If you write about art a lot (as I choose to do) you find yourself writing about Venice a lot (as I have). Yesterday, on a cold January day, I made my way to the Courtaulds Gallery in Somerset House to see their La Serenissima:Drawing in Venice (1700-1790) exhibition and though the works were really rather marvellous the exhibition was very small, just one room.
I'm not complaining though as, for me - thanks to my Art card, it was free and it also gave me time to check out some of the Courtaulds' impressive permanent collection. They've got Manets, Cezannes, Rubenses, Botticellis, Renoirs, Reynoldses, Bruegels, Pissarros, and Auerbachs. There's a lot to see. But my focus, of course - I almost take this stuff seriously, was on the 18c Venetian drawings.
Giovanni Battista Tiepolo - Portrait of a youth (one of the artist's sons?) (around 1751-53)
So that's where I started. One of the most striking pieces was a red chalk head shot that Giovanni Battista Tiepolo had made as preparation for the painted ceilings for the Wurzburg Residence in Bavaria. Wurzburg is a good eight hour drive from Venice but the portrait fits into the remit of the show because Tiepolo was born in Venice (though he died in Madrid), was an important member of the Venetian school, and because the work exploits the tonal effects of light and shadow using blue paper, a technique much favoured by Venetian artists of the time.
Don't worry, I won't be getting too bogged down in art techniques or that kind of stuff. The show highlights a time, the 18th century, when Venice was attracting visitors from all over Europe. They came for its art, they came for its architecture, they came for its history, and they came for its cosmopolitan environment. Possibly, they did not come for its smell.
Many of the artists featured in the exhibition took advantage of this tourist trade and produced works for moneyed visitors, a lot of whom would have been enjoying the 'Grand Tour' (Venice would come between Bologna and Rome on a standard itinerary). This lucrative tourist, and artistic, trade all but came to an end when Napoleon conquered Venice in 1797, bringing to an end a republic that had existed for over one thousand years.
The souvenirs the tourists had taken away with them from Venice soon represented a place that was no longer quite the same. The buzzing city state, the canals, the incredible buildings. Giacomo Guardi, the son of the more celebrated Francesco Guardi, knew what the visitors wanted and he gave it to them. Picturesque postcard style. Byzantine, Romanesque, Gothic, and Renaissance architecture, lagoons, canals, and gondolas.
Giacomo Guardi - Saint Mark's Square
Giacomo Guardi - The Lagoon with a view of the San Lazzaro island, with a gondola in the foreground
Giacomo Guardi - Riva degli Schiavoni
The more, the merrier. But away from the more obvious sights, there were curiosities galore to behold and Tiepolo took advantage of this by painting hunched Punchinellos, Pietro Antonio Novelli turned his hand to gnocchi sellers (quite fancy some gnocchi now) and leonine statues (lions were a popular symbol of Venetian power), and Giacomo Guardi's old man Francesco pulled rank by making a drawing of Venice's patron saint, Mark. Of course.
Let's get back to gnocchi though. Gnocchi Friday was, and still is, celebrated on the last Friday before lent during the Carnival in Venice. A parade of men in Punchinello style costumes would tour the streets before distributing the tatsy flour dumplings (and some wine to wash it down with) to the townspeople. To judge by the drawings made of the gnocchi men, gnocchi was not a slimming dish but, whatever, it seems a lovely idea and I'm all for bringing Gnocchi Friday to the UK.
Giovanni Battista Tieopolo - Standing Punchinello (around 1740-49)
Pietro Antonio Novelli - Gnocchi seller (1770s)
Pietro Antonio Novelli - Seated lion
Francesco Guardi - Saint Mark (1773-77)
Francesco Guardi, it seems, had his mind on higher concerns than gnocchi and wine. His Saint Mark has his
eyes upturned in search of divine inspiration perhaps. Or, possibly, this was a particular style of portrait painting popular with the Venetians. Saint Mark's will not be the last upturned eyes we see on this brief tour of 18c Venice.
That's not all there is though. There's 'a graphite standing man viewed from the front' which is believed to have been made by
Bernardo Bellotto in imitation of his megastar uncle Canaletto, and there's a slightly, intentionally, messy, ink drawing of two giants from Tiepolo's son - also called Tiepolo - that's how it works in families. One of them, Antaeus - who I'd never heard of before, has been challenging everyone he meets to wrestling matches - and winning them. At least as long as he remained in contact with his mother Gaia, the Earth.
Which seems a bit of an unfair advantage - having the entire planet's energy on your side. But Hercules, a much more well known giant, found a way round that. He lifted Antaeus off the ground, thus breaking the bond with Gaia, and then crushed him to death. Another lovely story from Greek myth to file along side
that one about being raped by a swan.
Attributed to Bernardo Bellotto - A standing man viewed from the front (around 1743)
Giovannia Domenico Tiepolo - Hercules and Antaeus (around 1780-90)
Giovannia Battista Tiepolo - Apotheosis of a Venetian hero (around 1757-60)
Francesco Guardi - The Feast of Ascension Day (around 1790)
Away from mythology, Tiepolo Sr. has provided an 'apotheosis of a Venetian hero' as, probabaly, part of a preliminary study for the Palazzo Porto in Vicenza, designed by the famous and influential Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio. The hero in question is reckoned to be Orazio, the head of the Porto family at that time.
I prefer Francesco Guardi's riparian scene - if a canal, or canals, can be said to be riparian. The Marriage of the Sea was, and remains, quite a spectacle. Established over a thousand years ago, it symbolised Venice's maritime identity and involved, on Ascension Day, the Doge (the head of the Venetian Republic) boarding his ceremonial barge, the Bucintoro, and sailing out to the mouth of the harbour where he'd toss a blessed ring out to the sea. A huge number of gondolas would flank the Bucintoto on its short journey and although Canalatto's famous painting of the scene is more celebrated than Guardi's it is Guardi who portrayed this ceremony more than any other artist in Venice.
He also painted the far less savoury pastime of bull baiting. 1782's 'spirited vignette' (the curator's words, not mine) shows a bull being 'baited' in Saint Mark's Square for the entertainment of Archduke Pau Pavlovich and Archduchess Maria Feodorovna of
Russia. I hope the bull gored the lot of 'em.
Francesco Guardi - Bull baiting (1782)
Giovanna Domenico Tiepolo - A Ball at the Ridotto (around 1757)
Why the rich enjoyed, and continue to enjoy, the torture of animals so much remains a mystery to me but perhaps as they don't care about other people, why should they care about animals? There were other entertainments open to the citizens, and visitors, of 18c Venice but they too seemed to involve having to be rich. In 1863, the Venetian government converted a wing of the Palazzo Dandolo into Europe's first public casino, the Ridotto. Expensive clothing was required to gain access thus effectively barring undesirables.
The rich bastards would prance around in masks and fancy hats and generally make complete and utter tits of themselves - as rich people have done for centuries - and will no doubt continue to do so. Jacopo Amigoni, who'd moved to Venice from
London, in 1729, was one of them. He mixed with the city's 'fashionable society' and befriended the famous castrator Farinelli who may well be the subject of the below drawing.
The castrati! Now, that's a thing. Castrating young men before puberty so their voices wouldn't break and they could still sing in soprano or contralto range. Now, I can admire a good singer as much as the next person (unless, perhaps, that next person is one Mrs Fox-Lane who was so impressed by Farinelli's performance she considered him a God) but I think chopping someone's balls off is a step too far. Unless, I suppose, they really want their balls chopped off.
Jacopo Amigoni - Man in fetters wearing a turban (Farinelli in the role of Arbace?) (around 1734)
Moving away, quickly, from the subject of dismembered testicles, the exhibition then features a series of exquisitely drawn heads from Giovanni Battista Piazzetta. Piazzetta achieved international fame, at the time at least, for his head studies - or 'teste di carattere' and you can see why. He'd been inspired by both
Rembrandt and Guercino and his works are notable not just for their technical skill but also because they seem to be able to shed some light on the character of the sitters. These aren't society portraits but more personal, even psychological, depictions of real people.
Tiepolo Sr, as we can see below, was also a dab hand at this kind of drawing and the young androgynous figure in his work, A head, looking up, echoes Francesco Guardi's image of Saint Mark with his eyes looking skywards to heaven. As if to say that the celestial sphere is not just for the venerated and the sanctified but for the ordinary person too.
Giovannia Battista Piazzetta - Head of a boy and of an old man (around 1740)
Giovanni Battista Piazzetta - Young woman with a basket (around 1740)
Giovanni Battista Piazzetta - Head of a youth with a fur collar (around (1740)
Giovanni Battista Tiepolo - A head, looking up (around 1726)
At least, that's my inspiration - and it's my blog so there. The final wall, as I viewed the exhibition - there is no suggested route, is something of a delight for fans of architectural drawings (or even architectural caprices) and I am one of those fans so I enjoyed it.
There's a delightful, and apparently austere, interior of Venice's Il Redentore's church (one of Palladio's and even more impressive from the outside as it rises above the Canale della Giudecca) which features, in the foreground, the British Consul in Venice (Joseph Smith, a patron of Canaletto and one of the most enthusiastic collectors of Venetian art from this time) and then there's even one from the big name himself - Canaletto.
Antonio Visentini - Interior of the Redentore church with figures (around 1746-66)
Giovanni Antonio Canal, known as Canaletto - Piazza San Giacomo di Rialto (around 1765-66)
It's lovely, of course. The San Giacomo dell'Orio church in the Piazza San Giacomo di Rialto looks to me as if it belongs as much in
Latin America as it does in Venice. Canaletto has filled the work with tiny, quickly sketched, figures (macchiette) to give a feel of busy Venetian life. Workmen construct scaffolding to the far left of the image while on the right the business of Venice continues as normal.
Equally compelling, and one of the best pieces in the exhibition, is a work that has been attributed to Francesco Guardi. Guardi is known to have favoured the motif of a sunlit view framed by a dark arch and this work certainly fits that bill. Guardi wasn't so bothered about making accurate representations of Venetian architecture and tended towards the whimsical and the capricious. He was interested in capturing not so much what Venice looked like but what Venice felt like.
It would have been fascinating to have visited Venice in the 18th century (or, indeed, any other time except for, perhaps, during Napoleon's invasion - or
when grieving the loss of a child) but I suspect, and the stories here strengthen my view, that one would have needed to be very rich to truly appreciate Venice. It must have been an expensive place to live, too, so it's no wonder that the artists who lived there looked to commercialise their art. Thankfully, for us - over two hundred years later, they still managed to create wonderful pictures that tell stories down the centuries.
Attributed to Francesco Guardi - Archway with figures (around 1775-80)
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