Venetian and Rococo
The art of Venice and the eighteenth century: Canaletto painting the Grand Canal with the precision of a surveyor, and a city that treated color as a religion.
Venice and the Rococo: Color, Light, and the Grand Canal
Venice is unlike any other city that produced great painting. It is built on water. The light reflects off canals and lagoons, bouncing through streets and into buildings. The air is humid. Colors appear softer and more saturated than they do in Florence or Rome. For five hundred years, Venetian painters treated color as the foundation of painting, not drawing. This is the fundamental difference between Venetian and Florentine art: Florence drew, Venice colored.
The Venetian Renaissance
**Giovanni Bellini** (1430-1516) was the painter who established the Venetian tradition. He was the son of Jacopo Bellini and the brother of Gentile Bellini, both painters. He ran a large workshop in Venice and taught Giorgione and Titian, the two painters who would take Venetian art to its peak. Bellini's "Madonna and Child" paintings, including the work available in our store, show the qualities that define Venetian painting: warm color, soft light, and a sense of intimacy between the figures and the viewer. Bellini painted the Madonna not as a distant icon but as a mother holding a child. The background is often a landscape seen through a window, painted with the atmospheric haze that only Venice's humid air produces. **Titian** (1488-1576) was Bellini's student and the most famous Venetian painter. He worked for the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, Pope Paul III, and King Philip II of Spain. His "Venus with a Lute Player," available in our store, shows a reclining nude Venus accompanied by a musician. The painting is about color. The flesh tones, the red drapery, the green landscape, all are built up in layers of oil paint that create a warmth no photograph can reproduce. Titian's technique was revolutionary. He did not draw outlines on the canvas and fill them with color, the way Florentine painters did. He built forms from patches of color, applying paint with his fingers as often as with brushes. Up close, a Titian painting looks like a field of colored smudges. Step back, and the forms emerge with a physical presence that precise drawing cannot achieve. **Lorenzo Lotto** (1480-1556) was a Venetian painter who never achieved the fame of Titian. He traveled widely, working in Treviso, Bergamo, and the Marches. His portraits, including the work available in our store, show a psychological depth that Titian's more formal portraits sometimes lack. Lotto painted people as they were, not as they wanted to be seen. His subjects look uneasy, skeptical, or sad. He was rediscovered in the twentieth century and is now considered one of the most interesting Venetian painters.
Canaletto and Vedutismo
Two centuries after the Venetian Renaissance, a new kind of painting emerged in Venice. It was called "vedutismo," from the Italian word "veduta," meaning view. Veduta painters painted precise, detailed views of the city. They were the photographers of their time, producing images of Venice for the Grand Tourists who visited the city in the eighteenth century. **Canaletto** (1697-1768) was the master of vedutismo. His real name was Giovanni Antonio Canal. He was born in Venice, the son of a theatrical scene painter. He started as a scene painter himself, then shifted to painting views of the city. His "Grand Canal with Rialto," available in our store, shows the Grand Canal looking toward the Rialto Bridge. The painting is precise enough to use as a historical document. You can identify every building, every chimney, every boat. But the painting is not just a record. Canaletto composed his views carefully, adjusting angles and moving buildings slightly to create a better picture. He used a camera obscura, a device that projects an image through a lens onto a surface, to establish the basic composition, then finished the painting in his studio. Canaletto's paintings were bought primarily by English aristocrats on the Grand Tour. He lived in England from 1746 to 1755, painting views of London and English country houses. His work is the primary visual record of eighteenth-century Venice, and his paintings hang in the National Gallery in London, the Royal Collection at Windsor, and the Museo Correr in Venice.
The Rococo
The Rococo was the dominant style in European art from about 1720 to 1780. It grew out of the Baroque but replaced the Baroque's drama and religious intensity with lightness, decoration, and pleasure. Rococo paintings are full of pastel colors, swirling curves, and scenes of aristocratic leisure: garden parties, boudoir scenes, mythological romances. Venice was one of the centers of Rococo painting, but the style spread across Europe. In France, Watteau painted figures in garden settings called "fetes galantes." Boucher painted mythological scenes with pink-skinned goddesses. Fragonard painted "The Swing," the most famous Rococo painting, showing a woman on a swing kicking off her shoe while a man hides in the bushes below. The Rococo was attacked by Enlightenment critics and later by Neoclassicists, who considered it frivolous and morally empty. The criticism was not entirely fair. Rococo painting was decorative, but the best of it, like Canaletto's vedute and Tiepolo's ceilings, achieved a level of technical brilliance that transcends the label of "decorative."
Why Venice Matters
Venice produced a continuous tradition of painting that lasted from the 1470s to the 1790s. For over three hundred years, Venetian painters focused on color as the primary tool of painting. This tradition influenced Delacroix, the Impressionists, and every painter who has ever prioritized color over line. The Venetian approach to paint, building forms from patches of color rather than from drawn outlines, is the foundation of modern painting. When Manet painted figures as flat areas of color against dark backgrounds, he was using a Venetian technique. When Monet painted water lilies as fields of colored strokes, he was extending what Titian started.
Where to See Venetian and Rococo Paintings
The Gallerie dell'Accademia in Venice has the largest collection of Venetian Renaissance painting, including works by Bellini, Titian, and Tintoretto. The Museo Correr in Venice holds Canaletto's vedute. The National Gallery in London has an exceptional Venetian collection, including Bellini's "Doge Leonardo Loredan" and several Titians. The Prado in Madrid has the largest collection of Titian outside Italy, because Titian painted for the Spanish court. The Frick Collection in New York has Bellini's "St. Francis in Ecstasy." The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. holds works by Titian, Bellini, and Canaletto.
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