Canaletto brings Venice to life on canvas in Brooks exhibit

Detail of Canaletto's "The Grand Canal from the Campo San Vio," ca. 1740; oil on canvas.

One could do worse than be a painter of canals. In fact, Giovanni Antonio Canal -- Canaletto -- could scarcely help plying that trade.

Born in Venice in 1697 near the iconic Rialto Bridge, young Giovanni was taught the art of painting by his father, a designer of theatrical sets, and from his relationship to his father came the boy's nickname, Canaletto, Italian for "Little Canal."

Detail of Canaletto's "The Grand Canal from the Campo San Vio," ca. 1740; oil on canvas.

This oil on copper painting by Canaletto is one of the collection's two almost photographic images of 18th Century Venice.

"Piazza San Marco seen from Campo San Basso" is part of the exhibition "Venice in the Age of Canaletto" at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art.

Thus this master painter of the Venetian city and waterscape is known to history, and thus he gives his name to "Venice in the Age of Canaletto," an exhibition that opens at Memphis Brooks Museum of Art on Sunday, for display through May 9.

The inspiration for the exhibition was one of the museum's most familiar signature works, Canaletto's "The Grand Canal from the Campo San Vio," a 45-inch by 63-inch painting executed in about 1740 and given to the Brooks in 1961 by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation.

"I always looked at this painting and loved it," said Brooks associate curator Stanton Thomas, who organized the exhibition with Alexandra Libby, former assistant curator at The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, Fla.

"I tried to place the piece in the context of the ornate Rococo period," said Thomas, "but Canaletto didn't fit. In a way, this exhibition is an answer to my question that places Canaletto in the wider context of Venice and other Venetian artists and decorative arts."

"Venice in the Age of Canaletto" comprises about 50 items, mostly paintings but also pieces of furniture and decorative objects such as the spectacular "Dessert Decoration in the Form of a Glass Garden," circa 1760. Lenders to the exhibition include a who's who of national institutions: The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the New Orleans Museum of Art.

The exhibition was displayed at the Ringling Museum from Oct. 8, 2009, to Jan. 10. Thomas called the collaboration with the Ringling Museum "a natural effort because of its connections to Venice. John Ringling and his wife collected Venetian art and some decorative arts."

While most artists of the period depicted mythological or religious scenes -- and some of those works are represented in the exhibition -- Canaletto was a painter of veduta, or "view paintings." His canvases, many on a large scale, offer views of Venice's canals and piazzas in awe-inspiring architectural detail, the grand as well as the shabby.

The works are populated with cross-sections of the city's inhabitants: beggars and vendors, merchants, workmen and boatmen of various sorts, casual strollers, the wealthy on parade. The lessons Canaletto learned from his stage designer father show up in his theatrical arrangement of architectural elements and the tricks he sometimes plays with perspective.

In a sense, the veduta paintings of Canaletto and other practitioners of the genre -- the exhibition includes examples by other artists -- served as mementos, or "postcards" of sorts, for aristocratic tourists who visited Venice as part of their education into European culture.

The "Grand Tour" was considered an essential finishing school for young Englishmen, and it's a measure of Canaletto's popularity and importance that he not only sold many works to English patrons but that he lived in England from 1746 to 1755, giving the same treatment to London and the Thames River as he did to Venice and its canals.

Despite the fact that "view painting" was regarded as inferior to historical, mythological and religious art, Canaletto was elected to the Venetian Academy in 1763; his reputation and the scope of his body of work -- more than 500 paintings and more than that number of drawings -- must have been impossible to ignore. Little is known about his last years; he died in 1768.

By the 18th century, Venice had lost the military and mercantile empire upon which its greatness during the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance had been based, and in 1797, Napoleon handed the city over to Austria. With its ancient palaces, churches filled with art treasures, quaint piazzas and general air of decadence and exoticism, Venice "was more of a tourist attraction than a center of power and trade," said Thomas. "It was the Las Vegas of its time."

For travelers in those days, and for tourists almost 250 years later, however, Canaletto, it's no exaggeration to say, defined how we see Venice.

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"Venice in the Age of Canaletto"

At Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Sunday through May 9. Hours are 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Wednesdays and Fridays; 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Thursdays; 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturdays; 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sundays. Admission is $7 for adults, $6 seniors, $3 students; children under 6 admitted free. Wednesday is free admission for all.

At 2 p.m. Sunday, Max Marmor, president of the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, will lecture on "A Priceless Gift: The Kress Collection at the Brooks." Free with regular museum admission. Call 544-6200 or visit brooksmuseum.org.

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