Venice:From Canaletto to a New Atlantis?

I've only visited Venice once. In 2014, on my way from Verona to Treviso to catch a flight back to London I spent about an hour at Venice bus station. I didn't see a single canal, gondola, or even any water. It felt like a wasted opportunity but I thought I could always come back. Having attended Canaletto's Venice Revisited at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich yesterday I now realise time may be against me.

Canaletto - A Regatta on the Grand Canal (1740)

While also, at the same time, wondering if it's even advisable to go there as a tourist. Since Canaletto's time (1697-1768) the sea level in Venice has risen by sixty centimetres and flooding has become both more frequent and more severe. The permanent population of the city has plummeted as people escape both the floods and the exorbitant property prices. Many places bought up to be used as hotels, AirBnBs, and other tourist infrastructure making the city ever more unaffordable to most Venetians.

In many ways, it's two of the things that have, in the past, made the city so prosperous that could now be its undoing:- its water and its tourists. For many years Venice was a gateway for trade between east and west (carpets and spices arrived into the city from Egypt, Turkey, and Syria) and that allowed many of its great palaces and churches to be built. Come the time of the Grand Tour in the 18th century, Venice was one of the most important destinations and if you were rich enough (and you had to be pretty rich to do the Grand Tour) you'd mark your visit to Venice by buying one of Canaletto's masterful paintings of his home city as a souvenir.

If you were really rich - as Lord John Russell, the 4th Duke of Bedford, was - you'd not just buy a Canaletto. You'd commission him to paint an entire series of Venetian views for you. It's these paintings that make up the first half of the National Maritime Museum's show and you'd have to be something of a curmudgeon to not admit they are very beautiful. You can normally only see them by visiting Woburn Abbey in Bedfordshire (as the TADS did, back in 2016, taking in an elephant while we were there).

The idea behind The Grand Tour was to teach British upper class men, future statesmen and generals, about art, architecture, and classical history. Most major European cities would be included but Lord John Russell's tour, or at least the plan for his tour - we're not sure how many locations he managed to visit in the end, was unusually extensive.

From places you'd expect like Paris, Madrid, Lisbon, Florence, and Athens to more unlikely destinations such as Zaragoza, Mantua, Hamburg, and Gdansk and even as far away as Agra, Cairo, Kandahar, Baghdad, and Samarkand. Even Inverness was included.

Giovanni Antonio Canal was born in Venice on 18th October 1697. He died in the same city seventy years later but by then he was better known as Canaletto. Meaning 'little canal'. He began his career painting backdrops for plays and operas but it was his city views that brought him his fame. He was particularly popular with British visitors and even lived for a time in London (there's a blue plaque on Beak Street in Soho marking his former dwelling).

Canaletto - View of the Doge's Palace at the Piazzetta seen from the Bacino (1731-36)

The Woburn Series, as the paintings commissioned by Lord John Russell are now known, take in many of the city's most celebrated landmarks and most famous festivals but they also show everyday Venetian life, people hanging their laundry out of their windows or going about their daily business. Canaletto treats his portrayal of the water of Venice's canals with equal importance as he does the imposing and beautiful architecture of the city though the people, when inspected close up, are rarely clearly defined.

Mere blobs against the majestic background. Making Canaletto a highly unlikely pioneer of Impressionism. Grand Tour visitors would often reach Venice from the Italian mainland via gondola and the view (above) of the Piazzetta di San Marco would be the one that would great them. In recent years, visitors would most likely have arrived in Venice on enormous cruise ships and you can't help thinking that experience wouldn't be nearly so rewarding.

Until 1854, the Rialto Bridge was the only bridge spanning the Grand Canal, the city's main waterway, and it, too, became a tourist attraction. In Canaletto's time, mirrors and lamps were sold from shops on the bridge. Now those shops primarily sell souvenirs and other tourist tat.

Canaletto - View on the Grand Canal, with the Bridge of the Rialto and the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, and the Palazzo dei Camerlenghi on the left (1731-36)

Canaletto - View of the Grand Canal from the Palazzo Bembo to Palazzo Vendramin-Calergi (1731-36)

Canaletto - The Piazzetta di San Marco, with the Libreria Vecchi on the left, and Palazzo Ducale on the right (1731-36)

I'm not completely dismissing tourism (I hate it when people claim they're a traveller rather than a tourist - as if there's any real difference). I love being a tourist either abroad, elsewhere in the UK, or even in my home city of London. But, even though nobody needs that many mirrors and lamps, it must be a problem when you can't buy everyday goods because the shops are full of snow globes and fudge.

While Canaletto's paintings celebrated the city, they also did a fair bit to attract yet more visitors to Venice and soon enough people who'd never been there would be able to recognise its campaniles, its piazzas, its churches, and its bridges from his paintings.

Canaletto - The Camp Santa Maria Formosa with the church and campanile, to the left beyond the two narrow bridges spanning the Rio di Santa Maria Formosa, the Palazzo Grimani (1731-36)

Canaletto - The Scuola di San Rocco (1731-36)

Canaletto wasn't always completely honest with his audience though. In The Scuola di San Rocco, above, the artist has created a spacious square where none existed. To be able to take in this view you'd actually need to be able to see through the stone wall of a nearby church but Canaletto wished to sell paintings and to sell paintings you needed idealised compositions.

On the other hand he painted local people (and their dogs) in then less celebrated squares like Campo Francesco Morosini. In that, he appears to be trying to capture at least a version of genuine Venetian life. The curators of the exhibition are keen for us to know that, in modern times, Venetians have taken to walking their dogs either very early in the morning or late at night so as not to lose them in the crowds. Have they never heard of leads?

Canaletto - The Campo Francesco Morosini from San Stefano, with the Church of San Vitale on the right (1731-36)

Canaletto - The Piazza San Marco looking from the Basilica di Marco to the Church of San Geminiano (1731-36)

Canaletto - The Entrance to the Grand Canal with the Dogiana and the Church of Santa Maria della Salute (1731-36)

There are times when the exhibition rams home its point about the deleterious effects of mass tourism a bit too heavily. Not least because in showing us all these spectacular images of Venice it will be making many of us want to visit. They are giving with one hand and taking away with the other.

Venice has had its share of problems in the past. As a busy port it was particularly vulnerable to plagues and illnesses. Cargo ships can carry diseases as easily as they can goods. Between the years 1575 and 1577, 30% of the city's population were killed by the bubonic plague and the Church of the Redentore was built on Giudecca island, by the hugely influential architect Andrea Palladio, to commemorate those that passed. In an interesting piece of circularity, Woburn Abbey itself is built in a Palladian style.

Canaletto - The Piazza San Marco looking towards the Basilica di San Marco and the Campanile (1731-36)

Canaletto - The Church of the Redentore on the Giudecca (1731-36)

Canaletto - View on the Grand Canal looking north from the Palazzo Contarini dagli Scrigni to the Palazzo Rezzonico (1731-36)

Canaletto - The Entrance to the Arsenal with the Oratory of the Madonna dell'Arsenale (1731-36)

Elsewhere, the curators show us that Canaletto has painted the Arsenale (Venice's main shipyard), the Pontei del Tre Archi (translation probably not required there), and numerous gondola ferries and fine buildings. While at the same time letting us know that shipbuilding is dying out in Venice, that the three arched bridge has been fitted with a wheelchair ramp (surely not a bad thing?), that only eight gondola ferries remain in the whole of Venice (including one, apparently, in the below View of the Grand Canal), and that many of the buildings in these paintings were knocked down to build a railway bridge.

Canaletto's Venice Revisited is nothing if not schematic - and that's before we even get to the last couple of, more politicised, rooms. The rooms containing the Canaletto paintings are fleshed out with models of gondolas, French guidebooks, watercolours, etchings, maps, and even an invoice. Yes, an invoice! While I was there two elderly, and somewhat posh, gentlemen were surveying the exhibits and commenting in the fruitiest of accents I've heard for some time.

Canaletto - View on the Cannaregio looking towards the Ponte di San Giobbe, with the Palazzo Testa on the left (1731-36)

Canaletto - View of the Grand Canal looking up from the Palazzo Balbi to the Rialto, with the Palazzo Contarini delle Figure to the right, and on the left the Palazzo Balbi (1731-36)

Canaletto - View of the Grand Canal, from the Sacca di Santa Chiara, with, on the left, the wall of the Convent of Corpus Domini (1731-36)

Already softened up for the message, the show ends with a couple of rooms dedicated to VENICE TODAY. Whilst acknowledging it remains one of the most beautiful cities on Earth, it has also gained a reputation as a 'dying city'. A city of floods, of dwindling population, and of protests against the unfeasibly large cruise ships. Venice, it seems, is a poster city for the damage that climate change is doing to the world. There are even fears that ultimately it will disappear under water, a new Atlantis.

It's long been a city of posters, if not a poster city for wanton environmental destruction, as a series of rather fetching advertisments for both the city and the cruise ships that once docked in its lagoon (the larger ones were banned but only last year) demonstrate.

'Venise et le Lido' travel poster (1920s)

'Venise' rail travel poster (1921)

Royal Mail line Mediterranean Cruises poster (1929)

Venice travel poster (1970s)

A city with a population of approximately 50,000 people that attracts more than two and a half thousand times that number every year is bound to have problems balancing things and while most people accept that mass tourism helps with economic development there is also a widespread belief that, in Venice, the situation has become unsustainable.

The air pollution caused by the cruise ships, and the damage they do to the city's waterways, has made those ships the focus of mass protests by the No Grandi Navi ("no big ships") movement. Cruise ship visitors are described as "hit-and-run" tourists because their time in the city is so brief. Many of them will have been fed and watered on board the giant floating tower blocks so will probably only make very minor contributions to the Venetian economy.

A port bow view of the Peninsular & Oriental Steam Navigation Company cruise ship Stratheden in Venice, Italy (1937)

Cruise ship Sea Princess arriving at Canale di San Marco in Venice (1980s)

MSC Fantasia cruise ship in Venice (2014)

Flood defences have been built around the lagoon in recent years but these were beset with delays and corruption scandals and many are still sceptical about what effects (either positive or negative) these defences will have. Some believe it may already be impossible to save both the city AND the lagoon and that a choice will soon need to be made.

Many Venetians have already left the city to seek employment elsewhere. Work in the tourist industry is often low paid and unreliable. But many others have stayed in Venice. They refute the idea that their city is dying and point to centuries of resilience, ingenuity, and evolution. They believe that Venice can not only survive but prosper. That Venice can become a new kind of poster city. 

A poster city for the kind of sustainable regeneration that everywhere in the world will need to undertake soon enough. Perhaps the days of Canaletto's grand regattas and Ascension Day celebrations are no more but I hope Venice can survive. Not just as a museum piece but as a vibrant city that provides as good a home to its citizens as it does an awesome destination for its tourists. Bona fortuna!

Matthias Scholz - Protest against big cruise ships, Venice (2019)

Canaletto - The Grand Canal, Ascension Day:The embarkation of the Doge of Venice for the Ceremony of the Marriage of the Adriatic (1731-36)