Читать книгу A Popular Handbook to the National Gallery, Volume I, Foreign Schools - National Gallery (Great Britain) - Страница 109

Canaletto (Venetian: 1697-1768).

Antonio Canale, commonly called Canaletto,95 was born in Venice, lived in Venice, and painted Venice. His pictures (of which the one before us is among the best) are in some respects very like the place, but most of those who love it best soon find much that is wanting in Canaletto's representations. "The effect of a fine Canaletto," says Ruskin, "is, in its first impression, dioramic. We fancy we are in our beloved Venice again, with one foot, by mistake, in the clear, invisible film of water lapping over the marble steps of the foreground. Every house has its proper relief against the sky; every brick and stone its proper hue of sunlight and shade; and every degree of distance its proper tone of relieving air. Presently, however, we begin to feel that it is hard and gloomy, and that the painter, compelled by the lowness of the utmost light at his disposal to deepen the shadows, in order to get the right relation, has lost the flashing, dazzling, exulting light which was one of our chief sources of Venetian happiness. But we pardon this, knowing it to be unavoidable, and begin to look for something of that in which Venice differs from Rotterdam, or any other city built beside canals. We know that house, certainly; we never passed it without stopping our gondola, for its arabesques were as rich as a bank of flowers in spring, and as beautiful as a dream. What has Canaletto given us for them? Four black dots. Well; take the next house. We remember that too; it was mouldering inch by inch into the canal, and the bricks had fallen away from its shattered marble shafts, and left them white, skeleton-like; yet, with their fretwork of cold flowers wreathed about them still, untouched by time, and through the rents of the wall behind them there used to come long sunbeams, greened by the weeds through which they pierced, which flitted and fell, one by one, round those grey and quiet shafts, catching here a leaf and there a leaf, and gliding over the illumined edges and delicate fissures, until they sank into the deep dark hollow between the marble blocks of the sunk foundation, lighting every other moment one isolated emerald lamp on the crest of the intermittent waves, when the wild sea-weeds and crimson lichens drifted and crawled with their thousand colours and free branches over its decay, and the black, clogging, accumulated limpets hung in ropy clusters from the dripping and tinkling stone. What has Canaletto given us for this? One square red mass, composed of – let me count – five-and-fifty, no; six-and-fifty, no; I was right at first, five-and-fifty bricks, of precisely the same size, shape, and colour, one great black line for the shadow of the roof at the top, and six similar ripples in a row at the bottom! And this is what people call 'painting nature'! It is, indeed, painting nature, as she appears to the most unfeeling and untaught of mankind. The bargeman and the bricklayer probably see no more in Venice than Canaletto gives – heaps of earth and mortar, with water between – and are just as capable of appreciating the facts of sunlight and shadow, by which he deceives us, as the most educated of us all. But what more there is in Venice than brick and stone – what there is of mystery and death, and memory and beauty – what there is to be learned or lamented, to be loved or wept – we look for to Canaletto in vain" (Modern Painters, vol. i. sec. ii. pt. i. ch. vii. § 7, first edition). Canaletto's pictures of Venice in this room should be compared with Turner's. It is impossible to get a more instructive instance of the different impression made on different minds by the same scenes. Canaletto drew, says one of his admirers (Lanzi, ii. 317), exactly as he saw. Well, what he did see we have shown us here. What others have seen, those who have not been to Venice can discover from Turner's pictures, from Shelley's and Byron's verse, or Ruskin's prose. "Let the reader restore Venice in his imagination to some resemblance of what she must have been before her fall. Let him, looking from Lido or Fusina, replace, in the forest of towers, those of the hundred and sixty-six churches which the French threw down; let him sheet her walls with purple and scarlet, overlay her minarets with gold, … and fill her canals with gilded barges and bannered ships; finally, let him withdraw from this scene, already so brilliant, such sadness and stain as had been set upon it by the declining energies of more than half a century, and he will see Venice as it was seen by Canaletto (as it might have been seen by him, Ruskin means); whose miserable, virtueless, heartless mechanism, accepted as the representation of such various glory, is, both in its existence and acceptance, among the most striking signs of the lost sensation and deadened intellect of the nation at that time… The mannerism of Canaletto is the most degraded that I know in the whole range of art. Professing the most servile and mindless imitation, it imitates nothing but the blackness of the shadows; it gives no single architectural ornament, however near, so much form, as might enable us even to guess at its actual one; … it gives the buildings neither their architectural beauty nor their ancestral dignity, for there is no texture of stone nor character of age in Canaletto's touch; which is invariably a violent, black, sharp, ruled penmanlike line, as far removed from the grace of nature as from her faintness and transparency: and for his truth of colour let the single fact of his having omitted all record whatsoever of the frescoes, whose wrecks are still to be found at least on one half of the unrestored palaces, and, with still less excusableness, all record of the magnificent coloured marbles" (Modern Painters, vol. i. pt ii. sec. i. ch. vii. § 30). Stated in the fewest words, the difference between Canaletto and the others is this: To Canaletto Venice was a city of murky shadows, to them it is a city of enchanted colour. But his pictures satisfied the taste of his time, as the great number of them still extant testifies. Moreover his fame extended beyond his own country. There was an English resident at Venice who engaged Canaletto (who started in life at his father's profession, that of scene painter) to work for him at low prices, and then used to retail the pictures at an enormous profit to English travellers. At last Canaletto came to England himself, and was given many commissions; but after two years he returned to Venice, as it was still Venetian pictures that his patrons wanted. How completely the public taste has now changed is shown by the fact that the Venice of all the most popular painters to-day, of whatever nation, is the Venice of Ruskin and Turner. Canaletto's pictures, however, will always possess one element of interest, apart from any fluctuations in taste. Within his limits they are historical records of the appearance of Venice in his time; and as more and more of the old Venice is destroyed, Canaletto's pictures will increase in interest. For though he is mechanical, yet his mechanism is very good. He was, by the way, the first to apply the camera obscura to linear perspective, and he painted in a workmanlike manner, so that his pictures endure.96

An interesting piece of "old Venice." Beyond the canal is what is now the National Gallery of Venice – the Academy of Arts – but was in Canaletto's time still the Scuola della Carità, the conventual buildings of the Brotherhood of our Lady of Charity. Notice the green grass in the little square: the Campo, as it is called (the field), is now covered with flagstones (there is a sketch of this spot among the Turner drawings given by Ruskin to the University Galleries at Oxford: see Guide to the Venetian Academy, p. 34).