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Visitors beware: the 55 pictures gathered here merge into one seemingly unending procession of chocolate box windows, opening out on to some of the most famously postcarded vistas in the world. It’s a bit like being in Venice, then – the waterlogged municipality that is forever etched on our minds thanks partly to the hand of Giovanni Antonio Canal, or ‘little Canal’ as he became known. At first a painter of theatrical backdrops, he lived and died in the Most Serene Republic of Venice, during the final throes of an imperial heyday that ended ignominiously in Napoleonic rule. This didn’t stop Canaletto from making his own hay while the getting was good, producing hundreds of politically correct views (or veduti) for the hoards of plundering, pillaging aristo-Brits on their Grand Tours.
The National Gallery initially dispels the notion that Canaletto was either an arch-classicist or a mere painter-by-numbers. His earliest work here, from 1722, is of the backside of Venice, looking north from Canareggio (no, not another painter, but an area roughly like a Venetian Garden Suburb, complete with Jewish ghetto) towards the cemetery island of San Michele. It’s an unfashionable scene of everyday life under a grey sky, but one that’s rich in atmospheric mystery. Canaletto’s 1725 ‘Stonemason’s Yard’, painted when he was just 28 years old, is also among his best pictures, but depicts nothing more than some incidental laundry and mundane goings-on in a dead-end street. The hasty execution only strengthens the viewer’s feeling of being lost and of discovering a quiet, hidden corner away from the hubbub – surely the high point of any authentic Venetian experience.
From shabby scenes of markets and old men pissing in the shadows, Canaletto soon graduated to panoramic, brilliantly day-lit scenes looking across Saint Mark’s Square or the Grand Canal (as above), often cleverly pinched in width to fit the canvas. Indeed, Canaletto was so besotted with the steady stream of commissions pouring in from various Earls, Dukes and Barons that he never hesitated to shift a pretty façade or insert a wagging dog to balance a composition or add pictorial oomph. Essentially, he sold out to become a topographical bore for hire, attempting painterly Cinemascope and High Definition in order to wow his clients.
But what of the much-touted rivals to this undisputed Doge of Venetian painting? Well, there was brief competition from the likes of Michele Marieschi and Francesco Guardi, but essentially Canaletto had no significant peers in the game because he – along with his precocious nephew and protege, Bernardo Bellotto – had cornered the market in anally retentive and harshly ruled cityscapes. There’s no doubting Canaletto was the champ – his perspective is never skew-whiff, his light never fades – it’s just that for all this skill and technical competency there’s little to love in the unerring craft and even less to admire in the occasional, practically phoned-in potboilers of some plaza or another.
Unable to take in as much visual information as any of these artists packed into their hi-res visions of Venice, the over-hung main room of jubilatory festivities starts to swim before the eyes, leading to that familiar blockbuster queasiness of overload. For all its gold and glister, the show is ultimately a parade of Venetian finery put on for the pleasure and consumption of outsiders (tellingly, almost all Canalettos were exported and few remain in Italian museums). Like the weirdly preserved-in-aspic place itself, this exhibition beats you over the head with impossibly impressive view after impressively impossible view. In other words, it’s a tourist trap.