The Entrance to the Grand Canal Venice

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The Entrance to the Grand Canal Venice: Canaletto

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Art Type: Oil Painting
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Canaletto Oil Painting - The Entrance to the Grand Canal Venice

Keywords: Entrance, Canal, Venice

Work Overview: The Entrance to the Grand Canal, Venice (The Grand Canal and the Church of the Salute)
Artist Canaletto
Year c. 1730
Medium Oil on canvas
Dimensions 49.6 cm × 73.6 cm (19.5 in × 29.0 in)

The Entrance to the Grand Canal, Venice, is an c. 1730 oil painting on canvas by the Venetian painter Canaletto. It is a Rococo landscape painting measuring 49.6 by 73.6 centimeters (19.5 in × 29.0 in) currently held as part of the Robert Lee Blaffer Memorial Collection in the Audrey Jones Beck Building at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, in Houston, Texas. It was a gift from Sarah Campbell Blaffer.[1] https://www.mfah.org/art/detail/46980 A variant of the painting with a larger church tower and an additional building is used as the Venetian screen in the 2001 video game Merchant Prince II.

Painted views of towns and landscapes were enormously popular in the 18th century. Travelers to Italy eagerly sought accurate and detailed records of their visits to Rome, Florence, Venice, and Naples. Canaletto was the most famous painter of vedute (Italian for "views") at the time. His ability to capture the light, life, buildings, and expanse of Venice established his reputation as one of the greatest topographical painters of all time. Canaletto was the son of Bernardo Canal, a painter of theater sets, with whom he worked and from whom he presumably learned the rules of perspective, so important for Canaletto's compositions. In 1719 Canaletto went to Rome, where he may have become familiar with the paintings of Giovanni Panini, an artist known for his Roman cityscapes and imaginary topographical views using actual landmarks as motifs. A year later Canaletto was back in Venice, attracting an international clientele, especially wealthy English patrons. This association, and the effects of the War of Austrian Succession, which greatly reduced the number of visitors to Venice, prompted Canaletto to travel to England, where he resided from 1746 until 1755. Canaletto’s works can be grouped into two major categories: topographic views depicting with extreme precision particular aspects of Venice and other European cities; and capricci, or imaginary views, in which architectural monuments have been displaced and rearranged according to the painter’s fancy. The Entrance to the Grand Canal, Venice, with the church of Santa Maria della Salute on the left, belongs in the first category. Despite the self-defined limits of his subject matter, Canaletto was an extraordinarily brilliant artist who delicately enhanced his subject by carefully omitting selected details in order to focus on an essential image. His fine colors subtly combine all the hues associated with the real Venice as much as with the idea, or memory, of the city. Executed in his studio after studies from the motif, his paintings are, therefore, more than topographic records. They are pure, intellectual re-creations.

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A beautiful painting by the Italian painter Giovanni Antonio Canal (17 or 18 October 1697 – 19 April 1768), better known as Canaletto: “The Grand Canal and the Church of the Salute” (completed in 1730, Italian: Il Canal Grande e la chiesa di Santa Maria della Salute). It is a Rococo (or “Late Baroque”) landscape painting.

The painting is oil on canvas and measures 151 by 121 centimeters (59.45 x 47.64 in) and is currently housed in a private collection.

Giovanni Antonio Canal (17 or 18 October 1697 – 19 April 1768), better known as Canaletto was an Italian painter of landscapes, or vedute, of Venice. He was also an important printmaker in etching. He was a son of the painter Bernardo Canal, hence his mononym Canaletto (English: “little Canal”).

He was very influential, famed for his precisely depicted and evocative views of the city (vedute). Canaletto’s early pictures for local patrons are his most accomplished: these carefully designed, individual, and atmospheric studies.

He found that providing formulaic paintings for tourists was very lucrative. These, still highly skilled works, were produced by him often in collaboration with an organised workshop.

Canaletto was favoured by English collectors. He visited England repeatedly between 1746-56, painting works like ‘Eton College’. His most important assistant was his nephew Bellotto, who became an accomplished artist. Canaletto often made meticulous preparatory drawings. He may have used a camera obscura for topographical accuracy in creating some of his designs, but he always remained concerned with satisfying compositional design, not simply slavishly recording views.

Canaletto’s views always fetched high prices, and as early as the 18th century Catherine the Great and other European monarchs vied for his grandest paintings. The record price paid at auction for a Canaletto is £18.6 million for View of the Grand Canal from Palazzo Balbi to the Rialto, set at Sotheby’s in London in July 2005.

The Grand Canal (Italian: Canal Grande, Venetian: Canałasso) is a canal in Venice, Italy. It forms one of the major water-traffic corridors in the city. Public transport is provided by water buses (Italian: vaporetti) and private water taxis, and many tourists explore the canal by gondola.

One end of the canal leads into the lagoon near the Santa Lucia railway station and the other end leads into Saint Mark Basin; in between, it makes a large reverse-S shape through the central districts (sestieri) of Venice. It is 3.8 km long, and 30 to 90 m wide, with an average depth of five meters (16.5 ft).

The Grand Canal probably follows the course of an ancient river(possibly a branch of the Brenta) flowing into the lagoon.

Because most of the city’s traffic goes along the Canal rather than across it, only one bridge crossed the canal until the 19th century, the Rialto Bridge. There are currently three more bridges, the Ponte degli Scalzi, the Ponte dell’Accademia, and the recent, controversial Ponte della Costituzione, designed by Santiago Calatrava, connecting the train station to Piazzale Roma, one of the few places in Venice where buses and cars can enter. As was usual in the past, people can still take a ferry ride across the canal at several points by standing up on the deck of a simple gondola called a traghetto, although this service is less common than even a decade ago.

Most of the palaces emerge from water without pavement. Consequently, one can only tour past the fronts of the buildings on the grand canal by boat.

The Basilica di Santa Maria della Salute (Basilica of St. Mary of Health), commonly known simply as La Salute, is one of the largest churches of Venice and has the status of a minor basilica. It stands in a prominent position at the junction between the Grand Canal and the Bacino di San Marco on the lagoon. It is a Baroque church, groundbreaking was in 1631 and completed in 1687. The architect is Baldassarre Longhena (1598 – February 18, 1682 – Italian), who worked mainly in Venice, where he was one of the greatest exponents of Baroque architecture of the period.

In 1630, Venice experienced an unusually devastating outbreak of the plague. As a votive offering for the city’s deliverance from the pestilence, the Republic of Venice vowed to build and dedicate a church to Our Lady of Health (or of Deliverance, Italian: Salute). The church was designed in the then fashionable baroque style by Baldassare Longhena, who studied under the architect Vincenzo Scamozzi. Construction began in 1631. Most of the objects of art housed in the church bear references to the Black Death.

The dome of the Salute was an important addition to the Venice skyline and soon became emblematic of the city, inspiring artists like Canaletto, J. M. W. Turner, John Singer Sargent, and Francesco Guardi

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