sky where some buildings were very brightly lit and others were in shadow.

00:04:54
Speaker 1: These early works showed the vedute view painting that was becoming popular in Venice, so we don't know how much contact exactly Caniletto had with other painters of this style outside of his teacher Carla Varius. His works fall under the category of capriccio, meaning views that are grounded in real vistas but which contain imagined elements. This doesn't, to be clear, indicate that they're fantastical, although it can be but merely that the painter imagined things in the vista that weren't there, and in Canniletto's case, he was painting scenes that often included people or events that he was imagining or remembering that were grounded in the real life culture and community of the surroundings. Although they were not things that he directly saw at the time, he may have been surveying it for the painting. One of the hallmarks of his paintings is detail. When you look at a Caniletto, it takes a little while to take it all in your eyes, dart around the image as you notice more and more smaller and smaller details, and in some cases, as you get closer and closer, you realize there's a bit of a magic trick in play, what looks from five feet away like a highly detailed boat on the canals of Venice is revealed to be just a couple of tiny brushstrokes and dots once you get closer to it. Yeah, it's really quite an amazing effect. I anytime I see a Caniletto in a museum, I like to watch people stepping closer and stepping back over and over, because they're kind of assessing, Oh yeah. Caniletto's early professional success is really indicative of how his entire career would play out. His most ardent supporters were from countries other than Italy, and part of this appeal for foreigners was that Canneletto's paintings were considered almost like souvenirs, so very very opulent ones in lieu of a postcard like we might get today. Foreign visitors would commission the talented Caniletto to paint one of the vistas that they had seen while traveling. In a lecture about Caniletto given by National Gallery curator Francesca Whitlam Cooper, she mentions that a stop in Caneletto's studio kind of became part of a grand tour for many Europeans. And procuring a piece by him offered not just a souvenir, but a way to build your art collection while abroad. A man named Owen McSwiney entures the story of Caniletto's life in the mid seventeen twenties. McSwiney, which has sometimes written just as Swiney, lived in Italy but was Irish, and he had an idea to commission a series of allegorical paintings that would feature prominent Englishmen in various roles. Mcsweiney's idea was that quote the figures, the landscaps, the buildings and other ornaments are painted by different hands. He wanted to commission three different painters for each work to create imagery that was entirely unique, and this was an expensive effort. To raise money for it, the Irish empresario wrote a pamphlet titled two of the Ladies and Gentlemen of Taste of Great Britain and Ireland. This was basic an advertisement for a subscription to a folio volume that would include engravings of all the paintings. He managed to get the first handful done and printed, but this project was never completed. Caniletto worked on the landscapes for some of the completed paintings, and his relationship with mcswheiney is considered to be the start of his souvenir landscape career. This irishman was the one who suggested that he might make a nice living doing what was essentially commercial art. Mcswhiney himself purchased quite a few works from Caniletto and then flipped them on the British art scene, reselling them to collectors. He also introduced Caniletto to a British expatriate living in Venice at the time, a man named Joseph Smith, and Smith is often credited with giving Caniletto the idea of broadening his offerings to sell more paintings, suggesting not just painting Venice, but also painting Rome and even other cities. This crossover relationship Caneletto, mcsweiney and Smith has often led to accounts that suggest that Smith was the one to put the Venetian artist on the path to commercial success, but plenty of historians give that credit to mcsweiney, who oddly never managed to have the same insights to create his own fortune. There are also some letters.

00:09:19
Speaker 2: Written by mcsweiney, in which he kind of bad mouths Caniletto say he isn't loving some of the artist's recent work and writing quote he's a covetous, greedy fellow, and because he's in reputation, people are glad to get anything at his own price. Some of mcswey's chagrin is born of the fact that he felt that he had set Canniletto down that liegrative path of souvenir paintings, only to discover that Joseph Smith had supplanted him as the primary conduit of deals between Britain and Italy, and Joseph Smith did help get a lot of Caniletto's paintings to English collectors starting in seventeen thirty. He was even nicknamed the Merchant of Venice for it, and a lot of what we know of Caniletto's business success during this time comes from the notes and invoices and other business documents that passed between Smith and purchasers. We don't really have much that comes from Camiletto himself. Additionally, the painter didn't always sign his work, so in some cases paintings have been attributed to him only after comparisons to descriptions in the notes of Smith and other art dealers.

00:10:28
Speaker 1: Coming up, we'll discuss one of Caniletto's most famous early works, and we'll get into all of the details after we pause for a sponsor break. One important work from this early stage of Caneletto's career is the oil painting The Stonemason's Yard, which is believed to have been painted in seventeen twenty five, before Joseph Smith started brokering deals for his work, which is one hundred and twenty three point eight by one hundred and sixty two point nine centimeters that's about forty nine by sixty four inches, is different from a lot of his other work. It's less grand in tone. It depicts a very ordinary scene, but it's also considered one of his masterpieces. Venice's grand Canal, which appears in so many of his paintings, is present, but it's in kind of a minimized sense. The viewer sees across it in the background. The people in the painting are doing very normal day to day things like winding yarn and chasing children. And it's notable for a number of reasons. One, it features really beautiful textures within the painting like plaster and wood, and it has the same idea of the play of some light across buildings, leaving some illuminated and some in shadow as a lot of his other work, but the contrast here is a little bit less intense. One element that feels much different about it is a darker sky than most of his other paintings. He often had these very bright, beautiful skyscapes, but the National Gallery lecture we mentioned earlier includes a discussion that it was repainted at some point, but it's unclear when, so we can't be certain if how that was originally intended or not, or even if Caniletto was the one that did the repainting.

00:12:17
Speaker 2: The Stonemason's Yard, like most of Caniletto's works, is an exterior view. Caniletto often stated that he painted outside, something that wasn't a common practice at this point, but there's also evidence that he eventually started using a camera ottica, which is a type of camera obscura. Using the camera ottica, which projected images onto a screen made of ground glass, the artist was able to work indoors, and that became a necessity as his popularity really soared and he had to keep up with this ever growing demand.

00:12:50
Speaker 1: For his work.

00:12:52
Speaker 2: This has been a very controversial part of Caniletto's story for a long time. Over the decades, there have been cases made for and against the assertion that the painter used a camera obscura. The camera ottica was not the only technique that Caniletto employed to ramp up production. He also sometimes worked from other people's drawings or engravings, and he also developed a fairly scientific approach to laying out his scenes, with a ruler and a compass to establish all of the architectural elements, and then used a formula to add details and people to maintain a perfect balance to the composition. This enabled him to make a multiple versions of the same view, something that would actually come back to bite him a little bit later.

00:13:37
Speaker 1: We're going to discuss that in a little while.

00:13:39
Speaker 2: But the camera ottica was merely a tool, and it was not uncommon for artists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to employ optical aids like these. In Caniletto's case, it sort of offered a guideline, not a picture that he was copying. If you look at any of his work, the perspective and the lines of.

00:13:59
Speaker 1: Science are sharp.

00:14:00
Speaker 2: They are more perfect than reality. If you go to a place that's represented in one of Canletto's paintings that you hold up a print or a photo of the artwork, you'll never quite get it lined up properly, because he trued up the lines of every scene to create really idealized versions of his vistas. Additionally, sometimes he used two different perspectives of a given view and combined them, using some details from each of them. The resulting works don't look surreal to the viewer, they feel almost super real because of how perfected they are. One of his paintings from the late seventeen twenties is the Piazza San Marco, which is in the collection of the met and it shows the plaza and its bell tower. The right third of the scene is in shadow, and the plaza is filled with people. Although it's not crowded, there are just a lot of people kind of spread out and they're going about their business or in some cases they're standing around in groups talking. This painting is noted as one in which he didn't alter the scene significantly, but he did make changes to create the effect he desired. For example, the flag staffs are taller in the painting than they were in actuality, and there are fewer windows in the bell tower than it actually had. And it also shows the way that Caniletto's paintings are carefully laid out. They're not symmetrical, but they are sort of perfect in terms of their perspective. In addition to the camera ottica, he also had a studio filled with assistance to maintain his output. One of his assistants was his nephew, Bernardo Belato, whose mother was Caniletto's sister, Forenza. Balato became an expert in replicating his uncle's technique and even signed Caniletto's name to some of his own work. This would lead to some problems not just for future art historians, but also in Caniletto's own lifetime.

00:15:56
Speaker 1: The painter's career was shifted in the seventeen forties, in part by political events. The War of the Austrian Succession began in seventeen forty, and like many wars, it was really multiple conflicts grouped together. The catalyst was the death of Holy Roman Emperor Charles the sixth and seventeen forty. His daughter Maria Theresa, who was twenty three at the time, assumed the throne, and this was all planned by Charles the Six, who had passed legislation even before Maria Theresa was born that stated that a daughter could inherit everything that was due to any male Habsburg descendant. And while many countries of Europe had sort of nodded along with this during Charles the Six's lifetime, the second he was gone they fought it. Maria Theresa, who is absolutely on my list for a future episode. She is in case you are wondering. Yes, Marie Antoinette's mother spent a lot of her reign holding on to this tenuous seat of power, and her early years were marked by a lot of countries trying to unseat her, which is what the War of the Austrian Succession was mostly about. It started when Prussia's King Frederic Theon invaded Silesia at the end of seventeen forty. Britain, Hanover and the Netherlands supported Maria Theresa. Prussia, France, Bavaria and Spain challenged her, and almost every permutation you can name of those countries warring took place. Britain and France were both really damaged by their participation in this conflict. There were battles fought as far away as North America over it, and it dragged on for years. So what does this have to do with Caneletto.

00:17:36
Speaker 2: Well, for a painter who was making the bulk of his money selling what were essentially very large souvenir postcards to wealthy tourists who were visiting Venice, war been a huge drop off in business. People were not traveling around Europe for leisure when most of the countries there were at war. But there were also some other matters impacting Caneletto's business. He just wasn't doing the same kind of volume through art dealers that he had been. There are some accounts that I read that suggested like the market was blooded by by this time. They were like, yes, yes, we all have a Caniletto. Now it's fine. And for another there was a new Vista painter on the scene named Michelle Marieski. How much these factors added to the problem, It's not entirely clear, but that easy flow of income that Caniletto had enjoyed from the seventeen twenties through the seventeen thirties was suddenly significantly diminished. So Caniletto did several things encouraged by Joseph Smith. First, he started working in different mediums from painting, specifically drawing and etching. He had always sketched a part of his process, so his technique there was solid, but he did make some drawings that were a lot more detailed and intended his finished pieces. His works would start with a pencil drawing and then canileto drew over them with a willpen. Occasionally he added a brown color wash.

00:19:04
Speaker 1: These are mostly.

00:19:05
Speaker 2: Views of Venice, including the public squares, the churches, and the Grand Canal. If you would like to see these incredibly detailed drawings, the Royal Collection Trust Online has images of a lot of them, and this will also be included in the research section of the show. Notes you can see in the description of the show in your podcast player or on our website.

00:19:27
Speaker 1: Yeah, quick little link.

00:19:29
Speaker 2: Unlike drawing, etching was an entirely new skill for Caneletto to learn, and it's something that he took several years to master, but he did master it. It's actually a little unclear exactly how long he was etching. The earliest dated etching we have of his is from seventeen forty one, but it is not believed to have been his first one. It's quite good and quite detailed. He published a collection of his etching prints that was dedicated to Smith and named him as Console. And we know that Smith didn't hold that poss that was one that he did come into in Italy until seventeen forty four, so we know that he was doing it for at least the pretty much the first half of the seventeen forties. The artist also traveled in the early seventeen forties with his nephew Bernardo, leaving Venice to spend time in other parts of Italy. During this time, Joseph Smith also worked to drum up new interest in Caniletto's work, publishing up respectus that served sort of as a sample catalog for interested buyers to peruse. Smith also commissioned a lot of new works from Canileto during this time, with the intent that he would then sell them to collectors. In the spring of seventeen forty six, Caniletto traveled to England while the war was still ongoing, thinking that he would work there for a little while. He ended up staying for nine years. Caniletto biographer J. G. Lynks wrote of the start of this time in Caniletto's life quote, the first five years of Caniletto's nine or ten years stay in England are by far the best documented of his life. Despite this, no one who met him has left any record of the meeting. Even so, the painter was reportedly very popular upon his arrival. He had so many clients in England who had been buying his work already, and Joseph Smith and Owen McSwiney, who at this point was living in London, had arranged for the artists to meet a number of people there who might be interested.

00:21:27
Speaker 1: In his work.

00:21:28
Speaker 2: Because there were fake Canelettos floating around, thanks in part but not exclusively, to his nephew, and because he was known to use assistance, and because he produced so many paintings, rumors started to spread in London that Catiletto wasn't actually the great painter he claimed to be. Additionally, people started realizing that there were some instances where two paintings were basically the same in terms of the backgrounds and perspective, and then they were differentiated by little details and people added to each of them. This fuelled the rumors and it really bothered Canileto, so to address this situation. In July of seventeen forty nine, Canileto published an open invitation to his studio with a view of Saint James's Park, so anyone could come in and watch him work and know that he was genuinely painting the canvases attributed to him. This garnered him a few new commissions, but he hoped for more. He briefly returned to Venice for eight months and then was back in London. He printed a public invite to an open house at his studio again in seventeen fifty one. Over the next several years he made paintings for a number of aristocratic British families, including the Lovelaces and political philosopher Thomas Hollis.

00:22:50
Speaker 1: Yeah, there seemed to be a couple of different thoughts on him not being either a the amazing painter that people thought he was, or be him not being the real Caniletto when he was in London. So he was just like, all right, everybody come over and watch, just watch me use my compass. You'll know.

00:23:13
Speaker 2: During Caniletto's time in Britain, he used his skills at painting large detailed vistas to capture images of London and scenes around the country, and we'll talk about one of them after we hear from some of the sponsors that keep stuff you missed in history class going. One of the most famous pieces Caniletto made while in Britain, which he painted during his later years in London, is the interior.

00:23:44
Speaker 1: Of the rotunda at Renlaw. This view is a little unusual for Caniletto because it's an interior and not an exterior vista, but it is a huge interior. The rotunda of the Renlaw Gardens was a circular building that stood until it was demolished in eighteen oh five. It was used for various entertainments, including concerts and balls.

00:24:07
Speaker 2: Though the subject was huge, the canvas for this painting was not, at least not as big as many of Canileto's other paintings. This one is forty seven by seventy five point five centimeters that's about eighteen and a half by thirty inches. Inside the rotunda, we see a central stage like structure that reaches from floor to ceiling, and a tiered orchestra section on the right side shows musicians playing a concert. Chandeliers dangle from the ceiling, and the space is full of spectators and revelers. It's a beautiful and deeply detailed scene.

00:24:42
Speaker 1: I love it so much. Uh Interestingly, though, these paintings are astounding, and how full they are with details, and how beautiful they are. The work that Caneletto did in London was often criticized for just kind of being formulaic and kind of wrote. Though his work had been all the race with British clients for years. The people who had once clamored for his work and were willing to pay any price now wanted to haggle with him, or they had just become disinterested.

00:25:11
Speaker 2: Canileto made the move back to Venice in seventeen fifty five, and he was welcomed as something of a hometown hero. Although his paintings continued to be judged as kind of lackluster compared to his earlier career, his drawings were still considered exceptional though. Additionally, Joseph Smith, who had so long supported the artists, decided to get out of the Canileto game. He sold his entire collection of the Venetian painter's work to King George the Third in seventeen sixty two. Despite his waning popularity, in seventeen sixty three, Caniletto was elected into the Venetian Academy in seventeen sixty six. He notated on one of his paintings that he had completed it at the age of sixty eight and without the need for glasses, which is pretty charming. But though he may not have needed spectacles as he aged, Caniletto was not immortal in seventeen sixty eight, so two years after he painted that painting, at the age of seventy, he developed a bladder inflammation that proved fatal. According to biographer JG. Lynks, he left behind quote twenty eight medium and small pictures of which nothing is known, some old clothes, and the most modest household goods. He had the equivalent of some eighty pounds sterling in cash, and still owns a property he had bought for twenty one hundred and fifty ducats. This was hardly the fortune that some people probably expected, given how often it had been claimed that Caniletto had charged such exorbitant prices for his work. One of Holly's favorite lines that she came across while researching this was from Encyclopedia Britannica, and it read quote Caniletto had no serious rivals. He's often characterized as having been sort of an egotistical figure due to knowing that no one else was doing what he was doing at the skill level he possessed. But there was also an interesting note in that nineteen eighty nine catalog from the met that we mentioned earlier. It references the agent Marcasini, who managed deals for Caniletto in the early days of his career. In this specific instance, JG. Lynx is talking about Marcasini's correspondence with a man named Stefanoconti, who was interested in Caniletto's paintings early in his career. Lynx writes, quote, not all of it is necessarily to be trusted. Marcasini was an agent, and there were certain things he wanted Kanti to believe, among them the idea that Caniletto was a difficult man who had to be humored. So some of this reputation may have come from nothing more than haggling. It was a tool to get prospective buyers to just finish a deal and stop fussing over other various questions. Yes, you do not haggle with the Great Caletto. He's very difficult, and if you want the painting to take it, so we don't really know. And additionally, there is so much that we don't really know about Caniletto. Still, there are likely quite a few of his paintings that remain unattributed because of that souvenir nature of his work. Early on, he was churning out just so much work for so long. We know he completed more than a thousand works, but there may be more lost to time or sitting in storage somewhere. Even in the immediate aftermath of the artist's death, the Venetian Academy had difficulty discerning if some of the paintings that were given to the institution were genuine. That is a problem that is ongoing. So perhaps he'll show up in unearthed to future editions, maybe as people go. M No, that wasn't a Canileto. Oh that one was that one? Do you have some listener mail for us? I do.

00:29:00
Speaker 1: I have one that is so delightful and made my heart so happy. It is from our listener Nicole, who writes, Dear Tracy and Holly, just a note to say thank you. I recently listened to the roller Coaster episode followed by your Behind the Scenes on roller Coasters. This was just the week before our family vacation to Disney and Universal Studios. I have never been a fan of roller coasters because of my intense anxiety and fear of heights. This is much unlike my husband, who, having a grandfather who designed and built coasters for Cedar Point, loves them. We have three children, ages ten, thirteen, and fifteen. Through the years, I have struggled to hide my heights flying coaster anxiety from them. I don't want them to be afraid. I want them to have so much fun. Nicole, I am crying because that's so sweet.

00:29:44
Speaker 2: Leading up to our trip, I did ride research to plan what I could tolerate. I desperately wanted to ride Guardians, but anything I read or heard about it terrified me until Holly's description.

00:29:55
Speaker 1: And I'm so thankful. The Guardians of the Galaxy movies make me feel so joyful. I just had to get on. The days leading up to it, I was able to warm up with Sleeky Dog and Mind Train, both really difficult for me. This is very sweet. Those are considered, you know, kind of lighter roller coasters, but I understand I can't do all of them either. The final day, we were able to get into the queue. I marched in with a whole lot of fake confidence, reminding myself that Holly said it was beautiful, and I got on that ride.

00:30:22
Speaker 2: Now it went faster than I'm used to and I don't love dark rides, but I did it, and I could do it again. Those Guardians made me smile, and I was singing one way or another all week long. There is a thing whereas you ride that roller coaster, you sing whatever song you got all week long. I did not have the courage to ride Tron or Hagrid's motorbike. It doesn't matter. I'm so proud of myself for doing it. My kids were proud of me too. I'm hoping this is just the beginning of pushing limits. Thank you, Thank you, Nicole. I'm crying through this whole read because I'm so proud of you. It's amazing. So this email came while you were out. I think you were in London. I think this is why you were in London. But we got this email and another email that I was so delighted by. They back to back, and as soon as you got back from your trip, I was like, Holly, have you read the Guardians of the Galaxy roller Coaster email and you were like, no, I have not, And I was like, stop what you're doing.

00:31:18
Speaker 1: Go read it right now. You'll cry and cry, and I did. I am. I'm seriously so proud of you, Nicole. It's amazing.

00:31:28
Speaker 2: Yeah, it was a great, great, Thank you so much for sharing that with us. Yes, if you would like to share things that might make me cry feel free, you can do that at History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You can also find us on social media at Miston History and if you don't subscribed yet.

00:31:43
Speaker 1: We encourage you to do that.

00:31:45
Speaker 2: You can do that on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Stuff you missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeart visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.