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Canaletto (Venice 1697-Venice 1768)

Venice: The Piazzetta looking south 1729

Pen and ink | 21.3 x 31.7 cm (sheet of paper) | RCIN 907441

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  • A drawing of the Piazzetta in Venice. On the left is the narthex of San Marco and the Palazzo Ducale. In the centre is the Piazzetta with the columns of San Marco and San Teodoro, and a view across the canal to the church of San Giorgio. On the right is the Libreria.

    This is one of the few drawings by Canaletto that was apparently done on the spot - or rather, on two spots. While the façades of the Palazzo Ducale, to the left, and the Libreria, to the right, are not quite parallel, their receding horizontals should not converge towards vanishing points as wildly divergent as Canaletto has drawn them here. The left side of the view was drawn standing in front of the second bay of San Marco, almost between the two northern flagpoles. But from that point, the Libreria is mostly hidden by the Loggetta at the base of the Campanile; Canaletto walked about ten metres (thirty feet) to the south-east to stand in front of the central door of San Marco, thus obtaining the view recorded in the right side of the drawing. The width of the Piazzetta has been reduced - most of San Giorgio should be visible between the Palazzo Ducale and the column of the lion, and by placing the column too close to the Palazzo, Canaletto had to draw the dome of San Giorgio to the right of the column. The belltower of San Giorgio has the onion dome that was completed in 1728.

    It is conceivable that Canaletto constructed the drawing in the studio on the basis of two sketches done on the spot, and the inadvertent reversal of the lion of St Mark, apparently facing to the right, might support this. But there is, unusually, no pencil underdrawing, and it may be observed that the diagonal shading of the narthex and Palazzo is hatched as if with the left hand, and that of the Libreria and shadow across the Piazzetta as if with the right. There is a clear break in the drawing at the corner of the Palazzo Ducale, suggesting that that was the boundary between one phase of sketching and the next. While Canaletto drew the buildings from a normal standing height, he dashed in the foreground figures as if from a much more elevated position, and thus their scale and perspective are drastically at odds with the surrounding architecture.

    Canaletto drew this view of the Piazzetta rarely, and never painted it. His only other rendering is an even more rapid and rudimentary sketch (private collection, C/L 545), with the perspectives accurately drawn from a single standpoint, inscribed by the artist with the title Veduta della piaza Versso il Mar and the date 1729. While not simply a refined version of that sketch, the present sheet may well have followed it directly, 'improving' the composition by bringing the two sides of the Piazzetta closer together and thus concentrating the visual interest.

    Inscribed in pencil on the verso: Smith

    Catalogue entry adapted from Canaletto in Venice, London, 2005
    Provenance

    Purchased by George III from Consul Joseph Smith, 1762

  • Medium and techniques

    Pen and ink

    Measurements

    21.3 x 31.7 cm (sheet of paper)


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