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VENICE’S ENDURING MAGIC: HOW THE FLOATING CITY INSPIRED ARTISTS FROM CANALETTO TO MANET

The Italian destination’s distinct combination of architecture, water, and light has captivated artistic visionaries for centuries, as seen in the collection of Paul G. Allen ‘Venice has an air of romance and mystery, so you feel you’re taken back into previous eras…’ Paul G. Allen For many, Venice occupies a unique place in the imagination. […]
|Viet Art View

The Italian destination’s distinct combination of architecture, water, and light has captivated artistic visionaries for centuries, as seen in the collection of Paul G. Allen

‘Venice has an air of romance and mystery, so you feel you’re taken back into previous eras…’

Paul G. Allen

For many, Venice occupies a unique place in the imagination. A floating city amidst the sheltered waters of a lagoon in the Adriatic Sea, it is an extraordinary location both intensely familiar and otherworldly.

The intricate network of canals ensures that water is a constant presence throughout the cityscape. Magnifying its atmosphere, light can be seen shining between buildings or at the end of a narrow street, bouncing off the water’s surface and causing reflections to dance along walls or on the undersides of bridges.

The Paul G. Allen Collection, being offered at Christie’s in New York from 9-10 November, contains a number of artistic treasures devoted to the city, each composition a reflection of the individual voices who found in Venice a subject rich with possibilities.

From the compositions of Canaletto from the mid-1700s, to the dreamlike visions of J.M.W. Turner almost a century later, and the paintings of Thomas Moran and John Singer Sargent, Edouard Manet, Henri-Edmond Cross, and Henri Le Sidaner, these works reveal the ways in which artists working in a myriad of styles and media responded to the enchanting city.

ARCHITECTURAL GRANDEUR

An important centre of maritime trade that was also rich in architectural splendour, Venice was among the most significant cities in Italy for many centuries. In the early eighteenth century, the Venetian-born painter Giovanni Antonio Canal, best known as Canaletto, popularised many of the key painterly vistas of the city in his exquisitely rendered vedute, recording the cityscape with a precision and clarity that made him popular among visitors partaking in a Grand Tour.

Giovanni Antonio Canaletto (1697-1768), The Grand Canal, Venice, Looking South-East from San Stae to the Fabbriche Nuove di Rialto, 1730. Oil on canvas. 18½ × 30⅝ in (47 × 77.8 cm). Estimate: $2,500,000-$3,500,000.

Focusing on a concentrated repertoire of monuments and views, Venice became a stage for the artist, with Canaletto returning to the same settings time and again to explore new ideas for figures or lighting, or to highlight the pageantry of a distinctly local festival or event. However, the cityscape of Venice itself remained the central protagonist, its churches, public buildings and palazzi the primary focus of his sumptuous scenes.

While his paintings give the impression of a faithful recording of reality, compositions such as Venice, the Piazza San Marco looking east towards the basilica and The Grand Canal, Venice, Looking South-East from San Stae to the Fabbriche Nuove di Rialto also highlight how carefully composed Canaletto’s paintings were, the perspective deftly manipulated, the choice of sightlines deliberate, in order to achieve a beautiful, poetic image of Venice.

A DREAMLIKE ATMOSPHERE

By the end of the century, a sustained period of political turmoil and conflict had left a devastating imprint on Venice. As the 1800s dawned, it was widely viewed as a modern-day Atlantis, a place of unique and unparalleled beauty at risk of disappearing, lost to the very waters of the lagoon which gave it its magical air.

It was against this backdrop that Joseph Mallord William Turner first arrived in the city in 1819. He returned to Venice on two more occasions, in 1833 and 1840, producing a rich group of pencil studies and watercolours during each trip.

Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851), Depositing of John Bellini’s Three Pictures in La Chiesa Redentore, Venice, 1841. Oil on canvas. 29 × 45½ in (73.7 × 115.6 cm). Estimate: $28,000,000-$35,000,000. 

Unlike the precision and detail of Canaletto, it was the unique atmosphere of the lagoon — the blend of mist and fog that crept in and blanketed the city blurring the lines of the buildings, monuments and gondolas as they moved through the water — that drew his attention. In these works, as well as the many oil paintings he completed upon his return to England, Turner set out to capture an impression of the ways in which both the weather and the light constantly transformed the visitor’s experience of Venice.

In Depositing of John Bellini’s Three Pictures in La Chiesa Redentore, Venice, Turner produces an invented view as he imagines the delivery of a trio of Giovanni Bellini paintings to the church of Il Redentore via an extravagant aquatic procession. Like Canaletto, Turner edited his views, including multiple landmarks in ideal rather than actual locations, to generate an evocative, dream-like portrait of the cityscape.

Thomas Moran (1837-1926), Glorious Venice, 1888. Oil on canvas. 20 × 30 in (50.8 × 76.2 cm). Estimate: $200,000-$300,000.

Turner’s paintings of Venice would have a lasting impact on generations of artists to come, becoming an iconic part of the identity and legend of La Serenissima. The American Thomas Moran was one such painter, having encountered several of Turner’s works on a visit to London in the 1860s. His 1888 composition Glorious Venice in the Allen Collection can be seen as an homage to Turner, selecting a similar view to the artist’s Bridge of Sighs, Ducal Palace and Custom House Venice: Canaletti Painting (circa 1833, Tate Britain, London), infusing the scene with his own subtle approach to colour and virtuosic handling of paint.

‘SEE WHAT THE WATER SEES’

For almost every visitor to Venice it is the water itself, cutting through the heart of the city, that holds the greatest fascination. The experience of gliding through the city’s intricate network of canals and waterways aboard a boat, preferably a sleek black gondola, offers a fascinating perspective on Venice. ‘One way — the original way — of looking at such facades is from a gondola,” wrote Joseph Brodsky, as quoted in Watermark (2013), ‘this way you can see what the water sees…’

Edouard Manet (1832-1883), Le Grand Canal à Venise, 1874. Oil on canvas. 22⅝ × 18⅞ in (57.5 × 47.9 cm). Estimate: $45,000,000-$65,000,000.

It was this alternate perspective on Venice that sparked Edouard Manet’s imagination most, providing the artist with inspiration for a pair of canvases during his visit to Venice in 1874. This was the artist’s second and final sojourn in the city. Seen from the level of the water, Manet vividly captures the sensation of travelling through the city by boat in Le Grand Canal à Venise.

John Singer Sargent (1856-1925), The Facade of La Salute, 1903. Watercolour, gouache and pencil on paperboard. 14½ × 21¼ in (36.8 × 54 cm). Estimate: $800,000-$1,200,000.

Similarly, John Singer Sargent often worked from the bow of a gondola, focusing his eye on the local play of life that filled the streets in quieter stretches of the city. Unlike Manet, who stayed just a month, Venice was something of a second home for Sargent, with the artist spending almost every summer there between 1898 and 1913. He was intimately familiar with the landscape, and as a result his compositions are rich in nuance and observation. In his exquisite watercolour, The Façade of La Salute from 1903, Sargent conveys a dynamic sense of the congestion that could strike within Venice’s waterways.

VENICE BY DAYLIGHT

The neo-impressionist Henri-Edmond Cross’s Rio san Trovaso, Venise, painted the same year as the aforementioned work by Sargent, offers a startlingly different vision of the city. Choosing a picturesque view that combines water, sky, built, and natural environments, Cross depicts a typically bustling stretch of canal in an unnaturally silent moment, free of all human presence. The artist, who travelled very infrequently due to chronic health issues, was astonished by the world he found in Venice: ‘This exceptional city does not only engender surprise,’ he wrote, ‘it also contains the supreme Beauty which imposes recollected silence.’

Henri Edmond Cross (1856-1910), Rio San Trovaso, Venise, September 1903-January 1904. Oil on canvas. 28¾ × 36¼ in (73 × 92 cm). Estimate: $2,000,000-$3,000,000.

Inspired by the brilliant play of sunlight as it dances across the water, Cross utilised a series of intense colour contrasts to capture the waterway in its myriad of hues, employing his distinctive pointillist technique to render the shimmering effects of the reflections and unique quality of light that La Serenissima was renowned for.

VENICE BY NIGHT

Henri Le Sidaner took a different approach than most artistic visitors to Venice with his 1907 composition, La Sérénade, Venise, portraying the atmospheric city by night. A masterful study in the subtleties of tone and the dazzling effect of colour, the composition is built around the interplay between deep, velvety shadows and the soft, hazy light cast by the lanterns that are dotted through the scene.

Henri Eugene Augustin Le Sidaner (1862-1939), La Sérénade, Venise, 1907. Oil on canvas. 53⅞ × 72¼ in (137 × 183.5 cm). Estimate: $1,500,000-$2,500,000.

While the Doge’s Palace remains clearly visible on the other side of the water, its vast walls punctuated by rhythmic rows of arches, Le Sidaner’s primary focus is on the flurry of gondolas floating in the middle of the lagoon, their elegantly attired passengers gathered for a musical performance, the ‘serenade’ of the title. Small touches of light on the far bank cast shimmering reflections through the water, drawing our eyes back to the gathering of fashionable tourists in the foreground. Le Sidaner’s nocturnal views of Venice were warmly received when they were first exhibited in Paris, with one commentator stating the artist had captured the ‘true Venice’.

However, as illustrated by each of these artists, capturing a so-called ‘true’ vision of Venice was a Sisyphean task — it is a city in constant flux, not only shifting in response to the weather, the water, the light, but also the personal experiences of the visitor. Through the diverse visions of Venice featured in the Allen Collection, we can catch a glimpse into the ways that the magical nature of the city can enchant, beguile, and obsess painters, leaving an indelible imprint on their memories.

‘Both the antiquity of Venice, and the light, and the architecture, all blend together to create special moods that I think painters were attracted to’

Paul G. Allen

Source: Christie’s

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