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We're in the Queen's Gallery at Buckingham Palace
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and this is the display space
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where the Royal Collection can be seen by the public.
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The Royal Collection is unique
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in that it's spread across many royal residences.
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So the paintings can be seen on display at Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle,
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but also at Hampton Court, Kew Palace or Kensington Palace.
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The Royal Collection is the art collection
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that's been accumulated and collected by many successive generations of monarchs
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and it includes paintings, drawings, prints and decorative arts.
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The Royal Collection is now held in trust by Her Majesty the Queen
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and it's here that the public can come to see parts of the collection.
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The Royal Collection has the largest assemblage of works by Canaletto
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in the world.
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It has major paintings, drawings and etchings.
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So one of the things we can show is not only the range of works by Canaletto
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but also the way in which he moved in his creative process
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from drawing to the final painting.
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With this exhibition, all the works were originally assembled
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by the collector, Consul Joseph Smith, an Englishman who was living in Venice
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and who sold his entire collection to George III in 1762.
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Smith not only collected works by Canaletto
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but also by the other artists working at the same time in Venice.
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These artists included Sebastiano Ricci, Marco Ricci,
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Rosalba Carriera, Luca Carlevarijs,
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Zuccarelli, Piazzetta, and others.
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This gives us a unique opportunity
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not only to show a large body of Canaletto's works in the Queen's Gallery
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but also to examine and put into context
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some of Venice's most influential artists of the 18th century.
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There are three main characters in this exhibition.
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First of all, of course, Canaletto, Venice's most famous view painter.
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And secondly, his main agent and dealer, a British man called Joseph Smith,
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and thirdly we have Venice itself, Venice the city.
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Venice was a great tourist destination in the 18th century
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and somewhere which was a real thriving centre
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for all kinds of artistic production, not just Canaletto's view paintings.
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Luca Carlevarijs is the great precursor.
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He's the first great view painter of Venice.
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But when you compare his work with Canaletto's,
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it looks very stiff and old-fashioned.
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In fact, there's a remarkable letter
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written by an art advisor in 1725 to a client,
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in which he advises him to stop buying view paintings by Luca Carlevarijs
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but to turn to this new artist, young Canaletto,
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whose work is like Luca Carlevarijs's but you can see the sun shining in it.
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It's his eye which separates him from his rivals
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and what makes him into one of the great Venetian artists of the 18th century.
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The first time when I visited the exhibition,
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I was particularly struck by the variety of Canaletto's visual intelligence.
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The quality of his draughtsmanship varies immensely,
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and there is a sort of continuous balancing
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between optical accuracy, geometrical layout,
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and then a visual impression and transformation of the optical data,
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and then the ways in which the paintings are composed.
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They always show different aspects of Canaletto's invention,
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to the point that you can feel, or you can follow, Canaletto
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thinking not only about Venice,
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but thinking about architecture,
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thinking about the difficult, sometimes, history of Italy,
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and how this architecture is an important part
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of what Venice, the Veneto, Italy was for Canaletto and his contemporaries.
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Canaletto has defined the image of Venice to the British to such an extent
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that it's easy to forget he was working in a much broader cultural sphere.
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So by reuniting Canaletto's paintings with works by other Venetian artists,
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we get a much fuller picture
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of the cultural and social life of the city in that period.
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So we've got history paintings,
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which were the most highly regarded genre of the period,
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by Sebastiano Ricci,
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landscape paintings by his nephew, Marco Ricci,
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and also some of the undercurrents that were influencing Canaletto at this time.
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So the interest in Palladian architecture, for example,
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which was of great interest to Joseph Smith
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and to other scholars and collectors in Venice and in Britain,
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the capriccio, which was a genre of painting
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that was particularly taken up by Venetian artists
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involving the combination of reality and elements from the imagination.
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So we see a much broader picture of the life of Venice
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through this lens of the collection of Joseph Smith.
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So the thinking behind this exhibition was to showcase the finest collection
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of Canaletto paintings, drawings and etchings in the world
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and to further the understanding of his work and his life
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and to recreate and show Venice
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in all its cultural diversity and life in the 18th century.
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You had huge numbers of British Grand Tourists travelling to Venice
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and enjoying the pleasures that it had to offer.
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Not only the annual carnival,
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which took place in the period between St Stephen's Day on 26 December
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and the beginning of Lent,
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which was when people would wear masks and carnival costume,
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you had lots of annual festivals that were celebrated in the city.
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Venice was also a thriving centre for the opera.
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There were 17 opera houses in the city by the end of the century.
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We are in the north fringes of Venice,
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nearly facing the lagoon, the sestiere of Cannaregio,
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one of six sestieri, six districts of the city.
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So the city is in the middle of a lagoon.
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In the Middle Ages, in early Middle Ages, in the fifth century,
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when the lagoon started to become what we know as Venice,
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this area was just muddy waters and natural canals with no buildings on it.
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But originally the Rialto side of the lagoon, the Venice we know,
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was made up of a cluster of islands,
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and they were not necessarily connected with each other.
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The basic unit of the city, of the urban space of Venice, is the square,
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with a well at the very centre, a church possibly,
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and the buildings around the square.
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Each of these units was an island, a small insula, in Latin.
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Every building in the island rests on a layer of mud,
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where posts are thrust in.
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This mud actually helps to preserve the wooden posts.
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Every building is staying on this stable layer, but very flexible layer of mud.
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So basically we can say the architecture of Venice
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stems out of the sea, of the lagoon.
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That's why so many travellers over the centuries were in awe,
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because of this miraculous architecture just springing out of the water.
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There were two particular places in Venice which were really important.
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One was the area around San Marco,
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which was the political and religious life of Venice,
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and the other was the Rialto,
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which is geographically the narrowest point of the Grand Canal
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and where it was obvious to build a bridge.
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And around this bridge grew up the major trading offices of the Venetians
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but also of foreigners working in Venice,
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for example, the Turks and the Germans and so on.
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Its power was in trade
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and importing and exporting goods from the East to the West.
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Venice had an extraordinary reputation from the medieval period onwards.
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For a start, it's an extraordinary city,
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the fact that it is in the sea, it's an island in the sea.
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But it was one of the wealthiest and most populous cities
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of the medieval period and had this extraordinary trade with the East.
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So this was the emporium
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where all the luxuries and exotic goods from the East came through.
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So the velvets, the spices, the silks which are imported into Britain,
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these come from Venice.
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From the medieval period Venice has been associated in people's imaginations
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with ideas of luxury, with ideas of the exotic.
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And it's been extremely powerful.
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Because it was so wealthy, it was a real player in European power politics
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and formed alliances with other European states.
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This is the era when Italy was composed of city states and small principalities.
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So because of its wealth, it was a mover and shaker
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and played a very important part in the crusades, for example,
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led resistance against the encroaching Ottoman Empires.
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It was also extraordinarily stable.
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It had been established, so the story had it,
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by Romans fleeing Rome after the fall of Rome
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and so this is where its pride and its liberty came from,
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that it was the last remnant of Roman liberty and it had never been conquered.
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So it had always been independent.
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It had always existed without being conquered by another power.
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It had an extraordinarily stable government
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and in the 17th century this became extremely attractive or interesting
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to politicians in Britain
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because Britain was going through enormous political upheaval
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with the Civil War and the debates about the monarchy
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and where does political power lie, what is the best sort of government.
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And Venice seemed to offer an example of what was regarded by Aristotle
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as the best form of government, mixed government.
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That is, it combines monarchy in the person of the doge
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with the aristocracy in the senate and the people in the Grand Council.
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And this system of checks and balances
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ensured that power didn't become despotic
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and there wasn't any danger of popular uprising
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and therefore these checks and balances provided the stability.
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This is a commercial republic that Britain feels it can identify with.
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It has the kind of balance of power that many people in Britain were aspiring to.
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It was resisting the papacy, and so they see a lot of similarities.
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So particularly in the late 17th century,
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there was a lot of political interest in Venice
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as offering a model of government.
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Canaletto was baptised Antonio Canal in the parish of San Lio in Venice in 1697.
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His father was Bernardo Canal, a stage painter.
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Canaletto must have begun his work training in his father's studio,
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where he would have learnt the skills of perspective,
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these skills very important in theatrical stage designs.
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His name appears in the libretti for some operas in Venice
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by Vivaldi and Orlandini.
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The Canal family were, I think, what we would call upper middle class.
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Unlike some of Canaletto's rivals, for instance,
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who came often from the lowest echelons of Venetian society,
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Canaletto did fancy himself as slightly grand.
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There is a da Canal coat of arms,
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which, in fact, he uses as a signature in the later stages of his career.
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He's obviously rather proud of coming from a family that has a coat of arms.
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Canaletto was called Canaletto
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because he needed to be distinguished from his father Bernardo Canal.
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He was a little man and canaletto means "small canal".
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I imagine him as being rather gentlemanly,
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solitary and quite possibly a bit difficult.
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Canaletto ended up supporting all three of his sisters
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and was clearly kind to them and good at being supportive.
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I think if he was more flamboyant and a well-known social figure in Venice,
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one would have heard more about it from contemporary diarists.
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There are very few references to him.
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We think that he was born in a small courtyard in the middle of Venice,
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which one can still go and see, in an upstairs apartment.
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We know that he lived there,
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because he did drawings from it, two of which survive
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and are particularly fresh and immediate drawings done out of his windows.
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But we know really very little about his early life at all.
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We don't know whether he had any training
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from anybody apart from his father.
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The one thing that we are told is about the key change in 1719-20,
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when he goes to Rome with his father to help with the design of theatre sets,
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when apparently he was so inspired by his surroundings
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that he decided to draw and paint them.
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He clearly had a significant natural talent.
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Canaletto famously excommunicated himself
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from the theatre and from this life
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and in 1720 he was inscribed into the painters' guild in Venice.
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At this stage Canaletto was painting large capriccios,
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so views incorporating Roman remains
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in these imaginary settings on a large scale.
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But he then turned to painting views of Venice.
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There is a sort of misunderstanding when we reflect on the term veduta,
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because most people would understand it as being an accurate reproduction
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of a cityscape, or a landscape, a view,
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something that can be almost photographed, in a certain sense.
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And especially in the case of Canaletto,
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there is this idea that when he is presenting us
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with, for instance, a representation of Piazza San Marco,
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this could be a sort of photographic impression of what he saw.
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And this is not right.
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First of all he tried actually to sketch, to have a sort of sketch
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of the place he wanted to represent.
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But then he would just recreate
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a sort of half-optical and half-reinvented cityscape.
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He almost blurs the contours, the lines.
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They become optical impression,
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they become artistic matter in a certain sense,
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and nothing is exactly the way we think it is,
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because there is something specific to Venice
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that only travellers and those who visit the city can understand.
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And he transforms his Venice.
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It's something that is very specific to him.
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What we're looking at here are two preparatory studies
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that Canaletto made for Joseph Smith sometime in the early 1720s.
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They're preparatory studies for the first commission
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that Canaletto made for Smith,
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and this was for a set of six monumental paintings
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that are also in the Royal Collection.
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00:26:29,600 --> 00:26:32,000
We're lucky to be able to show the preparatory studies,
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as well as the paintings that they were intended for.
248
00:26:34,440 --> 00:26:37,560
And Canaletto would have submitted these drawings to his patron
249
00:26:37,640 --> 00:26:41,120
to make sure that he approved of his designs before he carried them out.
250
00:26:41,880 --> 00:26:43,320
They were intended as pairs.
251
00:26:43,400 --> 00:26:45,760
You can see in the paintings and in the studies
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00:26:45,840 --> 00:26:50,040
that the weight of the architecture is on one side of the sheet or the other.
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00:26:50,120 --> 00:26:54,200
The drawings are quite loose and free in their execution,
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00:26:54,280 --> 00:26:57,440
especially compared to some of the other drawings we have by Canaletto,
255
00:26:57,520 --> 00:26:59,720
which are very highly finished.
256
00:26:59,800 --> 00:27:01,840
This is because they weren't intended to show
257
00:27:01,920 --> 00:27:04,000
the minute details of the architecture.
258
00:27:04,080 --> 00:27:06,240
They were just to show to Smith
259
00:27:06,320 --> 00:27:08,920
as an example of how his finished paintings might look,
260
00:27:09,040 --> 00:27:13,520
and just to convey the drama that he intended to put across in the paintings.
261
00:27:17,040 --> 00:27:19,200
What's interesting about Canaletto's paintings
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00:27:19,280 --> 00:27:23,000
is that it's really clear to see that he was working on the canvas,
263
00:27:23,080 --> 00:27:26,240
changing his mind as he worked and painting bits out.
264
00:27:26,320 --> 00:27:28,320
It's been great that we've been able to find out
265
00:27:28,400 --> 00:27:32,080
that he was going through the same working process in his drawings.
266
00:27:32,160 --> 00:27:36,040
In particular, we've taken an infrared image of this drawing on the right,
267
00:27:36,120 --> 00:27:40,120
which shows the two columns at the entrance to the Piazza San Marco.
268
00:27:40,200 --> 00:27:42,480
One is crowned with the Lion of St Mark,
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00:27:42,560 --> 00:27:45,200
and the other, which we don't see in the pen-and-ink drawing,
270
00:27:45,280 --> 00:27:47,320
has a statue of St Theodosius.
271
00:27:48,360 --> 00:27:50,160
But the infrared image has shown
272
00:27:50,240 --> 00:27:55,400
that actually, in his underdrawing, Canaletto originally drew in the column
273
00:27:55,480 --> 00:27:59,120
with the statue of St Theodosius in the right place,
274
00:27:59,200 --> 00:28:01,840
but then worked over the top with pen and ink,
275
00:28:01,920 --> 00:28:05,560
probably decided that the column was too much, perhaps,
276
00:28:05,640 --> 00:28:07,520
and decided not to draw it in.
277
00:28:07,600 --> 00:28:11,040
But when we go back to the painting, he's changed his mind again
278
00:28:11,120 --> 00:28:14,360
and he's returned the column to its correct place in the painting
279
00:28:14,440 --> 00:28:16,680
and painted out the column on the left,
280
00:28:16,760 --> 00:28:19,280
probably to make the two work better as a pair.
281
00:28:20,800 --> 00:28:23,600
These paintings were commissioned for a particular room
282
00:28:23,680 --> 00:28:26,240
in Smith's palazzo on the Grand Canal,
283
00:28:26,320 --> 00:28:29,160
and they would have been intended to hang in pairs,
284
00:28:29,240 --> 00:28:31,600
in a very dramatic arrangement.
285
00:28:31,680 --> 00:28:34,640
And Canaletto has chosen the Piazza San Marco,
286
00:28:34,720 --> 00:28:38,880
the area around San Marco which is the civic and religious heart of Venice,
287
00:28:39,000 --> 00:28:40,920
so highly recognisable sights.
288
00:29:25,120 --> 00:29:27,160
I think what makes Canaletto a great artist
289
00:29:27,240 --> 00:29:32,000
is his uniquely sensitive observation of things,
290
00:29:32,080 --> 00:29:35,440
which might be weather or light effects,
291
00:29:35,520 --> 00:29:39,600
people going about their daily business, how dogs behave.
292
00:29:39,680 --> 00:29:43,160
I've always been a particular fan of Canaletto's depiction of dogs.
293
00:29:43,240 --> 00:29:45,920
I'm sure he was a great lover of dogs.
294
00:29:46,040 --> 00:29:50,280
Each one is different and each one has a different character.
295
00:29:50,360 --> 00:29:53,160
It probably derives ultimately from Dutch painting,
296
00:29:54,400 --> 00:29:57,840
but it's entirely new in Venetian painting in the 1720s.
297
00:30:42,480 --> 00:30:46,800
What we're looking at here is one of Canaletto's only surviving sketchbooks.
298
00:30:46,880 --> 00:30:49,080
It's in the Accademia in Venice.
299
00:30:49,160 --> 00:30:50,880
And it's a fascinating document,
300
00:30:51,000 --> 00:30:55,760
because it shows us Canaletto's first response to the city he saw around him.
301
00:30:55,840 --> 00:30:58,440
He would have carried it with him around Venice,
302
00:30:58,520 --> 00:31:01,880
making notes into it of the façades of the buildings,
303
00:31:02,000 --> 00:31:05,480
mainly sequences on the Grand Canal, in this sketchbook.
304
00:31:05,560 --> 00:31:07,600
It dates to around the 1720s,
305
00:31:07,680 --> 00:31:11,360
so around about the time that he was first starting to make view paintings
306
00:31:11,440 --> 00:31:13,720
and to sell them to patrons.
307
00:31:14,720 --> 00:31:17,080
This page, for example, shows...
308
00:31:17,160 --> 00:31:21,400
Here is the Ca' Rezzonico, on the left, which was then known as the Ca' Bon.
309
00:31:22,560 --> 00:31:25,760
It's a sequence moving across to the Ca' Foscari.
310
00:31:25,840 --> 00:31:30,360
You really get a sense of how Canaletto was using the pages of the sketchbook
311
00:31:30,440 --> 00:31:31,800
to record the view.
312
00:31:31,880 --> 00:31:36,520
So he continues the sequence here, the edge of the Ca' Foscari here,
313
00:31:36,600 --> 00:31:38,680
and then he's moved further down the canal,
314
00:31:38,760 --> 00:31:41,320
and so the Ca' Foscari is now much larger.
315
00:31:41,400 --> 00:31:45,720
So he redraws, again, the façade of that building, and continues the sequence.
316
00:31:45,800 --> 00:31:50,720
The Palazzo Balbi, the last building on the previous page, continues here.
317
00:31:50,800 --> 00:31:53,480
And so the sequence continues through the book.
318
00:31:53,560 --> 00:31:56,320
And he's also annotated it with his notes.
319
00:31:56,400 --> 00:32:01,000
So we've got buildings labelled like the Ca' Bon and the Ca' Foscari.
320
00:32:01,080 --> 00:32:03,800
But we've also got little notes that are going to help him later
321
00:32:03,880 --> 00:32:05,360
when he's making his paintings.
322
00:32:05,440 --> 00:32:08,160
So B is for bianco or white.
323
00:32:08,920 --> 00:32:11,640
R here is for rosso or red.
324
00:32:11,720 --> 00:32:13,720
Then, here, sporco is dirty,
325
00:32:13,800 --> 00:32:17,200
so he's saying that the façade of the building is a bit dirty.
326
00:32:17,800 --> 00:32:20,160
And you've got splashes of paint.
327
00:32:20,240 --> 00:32:22,600
It's a working document that he was using
328
00:32:22,680 --> 00:32:25,520
to record his first insights into the city.
329
00:32:27,200 --> 00:32:30,480
This opening is very unusual, because it shows boats and figures.
330
00:32:31,160 --> 00:32:34,520
We've got, on the left-hand side, some of the details of the boats
331
00:32:34,600 --> 00:32:38,160
that Canaletto was recording in front of the Ca' Foscari.
332
00:32:38,240 --> 00:32:40,760
They're drawn in a very similar way to the architecture,
333
00:32:40,840 --> 00:32:43,640
so the pen and ink, very simple outlines.
334
00:32:43,720 --> 00:32:46,560
But then when we move to his figure studies,
335
00:32:46,640 --> 00:32:50,440
they're drawn with a much greater flourish, much looser,
336
00:32:50,520 --> 00:32:52,480
and little flicks of black chalk.
337
00:32:52,560 --> 00:32:57,080
So here we've got the little flicks that show the folds in this man's trousers,
338
00:32:57,160 --> 00:32:59,400
or the water carrier's,
339
00:32:59,480 --> 00:33:02,600
the little details of the man's leg lifting
340
00:33:02,680 --> 00:33:07,720
as he lifts to pour the water into the container that's held by the little boy.
341
00:33:07,800 --> 00:33:11,320
These characters, Canaletto is really enjoying recording.
342
00:33:12,000 --> 00:33:15,440
The interesting thing about the way that he's drawing these characters
343
00:33:15,520 --> 00:33:18,360
is that he takes a very similar approach in his paintings,
344
00:33:18,440 --> 00:33:20,800
where they're painted with little flicks of the brush.
345
00:33:20,880 --> 00:33:24,040
Here it's little squiggles of black chalk.
346
00:33:24,120 --> 00:33:27,520
It gives them a real vibrancy and emotional energy,
347
00:33:27,600 --> 00:33:31,400
which is really going to give the narrative focus to his paintings.
348
00:33:33,640 --> 00:33:36,560
Canaletto's figures, which are always very individual...
349
00:33:36,640 --> 00:33:40,200
In the same way that he doesn't repeat his own compositions,
350
00:33:40,280 --> 00:33:41,880
he also doesn't repeat figures.
351
00:33:42,000 --> 00:33:45,800
He always approaches the figures for each painting anew.
352
00:33:45,880 --> 00:33:51,440
What does happen with them is that they tend to get more and more unnecessary.
353
00:33:51,520 --> 00:33:53,160
And certainly in his late work,
354
00:33:53,240 --> 00:33:58,040
they sort of disintegrate into calligraphic dots and dashes.
355
00:33:59,600 --> 00:34:03,280
All of Canaletto's paintings were painted in his studio.
356
00:34:03,360 --> 00:34:09,040
A commentator at the time thought that he painted on the spot out of doors,
357
00:34:09,120 --> 00:34:10,520
but he didn't.
358
00:34:10,600 --> 00:34:13,320
He used drawings as quite detailed notes
359
00:34:13,400 --> 00:34:16,920
which then informed the paintings that he made.
360
00:34:17,040 --> 00:34:20,600
And therefore it is so amazing
361
00:34:20,679 --> 00:34:28,120
that he recreated these paintings which look absolutely realistic.
362
00:35:04,920 --> 00:35:09,880
The joy of this painting, for me, is the strong contrasts.
363
00:35:10,000 --> 00:35:13,120
The darks are very dark and the lights are very bright.
364
00:35:14,040 --> 00:35:19,160
And the contrast between the way the architecture's painted very formally
365
00:35:19,240 --> 00:35:22,480
and the crowd scene.
366
00:35:22,560 --> 00:35:26,160
You get a lot of highly impasted little blobs.
367
00:35:26,240 --> 00:35:30,040
So over here the chicken coops.
368
00:35:30,120 --> 00:35:34,920
The hens poking their heads out of the coops are completely convincing
369
00:35:35,040 --> 00:35:39,520
with just a few little touches of impasted paint.
370
00:35:39,600 --> 00:35:44,920
And then the group of the figures watching the Punch and Judy show.
371
00:35:45,040 --> 00:35:50,160
Here's Mr Punch just appearing out of the curtain.
372
00:35:51,080 --> 00:35:54,880
Canaletto's very good at just putting a few little blobs on
373
00:35:55,000 --> 00:36:00,800
to make the sunlight catch the face of the audience.
374
00:36:00,880 --> 00:36:06,240
And what I love about this one is that instead of just painting the folds
375
00:36:06,320 --> 00:36:08,600
of the fabric of the back of the puppet booth,
376
00:36:08,680 --> 00:36:11,800
you have really the sense of somebody's body.
377
00:36:11,880 --> 00:36:18,840
Someone or somebody is in there pushing out the back of the curtain.
378
00:36:19,680 --> 00:36:22,280
And what's charming about this painting
379
00:36:22,360 --> 00:36:25,720
is that there's a little fingerprint here by the artist.
380
00:36:25,800 --> 00:36:29,200
He's just modulated the light paint.
381
00:36:29,280 --> 00:36:32,200
The fingerprint is definitely the artist's.
382
00:36:32,280 --> 00:36:34,400
It's into the wet paint,
383
00:36:34,480 --> 00:36:39,840
being the most efficient way of making the right stone texture,
384
00:36:39,920 --> 00:36:41,280
just in that little bit.
385
00:36:41,360 --> 00:36:44,640
You don't get fingerprints happening very often in his work,
386
00:36:44,720 --> 00:36:49,800
so it's more charming and more precious that it's there.
387
00:37:32,560 --> 00:37:37,080
One of the very early accounts of Canaletto's life by Zanetti
388
00:37:37,160 --> 00:37:40,600
says that Canaletto used camera obscura.
389
00:37:40,680 --> 00:37:44,600
In fact he was able to teach how to use it well.
390
00:37:44,680 --> 00:37:47,680
So from that basis people have therefore thought
391
00:37:47,760 --> 00:37:51,600
that he must have used a camera obscura.
392
00:37:51,680 --> 00:37:54,440
Today we are much more sceptical,
393
00:37:54,520 --> 00:37:58,280
because of the evidence that we actually show in the exhibition
394
00:37:58,360 --> 00:38:02,920
that all his drawings were very carefully prepared in the studio.
395
00:38:04,600 --> 00:38:07,800
The camera obscura is a box with a pinhole in it
396
00:38:07,880 --> 00:38:10,800
and a mirror which projects an image
397
00:38:10,880 --> 00:38:14,800
of, for instance, a building in front of the artist
398
00:38:14,880 --> 00:38:18,600
onto a sheet of paper, which can then be traced.
399
00:38:18,680 --> 00:38:25,520
It's very useful for the establishment of the basics of a composition,
400
00:38:25,600 --> 00:38:29,400
but it's no good for detail.
401
00:38:30,160 --> 00:38:33,640
Obviously, it cannot be used except in a static position,
402
00:38:33,720 --> 00:38:39,480
which in Venice obviously rules out its use on any form of water.
403
00:38:39,560 --> 00:38:44,480
There's an enormous amount of recent work, particularly in Italy, done
404
00:38:44,560 --> 00:38:49,080
on Canaletto's use of the camera obscura, which is unquestionable.
405
00:38:49,680 --> 00:38:51,120
The main issue at this point
406
00:38:51,200 --> 00:38:56,000
is to balance one's feelings about its usefulness,
407
00:38:56,080 --> 00:39:00,520
because, on the one hand, having a mechanical aid of that sort
408
00:39:00,600 --> 00:39:05,480
was an essential ingredient to the way that these painters operate,
409
00:39:05,560 --> 00:39:08,320
but, on the other hand, the reason that they're artists
410
00:39:08,400 --> 00:39:10,560
is because they can take the mechanical
411
00:39:10,640 --> 00:39:14,240
and make it into something entirely their own.
412
00:39:15,800 --> 00:39:19,720
There's a long-running debate about whether Canaletto used a camera obscura
413
00:39:19,800 --> 00:39:21,920
and so when we were preparing this exhibition
414
00:39:22,040 --> 00:39:24,720
we were interested to look closely at the drawings
415
00:39:24,800 --> 00:39:29,480
and to see if we could find evidence of the use of this mechanical instrument.
416
00:39:29,560 --> 00:39:30,920
One of the things we did
417
00:39:31,040 --> 00:39:34,440
was we took some infrared photography of the drawings.
418
00:39:34,520 --> 00:39:37,360
This is a technique which works by the infrared rays
419
00:39:37,440 --> 00:39:40,400
passing through the pen and ink on the surface of the sheet
420
00:39:40,480 --> 00:39:42,320
because it doesn't contain any carbon,
421
00:39:42,400 --> 00:39:44,480
but they won't pass through any underdrawing,
422
00:39:44,560 --> 00:39:48,400
so any pencil or chalk underdrawing which does contain carbon.
423
00:39:48,480 --> 00:39:52,680
So you get these very clear images of Canaletto's underdrawing.
424
00:39:53,680 --> 00:39:57,440
What this has shown is that these drawings were very carefully constructed
425
00:39:57,520 --> 00:40:00,360
in the studio using a pencil and ruler,
426
00:40:00,440 --> 00:40:04,080
because you get these very clear perspective and horizon lines.
427
00:40:04,160 --> 00:40:07,640
You get vertical lines that extend not just for the façade of the building,
428
00:40:07,720 --> 00:40:09,040
but extending into the water
429
00:40:09,120 --> 00:40:12,320
where he would have drawn the corresponding reflections.
430
00:40:12,400 --> 00:40:15,880
So we see that he's very carefully constructed these drawings
431
00:40:16,000 --> 00:40:17,160
in the studio,
432
00:40:17,240 --> 00:40:19,600
probably from his outline sketchbook studies
433
00:40:19,680 --> 00:40:22,480
that he would have made while walking around the city.
434
00:40:22,560 --> 00:40:26,760
But no evidence at all that he was using a camera obscura in this instance.
435
00:40:29,440 --> 00:40:31,280
I think it's very important to understand
436
00:40:31,360 --> 00:40:34,680
that Canaletto ran a very active studio
437
00:40:34,760 --> 00:40:38,680
and, in order to meet the vast demand for his work,
438
00:40:38,760 --> 00:40:44,200
Canaletto inevitably employed first his family,
439
00:40:44,280 --> 00:40:47,840
his father presumably, two nephews,
440
00:40:47,920 --> 00:40:49,880
one of whom was particularly talented,
441
00:40:50,000 --> 00:40:55,600
but also other artists, in order to help at least in the preparation of canvases,
442
00:40:55,680 --> 00:40:59,560
which could then be finished off with the master's magic touch.
443
00:41:20,160 --> 00:41:26,280
The interesting thing about Canaletto and the other painters of the time
444
00:41:26,360 --> 00:41:30,800
is that, for view painting, Canaletto doesn't really have any competition.
445
00:41:30,880 --> 00:41:33,320
He is simply the best.
446
00:41:34,640 --> 00:41:38,480
This is a mock-up of how the paintings would be constructed.
447
00:41:38,560 --> 00:41:43,560
So you can see that the canvas is very coarse and open weave
448
00:41:43,640 --> 00:41:48,880
and the priming is this red, water-based layer
449
00:41:49,000 --> 00:41:54,360
which is quite thickly applied and fills the interstices of the canvas weave.
450
00:41:54,440 --> 00:41:58,080
And then in the area of the sky, there's a pink layer
451
00:41:58,160 --> 00:42:02,040
and you can see that here I've inscribed lines like Canaletto would have done
452
00:42:02,120 --> 00:42:04,000
into the paint.
453
00:42:04,080 --> 00:42:09,880
But also he does sometimes leave the rulings obvious.
454
00:42:10,000 --> 00:42:15,920
There are times when he needs to enhance the illusion of architectural form
455
00:42:16,040 --> 00:42:18,760
and then he leaves those lines visible.
456
00:42:19,840 --> 00:42:25,720
And here at the bottom we've got a kind of broad blocking in of stone colour
457
00:42:25,800 --> 00:42:29,360
and you can see that that's happening on the painting here.
458
00:42:29,440 --> 00:42:33,840
If you take away all the details you can see how broadly it's painted.
459
00:43:15,600 --> 00:43:20,080
Well, the 16th century is considered the golden age of Venetian art
460
00:43:20,160 --> 00:43:25,120
and especially Venetian painting, the most famous painter being Titian.
461
00:43:25,200 --> 00:43:29,920
Other big names, of course, are Tintoretto, Veronese.
462
00:43:30,040 --> 00:43:33,000
They are leading figures, but not the only ones, of course.
463
00:43:33,080 --> 00:43:36,200
There is a huge production of arts in general
464
00:43:36,280 --> 00:43:40,240
and painting more specifically over the 16th century
465
00:43:40,320 --> 00:43:42,520
which will be very influential later,
466
00:43:42,600 --> 00:43:47,760
and especially for painters working in the 18th century.
467
00:43:47,840 --> 00:43:52,160
Venetian painters were regarded as the masters of colour,
468
00:43:52,240 --> 00:43:54,800
and they were very influential.
469
00:43:54,880 --> 00:43:59,000
Even later, 17th-century, 18th-century painters
470
00:43:59,080 --> 00:44:05,720
looked to Titian and Veronese especially as examples of beautiful painting,
471
00:44:05,800 --> 00:44:09,240
and especially the way they handled colours.
472
00:44:09,320 --> 00:44:13,840
I think that there are several factors. Again trade, perhaps.
473
00:44:13,920 --> 00:44:18,600
The availability of pigments you had in Venice was unique
474
00:44:18,680 --> 00:44:24,160
and even Raphael ordered pigments from Venice.
475
00:44:25,840 --> 00:44:28,040
In the 16th century, there is a fascination
476
00:44:28,120 --> 00:44:33,920
for the sensuality of Titian's colour especially.
477
00:44:34,040 --> 00:44:40,400
It's thick, textural and extremely charming.
478
00:44:40,480 --> 00:44:44,480
What I believe people are struck by when they look at a Venetian painting
479
00:44:44,560 --> 00:44:52,560
is precisely this unfathomable effect that colour has on your sight.
480
00:45:01,240 --> 00:45:03,640
We're in the Accademia in Venice,
481
00:45:03,720 --> 00:45:07,440
and I'm standing in front of The Feast of the House of Levi,
482
00:45:07,520 --> 00:45:14,720
a major biblical feast painting by Paolo Veronese, the 16th-century artist,
483
00:45:14,800 --> 00:45:21,440
which Veronese painted for the refectory of Santi Giovanni e Paolo.
484
00:45:22,400 --> 00:45:24,680
More than any other 16th-century artist,
485
00:45:24,760 --> 00:45:28,840
it was Veronese who represented Venice
486
00:45:28,920 --> 00:45:34,320
as the 18th-century patrons, collectors wanted to see Venice,
487
00:45:34,400 --> 00:45:39,720
represented the stateliness, the magnificence, the power of the city.
488
00:45:39,800 --> 00:45:46,840
Veronese was also very important for two major artists of the 18th century,
489
00:45:46,920 --> 00:45:51,680
Sebastiano Ricci and Giambattista Tiepolo.
490
00:45:51,760 --> 00:45:57,320
They copied his works. They also emulated his style.
491
00:45:57,400 --> 00:45:59,160
In this case
492
00:45:59,240 --> 00:46:03,120
we think that Sebastiano Ricci actually came and stood in front of the painting
493
00:46:03,200 --> 00:46:08,840
and possibly had his canvas with him, and he noted down heads.
494
00:46:08,920 --> 00:46:11,120
And the particular heads that he chose
495
00:46:11,200 --> 00:46:16,640
were the central heads of Christ and St John in conversation.
496
00:46:16,720 --> 00:46:19,400
Some figures beside also in conversation.
497
00:46:19,480 --> 00:46:23,320
They were very quickly painted on bare ground,
498
00:46:23,400 --> 00:46:25,440
they have a great vitality about them.
499
00:46:27,720 --> 00:46:32,560
Sebastiano Ricci's copies of these heads were really famous at the time,
500
00:46:32,640 --> 00:46:35,520
well-noted by everyone.
501
00:46:35,600 --> 00:46:37,600
But if you look at the heads you can see
502
00:46:37,680 --> 00:46:41,360
that Sebastiano Ricci has actually brought all the 18th century
503
00:46:41,440 --> 00:46:42,920
into the 16th century.
504
00:46:43,040 --> 00:46:44,480
They have a bravura,
505
00:46:44,560 --> 00:46:49,400
they have a particular vivacity that was very typical of the 18th century
506
00:46:49,480 --> 00:46:52,120
and not so much of the 16th century.
507
00:46:53,920 --> 00:47:00,200
It's a huge canvas, and you had to be in full command of the whole thing.
508
00:47:00,280 --> 00:47:03,720
Every detail is in the right spot,
509
00:47:03,800 --> 00:47:08,560
and it's not just a matter of making it ornamental and magnificent,
510
00:47:08,640 --> 00:47:12,320
it's a matter of making it meaningful.
511
00:47:12,400 --> 00:47:18,000
And I think what Ricci sees in Veronese is precisely that,
512
00:47:18,080 --> 00:47:26,080
the way Veronese creates very poised, composed situations out of a narrative.
513
00:47:46,320 --> 00:47:50,200
This painting was completed in 1726
514
00:47:50,280 --> 00:47:55,720
and is part of a set of seven Old Testament scenes.
515
00:47:55,800 --> 00:48:01,480
More than any other artist, Sebastiano Ricci transformed painting
516
00:48:01,560 --> 00:48:05,840
from the heaviness and darkness of the Baroque of the 17th century
517
00:48:05,920 --> 00:48:10,120
into the light and fluency of the 18th century.
518
00:48:11,160 --> 00:48:14,240
A good example of this particular style
519
00:48:14,320 --> 00:48:21,760
which was taking off in Venice is the black king on the right of the painting,
520
00:48:21,840 --> 00:48:24,440
who stands in such an elegant pose,
521
00:48:24,520 --> 00:48:29,920
wearing sumptuous clothes in rich whites and gold and blue,
522
00:48:30,040 --> 00:48:37,520
and epitomises the sense of theatre, of drama, of light and colour,
523
00:48:37,600 --> 00:48:41,200
which transformed painting at that time.
524
00:48:42,080 --> 00:48:47,720
This style was popular both with the Venetians and across Europe
525
00:48:47,800 --> 00:48:53,200
and with the British who welcomed these Italian artists
526
00:48:53,280 --> 00:48:59,240
who could decorate their houses in such a magnificent way.
527
00:49:00,040 --> 00:49:02,560
The exhibition provides a remarkable opportunity
528
00:49:02,640 --> 00:49:06,840
to see all these fabulous paintings done for Consul Smith.
529
00:49:07,800 --> 00:49:10,880
Smith is a major figure in Venetian painting of the 18th century,
530
00:49:11,000 --> 00:49:15,440
because he was one of the great patrons of contemporary artists.
531
00:49:16,640 --> 00:49:20,200
He had a major collection of old art,
532
00:49:20,280 --> 00:49:22,320
but also bought works
533
00:49:22,400 --> 00:49:27,600
from most of the more interesting Venetian painters of the day,
534
00:49:27,680 --> 00:49:31,080
which he used initially to decorate his house.
535
00:49:31,160 --> 00:49:33,640
He had exceptional examples.
536
00:49:35,040 --> 00:49:41,360
Consul Smith had his house just a few hundred yards from the Rialto Bridge
537
00:49:41,440 --> 00:49:46,680
and built up his wealth through the import and export trade,
538
00:49:46,760 --> 00:49:50,280
particularly fish and wine.
539
00:49:50,360 --> 00:49:54,640
Of course Canaletto didn't live that far away from the Rialto Bridge.
540
00:49:54,720 --> 00:49:57,280
He lived in the San Lio area,
541
00:49:57,360 --> 00:50:02,400
so both patron and artist were in the same neighbourhood.
542
00:50:26,680 --> 00:50:29,680
Joseph Smith was a British merchant and banker
543
00:50:29,760 --> 00:50:33,040
who was educated in London at Westminster School
544
00:50:33,120 --> 00:50:36,720
and in about 1700 took the decision to move to Venice
545
00:50:36,800 --> 00:50:39,600
where he worked for a banking firm, Thomas Williams.
546
00:50:39,680 --> 00:50:44,480
He worked initially as a merchant and trader trading fish and meat,
547
00:50:44,560 --> 00:50:47,880
but he also began this great interest in art collecting,
548
00:50:48,000 --> 00:50:49,920
particularly collecting books at first,
549
00:50:50,040 --> 00:50:53,240
but then moving into patronising artists.
550
00:50:53,320 --> 00:50:55,920
Joseph Smith was also a keen opera lover,
551
00:50:56,040 --> 00:50:59,280
so he was married to Catherine Tofts, an English opera singer.
552
00:50:59,360 --> 00:51:01,400
It's through these connections with the stage
553
00:51:01,480 --> 00:51:03,640
that he probably first met Canaletto.
554
00:51:15,120 --> 00:51:18,240
In the Museo Correr is this book,
555
00:51:18,320 --> 00:51:22,800
which was commissioned by Pietro Gradenigo,
556
00:51:22,880 --> 00:51:30,680
who asked Giovanni Grevembroch to supply these wonderful images of dignitaries,
557
00:51:30,760 --> 00:51:36,200
and in fact the whole of Venetian society is represented here.
558
00:51:36,280 --> 00:51:39,800
It was started in the mid-18th century,
559
00:51:39,880 --> 00:51:43,920
precisely when Canaletto was at the height of his powers.
560
00:51:44,400 --> 00:51:48,840
The page that I'm looking at is called Console in Venezia,
561
00:51:48,920 --> 00:51:55,800
and it is dedicated at the bottom of the page to Consul Smith,
562
00:51:55,880 --> 00:52:00,440
so we think that this must be an image of Consul Smith.
563
00:52:02,840 --> 00:52:07,440
The top part is an explanation of what a consul does,
564
00:52:07,520 --> 00:52:11,320
and in particular the consul from Britain.
565
00:52:11,400 --> 00:52:14,840
It's to do with trade and the business of trade,
566
00:52:14,920 --> 00:52:18,440
and it's certainly not to do with politics.
567
00:52:18,520 --> 00:52:23,320
It's a very good job description for Consul Smith.
568
00:52:23,400 --> 00:52:27,080
And then at the end there is this wonderful sentence
569
00:52:27,160 --> 00:52:32,160
about how Consul Smith has been living in Venice for many years
570
00:52:32,240 --> 00:52:36,640
and it's thought that he has fallen in love with the city,
571
00:52:36,720 --> 00:52:42,280
so much so that he had a wonderful palace built at his own expense
572
00:52:42,360 --> 00:52:44,680
on the Grand Canal.
573
00:52:44,760 --> 00:52:48,040
It shows very much, very clearly,
574
00:52:48,120 --> 00:52:52,080
the love that Consul Smith had for the city,
575
00:52:52,160 --> 00:52:57,640
but also the respect that he was held in by people like Gradenigo.
576
00:53:00,040 --> 00:53:03,320
Consul Smith, I think, is extremely interesting
577
00:53:03,400 --> 00:53:06,160
for the way in which he combines commercial interests
578
00:53:06,240 --> 00:53:10,080
with being a connoisseur and a dealer in art.
579
00:53:10,160 --> 00:53:12,800
And he's very strategic about this.
580
00:53:12,880 --> 00:53:18,880
He has his palazzo on the Grand Canal which is the prime tourist site.
581
00:53:19,000 --> 00:53:21,480
And he invites people to the palazzo
582
00:53:21,560 --> 00:53:24,280
and this is where he can show them the Canalettos.
583
00:53:24,360 --> 00:53:28,120
One of the complaints that people very often made about Venice
584
00:53:28,200 --> 00:53:32,120
was that the Venetian nobility didn't consort with foreigners.
585
00:53:32,200 --> 00:53:35,000
Because of the paranoia of the Venetian state
586
00:53:35,080 --> 00:53:38,040
that they didn't want any state secrets divulged,
587
00:53:38,120 --> 00:53:41,080
they didn't want the security of the state imperilled,
588
00:53:41,160 --> 00:53:43,600
the Venetian nobility would not mix with foreigners.
589
00:53:44,480 --> 00:53:46,720
Going to Consul Smith had that added advantage
590
00:53:46,800 --> 00:53:49,360
that this was a house that you could freely enter
591
00:53:49,440 --> 00:53:51,000
and he would make sure
592
00:53:51,080 --> 00:53:55,120
that people were exposed to the kinds of paintings that he wanted to sell
593
00:53:55,200 --> 00:54:01,240
and then he was able to act as the agent and make a profit in doing so.
594
00:55:17,480 --> 00:55:21,120
We're standing in front of the 12 views of the Grand Canal,
595
00:55:21,200 --> 00:55:24,480
which is a unique set of paintings
596
00:55:24,560 --> 00:55:27,560
recording the entire length of the Grand Canal
597
00:55:27,640 --> 00:55:31,640
from the start of it at Santa Chiara
598
00:55:31,720 --> 00:55:37,520
right down the canal to the mouth and where Santa Maria della Salute is.
599
00:55:38,520 --> 00:55:45,520
We think that the idea for the set evolved during the 1720s,
600
00:55:45,600 --> 00:55:50,760
because the first in the series is the Santa Chiara,
601
00:55:50,840 --> 00:55:55,800
which was painted around about 1722-3, so very early,
602
00:55:55,880 --> 00:56:01,200
at precisely the time that Canaletto was painting the early San Marco series.
603
00:56:01,280 --> 00:56:05,080
Technically it's very similar to those paintings,
604
00:56:05,160 --> 00:56:10,760
but by the end of the decade the idea of a complete set was finalised
605
00:56:10,840 --> 00:56:14,560
as a commission between Canaletto and Consul Smith.
606
00:56:15,880 --> 00:56:20,080
These would have been hung in a major position, we think,
607
00:56:20,160 --> 00:56:22,360
in Consul Smith's palazzo
608
00:56:22,440 --> 00:56:25,720
and visitors would have been able to come and admire them
609
00:56:25,800 --> 00:56:30,520
and if they liked they could commission versions of their own
610
00:56:30,600 --> 00:56:32,800
to have back in Britain.
611
00:57:41,480 --> 00:57:44,400
It wasn't just tourists who came to Joseph Smith's palazzo
612
00:57:44,480 --> 00:57:45,560
on the Grand Canal.
613
00:57:45,640 --> 00:57:49,520
He also had a great network of scholars and collectors.
614
00:57:49,600 --> 00:57:53,880
He was widely admired by Carlo Goldoni, the dramatist,
615
00:57:54,000 --> 00:57:56,240
who wrote a play after him.
616
00:57:56,320 --> 00:57:58,520
He was also interested in a lot of the current trends
617
00:57:58,600 --> 00:58:02,040
in architectural thinking at this time,
618
00:58:02,120 --> 00:58:05,880
particularly the great interest in the work of Andrea Palladio,
619
00:58:06,000 --> 00:58:08,360
the Venetian 16th-century architect,
620
00:58:08,440 --> 00:58:11,040
which underwent a revival in the 18th century.
621
00:58:12,800 --> 00:58:16,360
There's a lot of evidence that Joseph Smith had much broader interests
622
00:58:16,440 --> 00:58:20,240
than just the commercial side of his dealings with Canaletto.
623
00:58:20,320 --> 00:58:24,520
He was interested in books, he built up a great library
624
00:58:24,600 --> 00:58:27,560
and was involved in the setting up of the Pasquali press,
625
00:58:27,640 --> 00:58:30,200
which printed important Enlightenment texts.
626
00:58:31,560 --> 00:58:33,600
Printmaking in Venice
627
00:58:33,680 --> 00:58:39,360
is a very important adjunct to the marketing of view paintings
628
00:58:39,440 --> 00:58:45,200
by producing a large series of engravings of Venetian views.
629
00:58:45,280 --> 00:58:50,320
These engravings disseminated the compositions of the view painters
630
00:58:50,400 --> 00:58:52,640
to the far ends of Europe.
631
00:59:36,920 --> 00:59:39,480
We're standing in the print shop of Gianni Basso,
632
00:59:39,560 --> 00:59:41,920
which is in the Cannaregio district of Venice.
633
00:59:42,040 --> 00:59:44,320
He uses a lot of traditional printmaking techniques
634
00:59:44,400 --> 00:59:47,080
that would've been used in the 18th century.
635
00:59:47,160 --> 00:59:50,120
Venice in the 18th century was a real thriving centre
636
00:59:50,200 --> 00:59:52,920
for printmaking and book production.
637
00:59:53,840 --> 00:59:58,800
Artists like Canaletto and Marco Ricci and Tiepolo took up etching themselves.
638
00:59:58,880 --> 01:00:00,480
But it was also in places like this
639
01:00:00,560 --> 01:00:03,440
where Grand Tourists and visitors to Venice
640
01:00:03,520 --> 01:00:07,000
could buy, especially, reproductions of Canaletto's paintings.
641
01:00:07,080 --> 01:00:09,400
Perhaps they couldn't afford to buy an oil painting,
642
01:00:09,480 --> 01:00:11,720
but they could afford to buy a print.
643
01:00:11,800 --> 01:00:15,640
In 1735, Antonio Visentini made a set of reproductions
644
01:00:15,720 --> 01:00:18,520
after Canaletto's most important paintings
645
01:00:18,600 --> 01:00:21,000
in Consul Smith's house on the Grand Canal.
646
01:00:21,080 --> 01:00:24,280
So visitors could consult this prospectus of prints
647
01:00:24,360 --> 01:00:27,600
and decide which versions they might commission for their own collection.
648
01:00:27,680 --> 01:00:31,360
Or they might simply decide to acquire the prints to take back to Britain.
649
01:00:31,440 --> 01:00:36,440
Joseph Smith was very interested in printmaking and print culture in Venice,
650
01:00:36,520 --> 01:00:41,360
and in the 1730s he set up his own printing press, the Pasquali press.
651
01:00:41,920 --> 01:00:45,920
He employed Antonio Visentini as one of its principal draughtsmen,
652
01:00:46,040 --> 01:00:48,360
and lots of the prints that were made by artists
653
01:00:48,440 --> 01:00:51,440
were then published as sets through Pasquali.
654
01:00:53,040 --> 01:00:59,080
Every significant English visitor to Venice would have met Consul Smith
655
01:00:59,160 --> 01:01:01,640
and probably been invited round to his house,
656
01:01:02,360 --> 01:01:07,320
where they would have been greeted with this fabulous display, floor to ceiling.
657
01:01:07,400 --> 01:01:10,480
And from the early 1730s onwards,
658
01:01:10,560 --> 01:01:13,920
he could produce this set of engravings and say,
659
01:01:14,040 --> 01:01:18,480
"Please tell me which numbers you'd like and I'll get them to send them to you."
660
01:01:19,680 --> 01:01:22,440
The business was extremely well organised,
661
01:01:22,520 --> 01:01:24,600
because Smith's brother lived in London.
662
01:01:25,640 --> 01:01:27,680
Paintings would be shipped to London
663
01:01:27,760 --> 01:01:31,200
and delivered to the client by Smith's brother
664
01:01:31,280 --> 01:01:33,200
and he would collect the payment.
665
01:01:34,480 --> 01:01:37,840
Both Joseph Smith and Canaletto were clearly very shrewd
666
01:01:37,920 --> 01:01:39,480
and they knew their market
667
01:01:39,560 --> 01:01:43,440
and they knew that there was a market there for these views of Venice.
668
01:01:43,520 --> 01:01:47,440
Actually, it's interesting because Venetian families themselves
669
01:01:47,520 --> 01:01:50,240
were not really interested in buying his paintings.
670
01:01:50,320 --> 01:01:54,840
It was mainly a tourist market that Canaletto was catering towards.
671
01:01:54,920 --> 01:01:57,880
These Venetian families were instead commissioning
672
01:01:58,000 --> 01:02:00,040
history paintings or decorative schemes
673
01:02:00,120 --> 01:02:04,840
by artists like Sebastiano Ricci or Tiepolo to decorate their houses
674
01:02:04,920 --> 01:02:08,000
because, for them, they didn't need to have a painting of Venice
675
01:02:08,080 --> 01:02:10,000
because they could look out of the window,
676
01:02:10,080 --> 01:02:13,480
whereas British Grand Tourists taking these souvenirs home
677
01:02:13,560 --> 01:02:15,480
wanted to hang them in their country houses
678
01:02:15,560 --> 01:02:19,600
where they could be reminded of this great period in their lives.
679
01:02:50,400 --> 01:02:54,160
Woburn Abbey is the family home of the Dukes of Bedford
680
01:02:54,240 --> 01:02:58,040
and it has been in their possession since 1547
681
01:02:58,120 --> 01:03:02,240
when it was gifted in the will of Henry VIII to Sir John Russell
682
01:03:02,320 --> 01:03:04,440
who later became the first Earl of Bedford.
683
01:03:06,080 --> 01:03:07,320
The fourth Duke of Bedford,
684
01:03:07,400 --> 01:03:11,280
who purchased the 24 views by Canaletto of Venice
685
01:03:11,360 --> 01:03:13,160
that are in the collection here at Woburn,
686
01:03:13,240 --> 01:03:17,240
acquired them on his Grand Tour in 1731.
687
01:03:17,320 --> 01:03:19,320
We know that he was in Venice.
688
01:03:19,400 --> 01:03:22,160
At that time he was Lord John Russell.
689
01:03:22,240 --> 01:03:25,160
He hadn't inherited the title from his brother.
690
01:03:25,240 --> 01:03:28,560
He became the duke in 1733
691
01:03:28,640 --> 01:03:33,080
and we know that he went back to Venice again in 1736.
692
01:03:34,360 --> 01:03:36,840
The fourth Duke of Bedford would have been a very young man
693
01:03:36,920 --> 01:03:40,640
when he arrived in Venice. He was 21 years old.
694
01:03:40,720 --> 01:03:44,760
So he would have started his Grand Tour probably when he was 19
695
01:03:44,840 --> 01:03:49,800
and he would have been conscious that as part of that tour
696
01:03:49,880 --> 01:03:52,000
he was acquiring works of art
697
01:03:52,080 --> 01:03:56,560
which would have effectively given a sense of his own taste.
698
01:03:56,640 --> 01:04:00,640
So when he got home he could use them to decorate his home
699
01:04:00,720 --> 01:04:06,160
and be able to show his companions and his contemporaries
700
01:04:06,240 --> 01:04:10,720
that he'd been on a Grand Tour, he'd seen these things first-hand for himself
701
01:04:10,800 --> 01:04:14,920
and that he was clearly as a consequence an educated man.
702
01:04:17,680 --> 01:04:22,440
The Grand Tour is a journey that was generally undertaken by young men
703
01:04:22,520 --> 01:04:23,840
during the 18th century
704
01:04:23,920 --> 01:04:26,560
and that's the way in which historians usually use it.
705
01:04:26,640 --> 01:04:31,800
It's this idea of young men who have left school, might have left university,
706
01:04:31,880 --> 01:04:35,040
they'll be in their mid-to late-teens
707
01:04:35,120 --> 01:04:39,680
and they're sent off by their parents on an extended tour of Europe.
708
01:04:39,760 --> 01:04:46,320
But a lot of it's about acquiring the social skills and the political know-how
709
01:04:46,400 --> 01:04:50,200
and ideas of taste and culture
710
01:04:50,279 --> 01:04:54,200
that will enable them to fulfil a position when they come back home.
711
01:04:56,640 --> 01:05:01,400
Here we've got the bill for one of the three invoices
712
01:05:01,480 --> 01:05:05,040
for the supply of the Canaletto views of Venice at Woburn.
713
01:05:05,120 --> 01:05:08,760
This one is dated February 1733
714
01:05:08,840 --> 01:05:12,240
and it's made out to His Grace, the Duke of Bedford,
715
01:05:12,320 --> 01:05:16,520
and it's signed by Joseph Smith, who then becomes Consul Smith.
716
01:05:18,040 --> 01:05:19,840
But if we have a look at the other side
717
01:05:19,920 --> 01:05:23,640
we can see that it's actually been acknowledged
718
01:05:23,720 --> 01:05:27,400
or rather that the cash has been received by John Smith.
719
01:05:27,480 --> 01:05:33,400
John Smith was the brother of Joseph Smith who acted as his agent in London,
720
01:05:33,480 --> 01:05:38,200
sort of facilitating the sales through to the English aristocrats
721
01:05:38,279 --> 01:05:40,760
who'd purchased these objects on their Grand Tour.
722
01:05:41,880 --> 01:05:44,920
We don't know exactly how the fourth duke
723
01:05:45,040 --> 01:05:47,640
would have first come into contact with Consul Smith,
724
01:05:47,720 --> 01:05:52,240
but we do know that Consul Smith was supplying pictures
725
01:05:52,320 --> 01:05:57,560
by various different artists to English aristocrats when they came to Venice.
726
01:05:57,640 --> 01:06:02,880
Although many of the views that exist of Venice by Canaletto
727
01:06:03,000 --> 01:06:05,320
are representing the same scene,
728
01:06:05,400 --> 01:06:07,640
there are very subtle differences between them,
729
01:06:07,720 --> 01:06:09,760
so no two are actually identical,
730
01:06:09,840 --> 01:06:14,120
although at a passing glance you might be forgiven for thinking that they are.
731
01:06:14,200 --> 01:06:18,040
And this is quite an important detail in Canaletto's work.
732
01:06:20,560 --> 01:06:24,840
One of the views of Venice that exists in the collection here at Woburn
733
01:06:24,920 --> 01:06:27,680
shows the Arsenal, which was the centre,
734
01:06:27,760 --> 01:06:32,600
the controlling point of Venice's maritime power and influence,
735
01:06:32,680 --> 01:06:38,320
and it controlled the trade routes into the Adriatic from Europe,
736
01:06:38,400 --> 01:06:42,440
which Venice had historically managed to do.
737
01:06:42,520 --> 01:06:46,400
Therefore it really represented a control of the sea
738
01:06:46,480 --> 01:06:50,320
and a route through which wealth could be accumulated
739
01:06:50,400 --> 01:06:54,720
through trade with the East with luxury goods and materials,
740
01:06:54,800 --> 01:06:56,720
such as, for example, lapis lazuli,
741
01:06:56,800 --> 01:07:00,640
which had been such an important commodity
742
01:07:00,720 --> 01:07:05,240
in terms of the birth of Venetian art during the Renaissance.
743
01:07:05,320 --> 01:07:11,880
The military and particularly maritime associations that Venice had
744
01:07:12,000 --> 01:07:16,680
were something which the British aristocrats could really relate to.
745
01:07:16,760 --> 01:07:20,920
They saw a parallel perhaps with the Republic of Venice
746
01:07:21,040 --> 01:07:24,200
and the British nation itself,
747
01:07:24,800 --> 01:07:29,760
both being maritime powers controlling trade through the sea
748
01:07:29,840 --> 01:07:33,000
and being able to express their power
749
01:07:33,080 --> 01:07:36,440
through their navy and their control of the water.
750
01:07:39,720 --> 01:07:43,400
So whereas in the first half of the 18th century what you find overwhelmingly
751
01:07:43,480 --> 01:07:45,880
are the sons of the aristocracy and the landed gentry,
752
01:07:46,000 --> 01:07:50,520
in the second half of the 18th century you're finding families,
753
01:07:50,600 --> 01:07:52,080
you're finding older men,
754
01:07:52,160 --> 01:07:55,360
you're finding professionals, people who aren't from the landed elite,
755
01:07:55,440 --> 01:07:58,240
you're finding lawyers and doctors and physicians,
756
01:07:58,320 --> 01:08:01,080
and also a lot of women travelling in family groups
757
01:08:01,160 --> 01:08:03,840
but sometimes independently.
758
01:08:03,920 --> 01:08:06,720
Women often tend to be much more sensitive
759
01:08:06,800 --> 01:08:10,480
to things like poor hygiene and smells.
760
01:08:11,240 --> 01:08:13,279
Everybody talks about the smell in Venice,
761
01:08:13,360 --> 01:08:17,040
but, in general, women are much more likely
762
01:08:17,120 --> 01:08:21,240
to talk about the cleanliness of the streets, the cleanliness of the beds
763
01:08:21,319 --> 01:08:23,080
and the way the food has been prepared.
764
01:08:23,160 --> 01:08:26,080
She'll tell you about the washing that's hanging out of windows
765
01:08:26,160 --> 01:08:30,439
whereas that tends, again, not to feature in the comments that men make.
766
01:08:32,200 --> 01:08:34,760
Women were also particularly interested in art
767
01:08:34,840 --> 01:08:38,880
and often provide very detailed comments about what they've seen.
768
01:09:03,279 --> 01:09:06,279
One of the most popular artists among Grand Tourists
769
01:09:06,359 --> 01:09:08,880
was the female artist Rosalba Carriera.
770
01:09:09,399 --> 01:09:12,120
She began her career working as a miniature painter
771
01:09:12,200 --> 01:09:14,559
but soon specialised in these pastels
772
01:09:14,640 --> 01:09:18,559
that are drawn on paper but framed and hung like pictures.
773
01:09:18,640 --> 01:09:23,319
And everyone who was anyone wanted their portrait done by the famous Rosalba.
774
01:09:23,399 --> 01:09:26,160
And Joseph Smith acted as her agent and dealer
775
01:09:26,240 --> 01:09:28,640
shipping these portraits back to Britain.
776
01:09:28,720 --> 01:09:31,880
And he also had one of the greatest collections of her pastels,
777
01:09:32,000 --> 01:09:35,399
of which these two personifications of Summer and Winter
778
01:09:35,479 --> 01:09:38,200
were two of the most highly prized among his collection.
779
01:09:40,880 --> 01:09:44,880
It was very unusual to be a professional female artist in this period.
780
01:09:45,000 --> 01:09:47,640
Carriera came from a family of lacemakers
781
01:09:47,720 --> 01:09:51,800
and one of her sisters was married to the Venetian painter Pellegrini.
782
01:09:51,880 --> 01:09:54,440
But she mingled in this circle of great artists.
783
01:09:54,520 --> 01:09:57,280
She knew Sebastiano Ricci and Canaletto
784
01:09:57,360 --> 01:10:00,280
and she was very much up there with the rest of them
785
01:10:00,360 --> 01:10:03,120
in terms of her great success across Europe.
786
01:10:03,200 --> 01:10:05,000
Although they look like oil paintings
787
01:10:05,080 --> 01:10:08,920
these pastels are made with fabricated chalks and they're drawn on paper
788
01:10:09,040 --> 01:10:12,640
and it gives them this very delicate and fragile quality.
789
01:10:12,720 --> 01:10:16,640
Actually the pigments in these chalks are very prone to fading.
790
01:10:16,720 --> 01:10:19,160
So we know from when we took Winter out of its frame
791
01:10:19,240 --> 01:10:22,000
during the conservation for the exhibition
792
01:10:22,080 --> 01:10:27,120
that the gown that Winter is wearing was originally a very bright fuchsia pink.
793
01:10:28,080 --> 01:10:29,640
So we're not looking at the colours
794
01:10:29,720 --> 01:10:32,440
as they would have been seen by the 18th-century viewer
795
01:10:32,520 --> 01:10:36,120
but the delicacy and subtlety is still something that's much admired.
796
01:10:54,800 --> 01:10:57,600
The British were the most numerous among travellers in Europe.
797
01:10:57,680 --> 01:11:00,080
This wasn't confined to the British elite
798
01:11:00,160 --> 01:11:04,040
because it was very much a sense of a common European heritage,
799
01:11:04,120 --> 01:11:07,720
that most of civilised Europe... well, all of civilised Europe
800
01:11:07,800 --> 01:11:10,720
traced its civilisation back to Rome.
801
01:11:10,800 --> 01:11:15,200
But the British were the most numerous and they were also the wealthiest,
802
01:11:15,280 --> 01:11:18,240
so they made the biggest impact.
803
01:11:18,320 --> 01:11:22,640
So some places like Rome or Florence, the big tourist centres...
804
01:11:22,720 --> 01:11:27,000
There were certain places you wanted to be at particular times of the year.
805
01:11:27,080 --> 01:11:30,559
So, for example, Rome. It was always good to be there at Easter,
806
01:11:30,640 --> 01:11:33,520
because that's when you had the ceremonies of Easter
807
01:11:33,600 --> 01:11:36,360
and the washing of the feet on Maundy Thursday
808
01:11:36,440 --> 01:11:38,680
and then the great mass on Easter Sunday.
809
01:11:38,760 --> 01:11:42,680
And then they'd go south to Naples for the period of Lent,
810
01:11:42,760 --> 01:11:45,920
because there was more going on in Naples and the climate was warmer.
811
01:11:46,040 --> 01:11:50,080
And then the great thing was to be in Venice for Ascensiontide
812
01:11:50,160 --> 01:11:52,280
which is when you had the ceremony of Sposalizio.
813
01:11:52,360 --> 01:11:55,200
So you'd go up north again for Ascension,
814
01:11:55,280 --> 01:11:58,920
which, depending when Easter was, would probably be sometime in May.
815
01:12:48,280 --> 01:12:52,600
In the 12th century the pope gave the doge a gold ring
816
01:12:52,680 --> 01:12:58,160
and the right to marry the sea as a sign of his lordship over it.
817
01:12:59,760 --> 01:13:02,320
Ascension Day is very important for the Venetians
818
01:13:02,400 --> 01:13:07,520
because it is the day that they celebrate the marriage of the sea.
819
01:13:08,360 --> 01:13:12,040
This painting shows the occasion of the marriage of the sea
820
01:13:12,120 --> 01:13:15,160
but what we see here is that the Bucintoro,
821
01:13:15,240 --> 01:13:18,559
which was the doge's ceremonial galley,
822
01:13:18,640 --> 01:13:22,760
has returned from the ceremony and is about to dock.
823
01:13:22,840 --> 01:13:25,280
We have an open view of the figures.
824
01:13:25,360 --> 01:13:27,400
We have them arranged on two decks,
825
01:13:27,480 --> 01:13:33,040
so the most senior, the procurators and senators in red at the top with the doge
826
01:13:33,120 --> 01:13:36,360
and then below, just a little bit below on the next open deck,
827
01:13:36,440 --> 01:13:38,680
you have the nobility in black.
828
01:13:38,760 --> 01:13:43,920
So you have this wonderful reflection of society of Venice in the Bucintoro.
829
01:13:44,760 --> 01:13:48,559
You see onlookers everywhere. They're right up the campanile.
830
01:13:48,640 --> 01:13:50,440
At the very top there are figures seated
831
01:13:50,520 --> 01:13:54,600
with their feet very perilously over the edge watching,
832
01:13:54,680 --> 01:13:58,520
and at the corner you see one man with a telescope to his eyes
833
01:13:58,600 --> 01:14:01,280
keeping a watch on what's going on.
834
01:14:01,360 --> 01:14:02,920
It's very typical of Canaletto,
835
01:14:03,040 --> 01:14:09,720
the way in which he crops a view so that boats seem to continue out of it
836
01:14:09,800 --> 01:14:13,559
and this gives a sense that you're standing there taking a photograph
837
01:14:13,640 --> 01:14:17,520
and that the whole ceremony is continuing all around you.
838
01:14:18,200 --> 01:14:22,880
But of course the most important thing about this and about Canaletto
839
01:14:23,000 --> 01:14:27,720
is that when he painted light it's with this absolute clarity.
840
01:14:27,800 --> 01:14:32,559
So we have spring light here which is clear and wonderful
841
01:14:32,640 --> 01:14:37,360
and the light filters through all the gondolas.
842
01:14:37,440 --> 01:14:41,640
You see reflected light and sunlight interchanging
843
01:14:41,720 --> 01:14:44,160
as your eye goes over the painting.
844
01:14:44,240 --> 01:14:46,720
Everything that's important is in that view.
845
01:14:46,800 --> 01:14:49,240
It summarises Venice completely.
846
01:15:30,760 --> 01:15:33,720
In the 1740s the War of Austrian Succession
847
01:15:33,800 --> 01:15:36,440
interrupted the flow of visitors to Venice,
848
01:15:36,520 --> 01:15:39,440
and so there were not only fewer tourists coming to the city
849
01:15:39,520 --> 01:15:43,559
but it was also more difficult to ship paintings back to Britain,
850
01:15:43,640 --> 01:15:45,800
and so Canaletto was short of work.
851
01:15:51,360 --> 01:15:55,000
the first for a series of five paintings of Roman views
852
01:15:55,080 --> 01:15:57,320
that were finished in 1742
853
01:15:57,400 --> 01:16:00,040
and the second for a series of over-door paintings
854
01:16:00,120 --> 01:16:03,920
that declared Smith's allegiance to Palladianism in architecture.
855
01:16:05,880 --> 01:16:07,720
But this wasn't really enough work
856
01:16:07,800 --> 01:16:11,680
and so in 1746 Canaletto decided to travel to London.
857
01:16:25,120 --> 01:16:27,840
For an artist who made a living as a view painter,
858
01:16:27,920 --> 01:16:30,840
I think he showed a remarkable reluctance to travel.
859
01:16:31,720 --> 01:16:34,440
There's a note by a contemporary
860
01:16:34,520 --> 01:16:37,160
that why would Canaletto bother to come to England,
861
01:16:37,240 --> 01:16:40,920
because everybody who wants a painting by him has got one already.
862
01:16:42,559 --> 01:16:47,360
It's around this time that, in fact, the whole family disperses.
863
01:16:47,440 --> 01:16:53,440
The two nephews both leave Venice and go and live abroad as well.
864
01:16:53,520 --> 01:16:56,040
But I think also an important element
865
01:16:56,120 --> 01:17:00,280
is that I think that he himself had quite simply got bored.
866
01:17:01,120 --> 01:17:05,360
He'd spent the whole of the 1730s painting views of Venice,
867
01:17:05,440 --> 01:17:11,600
and in the 1740s he shows every sign of agitation
868
01:17:11,680 --> 01:17:13,880
and he starts doing all sorts of different things.
869
01:17:14,000 --> 01:17:18,360
He starts doing capricci again, he takes up printmaking.
870
01:17:19,320 --> 01:17:24,400
I see the move to England in 1746 as part of this restlessness.
871
01:17:24,480 --> 01:17:26,600
I think he wants a new challenge.
872
01:17:26,680 --> 01:17:29,680
I think the main reason why Canaletto chose England
873
01:17:29,760 --> 01:17:33,440
is obviously because that was his main source of patronage.
874
01:17:34,120 --> 01:17:39,320
Most of the paintings that Canaletto executes in England are not of Venice.
875
01:17:39,400 --> 01:17:45,320
There are fabulous views of England, notably London and Warwick Castle.
876
01:17:46,360 --> 01:17:50,320
He refigured the River Thames as if it were the Grand Canal,
877
01:17:50,400 --> 01:17:52,720
showing London as if it were Venice.
878
01:17:52,800 --> 01:17:55,640
He was received in Britain with mixed success
879
01:17:55,720 --> 01:17:58,440
but he did have a great influence on topographical artists
880
01:17:58,520 --> 01:18:00,280
working in the city.
881
01:18:00,360 --> 01:18:03,480
And then in 1755 he decided to come back to Venice
882
01:18:03,559 --> 01:18:05,559
where he remained for the rest of his life.
883
01:18:07,800 --> 01:18:10,160
In the same year, 1755,
884
01:18:10,240 --> 01:18:14,920
Joseph Smith published the catalogue of his library, the Bibliotheca Smithiana,
885
01:18:15,040 --> 01:18:17,840
that was published by his own Pasquali press,
886
01:18:17,920 --> 01:18:20,800
and this listed the contents of his significant library,
887
01:18:20,880 --> 01:18:25,120
his books, manuscripts, prints and albums of drawings,
888
01:18:25,200 --> 01:18:28,800
and this was with the intention of finding a prestigious buyer.
889
01:19:03,120 --> 01:19:06,400
The young George III who was Prince of Wales at the time
890
01:19:06,480 --> 01:19:09,880
had advisors and agents in Italy
891
01:19:10,000 --> 01:19:14,520
seeking out works of art and books for his collection,
892
01:19:14,600 --> 01:19:18,160
because of his interest in the visual arts.
893
01:19:18,240 --> 01:19:24,320
Close advisors to him heard that Smith's library was for sale
894
01:19:24,400 --> 01:19:26,760
and negotiations were opened.
895
01:19:26,840 --> 01:19:30,559
And it was suggested that he might like to buy the library
896
01:19:30,640 --> 01:19:33,440
for the sum of £10,000.
897
01:19:33,520 --> 01:19:37,880
The Seven Years' War intervened which interrupted negotiations.
898
01:19:38,440 --> 01:19:43,280
They resumed in the spring of 1762
899
01:19:43,360 --> 01:19:49,480
and by that stage Smith had offered to sell not only the library
900
01:19:49,559 --> 01:19:56,760
but also his entire collection of paintings, gems and books,
901
01:19:56,840 --> 01:20:01,680
so the total of that would have been about 500 paintings
902
01:20:01,760 --> 01:20:05,240
and around 15,000 volumes.
903
01:20:06,040 --> 01:20:12,600
By the end of 1762 the sale was finalised but now for a sum of £20,000,
904
01:20:12,680 --> 01:20:17,400
which was sold to George III who had come to the throne in 1760.
905
01:20:21,160 --> 01:20:27,080
At the same time George III bought Buckingham House, now Buckingham Palace,
906
01:20:27,160 --> 01:20:30,080
which he wanted to have as a private residence
907
01:20:30,160 --> 01:20:33,000
for him and his growing family.
908
01:20:33,080 --> 01:20:37,440
So it was, in a way, a very happy coincidence
909
01:20:37,520 --> 01:20:40,800
that these paintings arrived.
910
01:21:28,240 --> 01:21:32,080
After his return from Britain, Canaletto carried on working in Venice
911
01:21:32,160 --> 01:21:35,080
making many drawings and paintings of the city
912
01:21:35,160 --> 01:21:39,880
and he was finally accepted into the Venetian Academy in 1763.
913
01:21:40,000 --> 01:21:42,200
But we don't know a lot about his personal life.
914
01:21:42,280 --> 01:21:43,520
He never married,
915
01:21:43,600 --> 01:21:46,320
and he seems to have been a relatively solitary figure
916
01:21:46,400 --> 01:21:48,040
towards the end of his life.
917
01:21:52,280 --> 01:21:56,640
Canaletto died in 1768 after an illness of five days,
918
01:21:56,720 --> 01:21:59,720
in which his symptom is described as inflammation of the bladder.
919
01:22:00,280 --> 01:22:03,840
He was buried in the same church in San Lio in which he was baptised.
920
01:22:06,440 --> 01:22:10,240
Canaletto was not the wealthy man at the time of his death
921
01:22:10,320 --> 01:22:12,480
that one would expect him to be.
922
01:22:12,559 --> 01:22:18,000
We have an inventory of his possessions made after he died,
923
01:22:18,080 --> 01:22:19,760
which includes as one would expect
924
01:22:19,840 --> 01:22:25,400
a number of unfinished or unworked canvases, but remarkably little else.
925
01:22:25,480 --> 01:22:29,840
There are a number of shirts and there are a few spare pairs of trousers,
926
01:22:29,920 --> 01:22:33,040
but certainly none of the trappings of wealth
927
01:22:33,120 --> 01:22:37,320
that one would expect of a painter of international renown.
928
01:22:38,880 --> 01:22:43,080
Since Consul Smith ended up as a very rich man indeed
929
01:22:43,160 --> 01:22:46,240
and Canaletto very much didn't,
930
01:22:46,320 --> 01:22:48,680
he may be an early example of an artist
931
01:22:48,760 --> 01:22:51,360
who was very much exploited by his dealer.
932
01:22:51,920 --> 01:22:53,600
What one can never know, of course...
933
01:22:53,680 --> 01:22:57,440
We know how much some of these noblemen paid Smith,
934
01:22:57,520 --> 01:22:59,080
but of course we don't have any idea
935
01:22:59,160 --> 01:23:01,800
how much Smith actually passed on to Canaletto.
936
01:23:04,559 --> 01:23:06,400
I think he is a master
937
01:23:06,480 --> 01:23:12,280
and I'm not sure that his role has been rightly understood in art history,
938
01:23:12,360 --> 01:23:17,920
because actually we tend to associate him with a certain idea of Venice.
939
01:23:18,040 --> 01:23:21,440
But then we can see in many of his drawings and paintings
940
01:23:21,520 --> 01:23:24,800
he's also reflecting on the Venetian tradition,
941
01:23:24,880 --> 01:23:28,400
and not just the tradition of architecture,
942
01:23:28,480 --> 01:23:31,440
but also on other elements of the tradition.
943
01:23:31,520 --> 01:23:34,040
There is a real thinker there,
944
01:23:34,120 --> 01:23:36,520
there is a technique that is developing,
945
01:23:36,600 --> 01:23:39,400
and that technique is going towards the future.
946
01:23:39,480 --> 01:23:43,440
When I look for instance at the beautiful rendering of the pediment
947
01:23:43,520 --> 01:23:46,360
in the representation of the Pantheon,
948
01:23:46,440 --> 01:23:52,120
we will see actually that there are patches of brown, of blue, of grey.
949
01:23:52,200 --> 01:23:56,760
That pediment is almost disassembled into patches
950
01:23:56,840 --> 01:23:59,040
and then recomposed together.
951
01:23:59,120 --> 01:24:03,160
That technique is becoming artistic avant-garde.
952
01:24:10,440 --> 01:24:15,840
I think Canaletto is, first and foremost, a great topographical artist.
953
01:24:15,920 --> 01:24:21,840
He could record what he saw and observed with absolute precision.
954
01:24:21,920 --> 01:24:26,400
But I think on top of that he could take reality
955
01:24:26,480 --> 01:24:32,160
and create something imaginary and ideal and poetic
956
01:24:32,240 --> 01:24:35,200
from the ordinary and the actual.
957
01:24:36,280 --> 01:24:42,720
And I think he did that through his incredible expertise with paint.
84175
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