X - Fourth act: fourth itinerary

This itinerary passes through the characteristic lower class Sestiere of Castello.  It includes the Church of Sta. Maria Formosa.

Santa Maria Formosa - San Lorenzo - Santa Maria Formosa 

The fourth itinerary is quite unlike the rest of Lorenzetti’s walks in character.  It strikes out into the relatively unknown eastern reaches of Venice.  This is no longer a guided tour of a city you wish to know better; this is another city altogether, though clearly a sibling.  The itinerary culminates in the intimate surroundings of Santa Maria Formosa.  For most tourists this is likely to be as strange and unfamiliar as the rest, even though it lies only a little way off from the Piazza San Marco.  For me, though, reaching it is like coming home.

For once, the initial stages of the itinerary repeat those of another.  I leave the Piazza San Marco under the clock tower, and pass along the bustling Mercerie to the Campo San Zulian.  The previous itinerary had also reached this point, but there Lorenzetti had hurried on with other goals in mind, leaving full contemplation to another time.

Now he stops and points out the curious facade, a window in the pediment, its stones covered with grime and soot, easily missed by those rushing past.  It is as much a monument as a religious building.  There are inscriptions in Greek and Hebrew extolling the virtues of the church’s benefactor, and there is a small relief by Sansovino depicting him.

But Lorenzetti has dived down a tiny alley by the side of the church, and passed over a couple of bridges.  Following him, to my surprise I find myself already in the Campo Santa Maria Formosa; for a moment I feel lost, disoriented: Santa Maria Formosa was supposed to be the conclusion of our walk, and to form the climax of my stay in Venice.  Its sudden, unexpected presence here is like a small but frightening betrayal of all that Lorenzetti’s ordered itineraries stand for.

But I am over-reacting: in fact we are just skirting the campo.  To be more precise I am in the Campiello Querini-Stampalia, near the gallery of the same name.  As is often the case, Lorenzetti makes this gallery a small itinerary of its own, which he places at the back of his book.  Today the gallery is closed, so I have no choice but to follow the main itinerary rather than make a diversion.

I pass over the Fonte Ruga Giuffa, then down the Ruga Giuffa itself.  To the left there is the Palazzo Grimani.  A left turn takes me down the beautifully named Salizzada Zorzi, a transformation of the name Giorgio.  After a bridge and a long, straight road, I emerge in front of the Lorenzetti’s own church of San Lorenzo or St. Lawrence -  Lorenzetti  means ‘the family of the little Lawrences’.  The saint’s death was particularly horrible: he was martyred by being slowly roasted alive on a griddle.

His church is situated at the bottom of a deep courtyard, surrounded on two sides by high buildings, which reaches down to the Ponte Lorenzo where I now stand, a spot little changed from its appearance in Gentile Bellini’s ‘Miracle of the Cross which fell into the Canal at S  Lorenzo’ in the Accademia Gallery.  The church facade is very simple, built of dark bricks, but very strong.  It is also rather melancholy.   As Lorenzetti writes, the church was damaged in the First World War; he also wrote - in 1926 presumably - that it was in the process of restoration.  It still is, a sad state for what is an impressive building.

Once more Lorenzetti takes a small turning which no tourist would ever find except by chance, and having found it would certainly never take.  After passing the Scuola of San Giorgio Schiavoni with its fine collection of Carpaccio paintings - also closed today -  I move on and enter a real warren of backstreets.

There is the Campo Ugo Foscolo, commemorating where that brooding poet lived.  Once it was called dei Gatti - of the cats - apparently a wonderful mangling of the phrase ‘i legati’ - the legates - since the latter used to live here too.  The names generally have a certain charm round here: there is the Ponte della Scoazzera - the bridge of rubbish - and the Campo a Fianco della Chiesa - the square alongside the church.

Lorenzetti’s maps are hard enough to follow when he gives detailed instructions on how to find the well-known streets.  There is no indication of distance either in the text or from the maps, and exactly when you turn left or cross a bridge is unclear.  Around here things are even worse.  I reach the Calle del Cimitero - Cemetery Avenue - but search in vain for Lorenzetti’s next marker, the Calle dietro il Campo della Confraternità - itself named for its relative position.  Uncharacteristically for Venice, there seems to be a large open space, or several smaller ones connected together, with blocks of houses dotted around like islands of an archipelago, making it hard to sense overall direction.  For a period I am lost.

At last I find the exit, which takes me to the Church of San Francesco della Vigna, so named after the vineyard which was left to the original friars in 1253.  The facade is familiar, not because I have seen it before - which I may have done in my previous wanderings in Venice - but because it is a typical Palladian design, with his favourite twin pediments, one piercing the other.  It is built on a massive scale, and unlike San Giorgio Maggiore, or his church of Il Redentore, you can move back from it and take in its proportions in a way that you cannot with those other churches, built as they are on the edge of the sea.  But even with this building, Palladio has been unlucky: the right-hand side is obscured by a block of flats built too near.

The interior is rather four-square, and done out in the same grey and white as Santa Maria della Salute.  It is light and airy, and according to Lorenzetti’s description, packed with works of minor artists.

From there, I pass along more backstreets, and then to Barbaria delle Tole, an interesting street which emerges alongside the church of Santi Giovanni e Paolo.  It is a busy and bustling thoroughfare, clearly one of the shopping centres for the district.  The sounds carry strangely; as I walk along I can hear a woman’s voice from one of the upper stories of a house beside the road.  She shouts and screams unremittingly.  No one else takes any notice.

Before reaching the end of this street, the path turns left down a small side alley, over a couple of small bridges, and then suddenly I find myself in the Calle Lunga, a narrow alley I walked down many times every day during my first visit to Venice.  As past maps on to present, my feet remember the paving stones.  True to its name, the alley is long, and at the end it opens out into the attractive Campo Santa Maria Formosa - the Square of Shapely Mary.

The name of the church derives from the legend of the visions of the seventh century San Magno, Bishop of Oderzo, to whom the Madonna appeared in the form of a shapely matron.  According to the tradition relayed by Lorenzetti, Santa Maria Formosa was one of eight churches built by the saint.  Whatever its origins, we know that it was rebuilt at the end of the fifteenth century to a design of one Mauro Coducci, a prolific architect who was responsible for many of Venice’s famous landmarks, including one side of the Piazza San Marco.  Aptly enough, then, Santa Maria Formosa was designed partly in imitation of the central part of San Marco.

The connection goes deeper, as if the architect had been haunted by the image of San Marco and its campanile in the great piazza.  Viewed from the north end of the Campo Sta. Maria Formosa, the church and its campanile bear a striking resemblance to San Marco seen from the west end of its piazza.  It is more a similarity of spirit than details; the styles are quite different.  Santa Maria Formosa is transitional between late Renaissance and early Baroque in its two main facades, facing west and north.  The latter is the more ornate.

It has an elaborate doorway - not used at present - with two columns supporting a broken circular pediment.  Above it, there is a lunette window, and above that, a further small pediment.  The broad roof passes via two volutes to four simple arches which flank the doorway, each of which is separated by ionic pilasters.  There are three portrait busts of the Cappello family, one above the doorway, and two either side above the nearest arches, and five statues along the top of the pediment.  The high dome has been rebuilt several times, once after an earthquake in 1688 and again after an incendiary device damaged the church and its contents in 1916.

The campanile is more boisterously Baroque, and was built in 1611.  The belfry and pinnacle are wildly ornate, and over the entrance there is a grotesque mask which moved Ruskin to write in his ‘Stones of Venice’ one of his eloquent splutterings which seem so disproportionate to their occasion. Indeed, he characterises Santa Maria Formosa as one of the first examples of what he calls ‘grotesque renaissance’, given over to the glory of Man not God, and cites San Moisè and Santa Maria Zobenigo as other offenders.

It all seems a bit much for this quiet little church.  Though as Lorenzetti and Ruskin note, Santa Maria Formosa was once an important place of pilgrimage for no less a person than the Doge himself.  On the occasion of his annual visit to commemorate the rescue of Venetian brides from the hands of Slav pirates by the local makers of marriage chests, the Doge would receive a straw hat.  This ceremony took place for centuries - possibly seven of them if the legends are true - until the fall of the Republic itself in 1797.  As a sad reminder of this lost continuity, the last hat ever given is kept in the Correr Museum.

I enter the church, and am greeted by what looks like a typically unpretentious seventeenth or eighteenth century interior, and moreover a living parish church.  With his customary meticulousness, Lorenzetti details each work of art to be found there, including the altarpiece of Santa Barbara which won Palma il Vecchio great renown in his day. Appropriately enough for this church, the female saint is what Lorenzetti calls “a splendid type of buxom female beauty”.

Every time that Lorenzetti launches into one of his extraordinarily detailed descriptions of a church’s interior, its architects, sculptors and artists, I am amazed at the effort expended, the doggedness with which he seeks out every work, consults every authority on its attribution, its quality.  I feel embarrassed that I cannot do justice to this dedication, this diligence, even on a site which is of such great personal significance to me.  I can only wander around, looking at as much as I can, flicking through his book, then stumble out into the cold open air again, saturated with facts and images, my head buzzing.

Outside, Lorenzetti is still eagerly dragging me forward, imparting information.  He tells me about the beautiful private houses in Campo Santa Maria Formosa: the Palazzo Malipiero-Trevisi, Palazzo Vitturi, Palazzo Doria, Palazzo Priuli.  Lorenzetti could doubtless tell me even more: the names suggest rich and complex histories; constraints of space alone preclude it.

Some other things he does not tell me.  He omits any mention of the palazzo wall opposite the church, beloved of the Venetian children who pound a plastic football against it again and again, causing arrhythmic, hollow thuds to echo around the square.  He says nothing of the well-head in the middle of the campo; he never mentions my favourite café on the corner of the Calle Lunga, with its dog-eared copy of the pink Il Gazzettino dello Sport on the counter and screwed-up paper napkins on the floor like gross confetti; nor refers to the pizzeria where, as an early customer in a hurry, I ate my last meal before leaving Venice for the first time, and which has since turned into a popular restaurant called ‘Il burchiello’.  He even remains silent about what lies at the end of the Calle Lunga.  But I expect too much: such a book would be a personal Lorenzetti; the one he left us is universal.

So, almost reluctant to leave this magic square, I follow in the footsteps of the master once more.  He is taking me round the back of the campo, over a bridge from which I can see the church of Santi Giovanni e Paolo, reminding me how near I am to that landmark.  He leads me down a calle and over a bridge or two, to the Ponte delle Bande, so-called as one of the first bridges to have parapets, and then to the Calle della Guerra, leading to the Campo della Guerra via the Ponte della Guerra - clearly a place of strife, this - where one of those daft Venetian street battles took place between rival factions in the city.  The losers of these melees on bridges still without parapets ended up in the canal, often as not with broken heads and bones to boot.

And all this a stone’s throw - and a few probably were thrown in these little wars - from the august and dignified San Marco.  Once more my guide has brought me safely home to the haven of the Piazza.  And yet however glad I am to have accomplished my itinerary, to have reached my goal, I am still a little sad to part from Lorenzetti, to have left behind all the hidden corners of the city.  Leaving them and striding across the open space in front of San Marco is a little like leaving the claustrophobic world of Venice for the ordinary world outside.  We will always hanker for those special, secret places - like the tiny backstreets way out east, like the Campo Santa Maria Formosa, like Venice itself.

Walks with Lorenzetti

IX - Third portrait: Antonio Canaletto

Of Canaletto, most of the best paintings went to England where he himself also went to work.

For the rest of the world, to think of Canaletto is to think of Venice; but for the British, to see Venice has been, for two hundred years, to see the embodiment of a Canaletto.

The unparalleled quantity of Canaletto’s work acquired through Grand Tours left examples in many English stately homes; there they soon formed part of the eighteenth century’s cultural backdrop.  Anyone with the means to undertake a trip to Venice would have frequented one or more of these houses, would have seen and admired the Canalettos, and so, imperceptibly, would have assimilated his vision.  Today, with the democratisation of culture, the dissemination in Britain of the quintessential Canaletto scene is even wider, through access to originals in museums, or through reproductions and books.  Now it is almost impossible to see the city without first experiencing Canaletto’s mediation of it.

Such a cultural colonisation is probably unique.  Think of any of the great cities of the world: London, Paris, New York, Leningrad, Delhi, Beijing or wherever: no one name springs to mind as capturing the essence of that place in the way that Canaletto does Venice.  Certainly, many other painters have been drawn to Venice in an attempt to capture its spirit; but when Turner, for example, produces his extraordinary chromatic fantasies of the Lagoon, they are first and foremost Turners.  A Canaletto scene seems Venice pure and simple.

When we arrive in Venice, then, we unconsciously follow in Canaletto’s footsteps.  What is familiar and what is unfamiliar is partly determined by how much it figures in Canaletto’s work.  His magnificent set pieces of the Piazza San Marco and the Grand Canal define these scenes as the visual high points of our visits.  On the other hand, a spot unrecorded or rare in Canaletto’s output strikes us with a freshness born of personal discovery.  Paradoxically, the most familiar Venice is the least real: for reality we have to look in the squares and canals which the painter left for us to see for ourselves.

It was the British nobility’s desire for souvenirs of their Grand Tours which was largely responsible not only for the creation of that city which we know as Canaletto’s Venice, but also of the mature style we associate with his name.  Before the flow of commissions for these acquisitive aristocrats became a source of regular income, Canaletto’s approach was moody and dramatic - and quite unsuited to the grand but untroubled picture postcards the tourists wanted.  Perhaps the most dramatic example of Canaletto’s early approach is his first surviving painting of the Piazza San Marco, looking east in what would become one of his staple views.  It was painted before the present paving of 1723 had been completed, and shows a scruffy, rather provincial square with stalls clustering around the arches of San Marco.  Broken blinds hang askew over windows, and there are lines of washing clearly visible.  Hardly the noble and majestic scene which is so familiar from the many later versions.

It may have been the purses of the British nobility who paid for these pictures, but the credit for stimulating the demand and encouraging Canaletto to satisfy it belongs to one man: Joseph Smith.  Although not the first to act as a conduit between the painter and his culture-hungry clients - that honour belongs to a rather dubious character called Owen McSwiney - it is Smith who dominates the whole of Canaletto’s productive life, and who is probably at least partly responsible for shaping the idealised Venice of Canaletto - and hence our own vision of that city.

Smith is one of those figures who seem to stand on the sidelines of history; although hardly significant in themselves, these characters play indispensable roles in supporting the leading players, or recording their deeds,  Perhaps for this reason they often live to a great age - Smith died in his nineties - and are part of a great tradition of witnesses.

Smith is particularly important because he acquired paintings from Canaletto for his own collection throughout his life, as well as drawings and sketches.  The bulk of them were bought by George III, and they form the basis of the unmatched wealth of Canaletto’s works in the Royal Collection - 48 paintings and 143 drawings.  He was also responsible for commissioning the two important series of prints of Canaletto’s paintings.

These engravings were probably the most influential means of disseminating Canaletto’s canonical vision of Venice,  In commissioning them, Smith doubtless had a purely pragmatic end in view - drumming up new business for the painter - but their effect in the long-term was more significant.  Increasing numbers of them began to turn up not just among the British nobility - who in any case would be able to afford originals - but among humbler travellers from the British Isles, enabling Canaletto’s Venice to reach an even wider audience.

The man who facilitated that propagation was the engraver Antonio Visentini.  Although he too lived to a great age - he was born in 1688 and died in 1782 - he remains a shadowy figure, best-known for his connections with greater artists.  As well as working with Canaletto, he is probably most famous for his invaluable architectural designs of buildings and copies of plans by Palladio.  Like Canaletto’s works, many of Visentini’s drawings found their way back to Britain with the returning Grand Tourists, often through the offices of Consul Smith, his friend and patron.

At the front of the first book of engravings of Canaletto’s paintings, there is a portrait of Visentini, together with the only authenticated image of Canaletto himself.  Visentini, dressed in an artist’s smock, looks steadily at the viewer with a frank and open gaze.  Canaletto, wearing a formal frock coat and wig, averts his eyes.  Canaletto is described as ‘citizen of Venice’, while Visentini contents himself with just ‘Venetian’; the images maintain the subtle class distinction.

The two men collaborated on three sets of engravings of Venetian scenes, published in two parts in 1735 and 1742; a second edition of all three sets followed in 1751.  The original designs were produced at the height of Canaletto’s powers and popularity, and they constitute a uniquely systematic investigation of his primary subject matter.

The first set, published in 1735, consists of 12 views of the Grand Canal, plus two additional scenes.  They are all based on pictures by Canaletto now in the Royal Collection at Windsor.  The paintings and engravings of the first set offer a tour of the Grand Canal, proceeding from the Rialto bridge, first towards the entrance, ending with two views of Santa Maria della Salute, then back from the Rialto to the very start of the canal, past where the railway station now dominates the scene.  The series ends with views of a gondoliers’ Regatta, and of the Bucintoro, the state barge, aboard which the Doge has just carried out the traditional marriage of the city to the sea by casting a gold ring into the waters of the Adriatic.

The second and third set add twelve more scenes each.  Ten of the second set show further scenes of the Grand Canal, this time proceeding from its start, and moving on past the Rialto bridge to the mouth.  They are followed by two larger views, one of the Riva degli Schiavoni, looking east towards the Ospedale della Pietà, the other looking west along the Molo in front of the Piazzetta.

In all, 23 of the 38 engravings in the three sets show the Grand Canal, along with some 100 of its palaces.  The preponderance of such views obviously reflects in part the desires of Canaletto’s customers for a memento of the unique experience of the famous waterway.  Given the hundreds of other paintings of similar scenes by Canaletto, it is also an indication of his own preoccupation with the enormous variety and detail offered by the Grand Canal along its length.

The third set shows twelve of the campi of Venice, some famous, some of them comparatively unknown.  The series starts with the grand church of Santi Giovanni e Paolo, which is followed by the obscure San Nicolo in Castello, hidden away in the east of Venice, and now demolished.  There are views of Santa Maria Zobenigo, the Campo Santo Stefano, Santa Maria Formosa, and the narrow campo in front of the Gesuiti church.  The series - and the collaboration - ends appropriately enough with two views of the Piazza San Marco: one from the east, and one from the west showing the most famous view in Venice, the great facade of San Marco itself.

For the first series at least, and for some of the second and third, it is clear that Visentini was very faithful to the spirit and details of Canaletto’s images.  It is therefore reasonable to suppose that even for those views where there are several closely related versions among Canaletto’s paintings and drawings, none of which matches the engraving in all points, Visentini was following another original, now lost.  There is no evidence that he took any substantial liberties with Canaletto’s images.  Indeed, his forte seems to have been copying.  Although he was an architect in his own right - he designed two palaces for Smith - much of his work consists of engravings after other artists, or else plans of others  buildings.

There is one exception to this general fidelity, attributable perhaps to Visentini’s architectural background.  The fifth engraving of the third series shows the Scuola di San Rocco, famous for its collection of paintings by Tintoretto.  To the right of the Scuola is the church itself.  In the 1720s, the original facade was removed, and until a new one was built in 1771, the church showed the rough brickwork underneath.  In Canaletto’s painting for the engraving, he replaced this with a simple pedimented design.  When Visentini came to make his drawing and engravings, he seems to have felt at liberty to try his own - admirably qualified - hand at the facade, which appears in a rather more ornate form than Canaletto’s.

The way in which Visentini translates Canaletto’s unique representations of Venice from painting to engraving is interesting.  One model that it is unlikely that he was able to follow was Canaletto’s own work as an engraver.  Canaletto took up engraving as a way of reaching a wider audience only in the 1740s, when the market for his paintings among the travelling English nobility seems to have dried up, partly as a result of the War of Austrian Succession.  His one book of etchings was published in 1745.  Unusually, all but two of his works in this medium are of scenes outside Venice: it is therefore hard to make direct comparisons of Canaletto and Visentini as etchers.  But the former’s work is superior in all respects: it offers greater subtlety and detail, and above all it is full of an atmosphere which is totally lacking in Visentini’s efforts.

Nonetheless, Visentini’s images have a consistency and charm of their own. They may lack the distinctive surface of Canaletto’s scenes, but their rather basic cross-hatchings and unvaried vertical and horizontal rules mean that we can accept them as successful re-interpretations and simplifications of Canaletto’s vision, rather than as failed attempts at literal reproduction.

It is symptomatic of this process that two of the key elements of Canaletto’s compositions - the water and the sky - are radically altered.  Visentini never quite matched Canaletto’s apparently naive but totally effective rendition of the waves of the canals.  Visentini tried a number of approaches.  One consists of broken horizontal lines; another, of a series of tiny arcs; and a third, of lines with tiny tremors along their length.  They all tend to make the surface of the water look like a deep pile carpet.  If nothing else, they help us appreciate again Canaletto’s mastery in depicting this crucial element in his scenes.

Gone too in Visentini’s world is the smooth creamy pale sky which is the characteristic light of Canaletto’s Venice.  Instead we have hard straight lines drawn with a ruler, with Canaletto’s subtly modulated clouds turned into patches of white or the odd swirl of marks.

Nearly all of the paintings which form the basis of the engravings found their way to England at some point; many remain there.  The original series of 14 stayed with Smith until his collection passed to George III. The additional views of the second series were drawn from a group of paintings which was dispersed to a number of English collectors: the Duke of Bedford had - and still has - 24 of them, the so-called Harvey collection, now broken up, had 23, and there were odd pairs of paintings obtained by the Duke of Leeds, and the Earl of Fitzwilliam.  This group of fifty or sixty paintings, all passing through the hands of Smith, form our most complete and systematic record of Canaletto’s Venice; that they all spent most of their existence in Britain underlines the unique role of that country in the history of the painter’s output, reputation and subsequent influence.

That English connection is in fact even stronger.  Scenes of Venice naturally dominate Canaletto’s work; but another large group are representations of London and England, fruit of Canaletto’s visits to the country whose patrons had served him so well.

Canaletto arrived in London in 1746, at the end of his most successful Venetian period which had seen the creation of the series of masterpieces handled by Smith as well as a host of other, sometimes inferior paintings. He now set about recording London as he had Venice.  Almost inevitably, it was the Thames which attracted him, its broad curves reminding him of his own city’s main waterway.  He also painted a number of London street scenes.  These are particular fascinating, for Canaletto’s meticulous technique presents us with an almost photographic record of what Charing Cross and Whitehall looked like in the 1740s.  It is ironic that most of his works depict Venice, the major European city which has probably changed least over two centuries, and therefore stands in least need of such a pictorial documentation.  Of London, which has altered beyond recognition, we have only these few tantalising glimpses.

Because of the obvious surface detail of Canaletto’s work, we often take for granted its accuracy.  Yet closer examination shows that few of his views are literalistic; most have been subtly and artfully recomposed. The more we look, the more discrepancies we find, and the more disconcerted we become by this skilful deception.  It strikes at the very root of our conception of the artist.

In some cases, the violations are minor.  For example, the views of the Grand Canal which formed the basis of the first set of engravings published in 1735 correspond so closely with our memories or expectations of Venice - largely because both have been highly coloured by Canaletto’s pervasive influence - that we tend to overlook the basic fact that with a few possible exceptions, all of the vistas are physically impossible to achieve.  That is, they are painted from viewpoints only obtained from a ship’s crow’s nest or perhaps by a hovering bird.  They are therefore totally factitious scenes; neither Canaletto, nor indeed anyone else, ever saw them.  Instead, the artist’s invention drew on his experience and synthesised the affecting scenes we know - or think we know - so well. That we are oblivious of this innocent deceit is in part a measure of the triumph of Canaletto’s art.

Some of the other deviations from reality are more drastic.  From his earliest pictures Canaletto did not hesitate to alter, move or ignore inconvenient shapes, in order to improve the overall composition.  The first version of the Piazza San Marco, referred to above, artfully tapers the Campanile more than reality, and makes San Marco itself slightly higher and less squat.  An early view of the entrance to the Grand Canal from the Piazzetta outside the Palazzo Ducale omits the Column of St Mark altogether and transplants the Column of St Theodore much closer to Sansovino’s Library - all for the sake of balance.

Another dramatic re-arrangement of reality occurs in a painting used in the second set of engravings.  The church of Santa Maria Zobenigo stands in a narrow street which blocks any clear view of its facade.  Canaletto simply removes the offending buildings, and shows the church standing in a spacious campo, its Baroque facade laid bare in all its ornate glory. Increasingly then, Canaletto was starting to re-create Venice from the elements which were so familiar to him.

These variations on reality culminated in a series of 13 paintings commissioned by Smith in the mid 1740s from a by-now impecunious Canaletto, to act as decorative pieces for his house.  They show familiar locations, but with unfamiliar and indeed non-existent buildings.  For example, there is a view of the Rialto bridge - not the design of Antonio da Ponte which stands to this day, but Palladio’s suggestion of one hundred and fifty years earlier.  Another version of the same scene shows an apparently wholly imaginary bridge, together with a massive but fictitious rotunda.  A third fantasy shows the real Rialto bridge but with San Giorgio Maggiore transplanted from its island and placed at one end.

Even the Piazza San Marco was not immune to these re-workings.  An eerie scene depicts the piazza at the western end of San Marco.  In front of it stand the famous four horses, plucked from the cathedral’s facade down to the piazza and raised on massive plinths.  It is disconcerting to see such a well-loved scene painted with all of Canaletto’s familiar stylistic fingerprints - the pale blue sky, the deftly characterised figures, the ubiquitous dog - but containing such a blatantly counterfactual element.  By creating a totally realistic view of a scene which never existed, Canaletto effectively undermines all our confidence in his other scenes which hitherto we have taken to be trustworthy representations.

These capriccios, as Canaletto called them, seem to have been produced throughout his life.  All of them have a strangely melancholy air, as if the artist were expressing a desire to escape from the prison of reality he depicted so meticulously in his mainstream works.  They hint at a darker, more mysterious side to a painter whose works are usually seen as the epitome of bright and sunny optimism.

As with so many artists, there are indeed mysteries surrounding Canaletto. The perfect surface of his works acts as an effective barrier which prevents us from probing too deeply.  But sometimes personal elements creep through.  For example, there is a pair of drawings which show views over some nondescript roofs.  Unremarkable in themselves, they gain in interest when we know that they are precisely the outlook which Canaletto had from two of the windows of his house - the scene is practically unchanged to this day.  We are used to seeing Venice through Canaletto’s eyes, but to see Canaletto’s personal Venice comes as something of a shock, as if an eighteenth century statue had reached out and touched our hand.

A late painting has a similarly personal feel, though the evidence is more circumstantial.  It is small, very intimate view of part of the Piazza San Marco, looking east from half-way down the south side.  Unusually for Canaletto, it is the figures which dominate the scene: three men, two sitting and one standing, in the long arcade outside the Florian café.

The seated pair talk while the man stands holding an elegant cup and saucer.  He listens intently, as does one of Canaletto’s dogs seated at the feet of the other men.  In the background are San Marco and the Campanile, but they are both overshadowed by the extreme perspective view of the arcade full of bustling Venetians.  It is an everyday human scale which prevails here, rather than the usual grand architectural one which informs most of Canaletto’s masterpieces.

Aside from the unusual concentration on the figures, the highlights of their forms picked out with Canaletto’s familiar blobs of light paint, which suggests that the scene had a particular significance for the painter, there is an anecdote which seems to be apposite.

In 1760, two Englishmen were walking across the Piazza San Marco.  They saw a little old man sketching the Campanile.  Going over to observe the work, one of them, called Hinchliffe, recognised the artist’s style familiar at even this early date - and murmured his name.  ‘Mi conosce’ - you know me - the old man said.  A commission resulted, and we can identify the painting Canaletto produced from that sketch the Englishmen chanced upon.

This story was passed on from father to son and recorded by Hinchliffe’s grandson in 1856.  Taken together with the sizeable group of works from this period all based around views of the Campanile from the south side of the Piazza, it is tempting to imagine the old Canaletto, sunk now into relative obscurity, sitting by the café, drinking from the same elegant cups as the standing man in the painting, listening to the conversations while he sketched variations on his favourite Venetian scene.  No longer were these works for eager tourists - though the occasional encounters with Englishmen like Hinchliffe must have provided a welcome boost to his finances - but for himself, as he continued to record and recreate his Venice.

Canaletto allows one more brief glimpse of the man behind the inscrutable artist.  In his last recorded work, a pen and ink drawing of the crossing and north transept of San Marco with musicians singing, Canaletto has added a short inscription.  In a neat and flowing hand are the words “done without spectacles at the age of 68”.  It is the only information we have about him for the last five years of his life.

For most of that life, running through his work like a hidden message, there is one curious personal quirk which probably goes unnoticed by the millions who look at Canaletto’s paintings each year: after a certain date in the mid 1720s, there are no birds in any of his paintings.  His skies remain undisturbed by untidy flocks or lonely stragglers.  Instead we have the creamy pale blue, and the thin veils of high cloud which lend an air of eternal early summer to his scenes,

Perhaps it is simply for reasons of design and overall effect: Canaletto may have wished to preserve the smooth surface of his skies to balance and frame the rich detail of his buildings.  Interestingly, his drawings continue to show birds, but these are never translated into paint.  Some might be tempted to read more into this unnatural absence, just as Freud read so much into Leonardo da Vinci’s childhood memory about a bird.  But would-be interpreters of such tiny events in artists’ lives would do well to remember that Freud’s impressive edifice - his study runs to some 80 pages - is founded on an error, a crucial mistranslation, the correction of which destroys his whole argument.

We are left therefore with little that we can be sure of in the external details of Canaletto’s life.  We know that he was born in 1697, the son of a theatre scenery painter, and that he himself began by designing scenery for opera composers such as Alessandro Scarlatti; we know when some - but only a few - of his paintings were finished; we know odd scraps about him as related in letters from Englishmen abroad; we know that he died in 1768.  Of his thoughts and feelings as he translated his Venice into the images we have today, we know nothing.

Yet we trust those images, we believe in Canaletto.  We look through his eyes at a strange and beautiful world that is and is not a real Venice, and is neither past nor present.  Perhaps his art succeeds today for the same reason it succeeded when it first appeared.  Canaletto has the gift to extract the essence of Venice, the familiar scenes bathed in the steady sunlight, the bustle of the campi, the colourful busyness of the canals, the steady march of the palaces and churches, and to place all those elements in a harmonious whole which skilfully encapsulates our own response to Venice.  It is a Venice of serene perfection, a city which is a masterpiece, a city of joy and pleasure.  If the reality is somewhat different - a rather dirty, smelly city full of tourists, the weather variable, the buildings crumbling and covered in bill posters, no matter.  We know, as Canaletto knew, that underneath all this grime there lies that other eternal Venice.  It is Canaletto’s enduring achievement that he managed to recreate and fix that glorious, shimmering city for us to recognise as soon as we step onto its streets or travel along its canals.

Walks with Lorenzetti

II - First night movement: Allegro più ch'è possible

At night the face of Venice is transformed: she prepares and presents new enchanting beauties.

The first night of that visit to Venice, I went for a walk without Lorenzetti.  Although all of Venice lay before me - magically transformed as if for a carnival outing by the great black cape it wore - there was only one possible choice for my steps: towards the Piazzetta, to sit beneath the lion of St Mark atop his column.  I had spent the last hour of my very first night in Venice here, as well as many others on my subsequent trips.

More than any other spot in the city, it was here that I felt most directly in touch with all my past visits.  It was here that I sat on the cold and uncomfortable steps at the base of the column, looking out through the darkness to the island of San Giorgio Maggiore, thinking about all the occasions I had sat and looked and thought in just this way.  There were few people about, so it was easy to map past onto present.  Nothing seemed to have changed as I contemplated Palladio’s bold, almost shocking design for the church’s facade of a low, squat pediment pierced through by a second, higher pediment.

But there were changes.  Even San Giorgio Maggiore was different, though not because of any visible alterations to its design.  Since last visiting Venice I had read several books on Palladio’s architecture.  As a result, I was aware now not only of the lonely splendour of San Giorgio Maggiore but also saw for the first time the echoing forms of San Zitelle and II Redentore on the nearby Giudecca, two other churches designed by Palladio.  Where before I saw only an isolated masterpiece, I was forced by my newly gained perspective to see the start of a series of works, themselves part of a larger body of Palladian-inspired architecture throughout Europe, particularly in Britain.  Cultural ramifications spread out in all directions.  My original vision had been corrupted by knowledge.

Another change: when I looked up, I saw to my astonishment an empty capital - the lion had gone, presumably to be re-gilded.  Once again, my memories had been dashed against reality.  I got up and wandered along the Molo; I gazed across at Santa Maria della Salute.  Floodlit like some huge, baroque spaceship about to lift off, aided by its magnificent setting across the canal which here attained its widest extent, it seemed the only possible conclusion to the complex architectural discourse of the Grand Canal, a full stop in stone.

I joined the few strollers taking their passeggiata along the Riva degli Schiavoni, a waterfront which always surprises by its unvenetian breadth.  I stopped briefly before the Church of the Pietà, undistinguished in appearance, but once the centre of Antonio Vivaldi’s music-making, and thus the home of perhaps the most Venetian music ever written.  Beyond it lay a funfair, eerie in its stillness and silence, and eerie in the grotesque silhouettes its attractions formed against the distant San Giorgio Maggiore.

I turned back towards my hotel, tired from my day’s walking, and from the new and old sights which had pressed in on me.  It is all too possible to suffer from an overdose of experience.  The Piazza San Marco was illuminated by a harsh, other-worldly glare; as I crossed it, somebody was letting off very loud firecrackers which echoed around the square’s impassive stone faces.

Walks with Lorenzetti