Just several years after Mackintosh’s School of Art caught fire, and was repaired, it catches fire again. As this photo from the Guardian shows, the damage is even worse than the first blaze! Continue reading

From the Guardian. Very Dan Brownish! Continue reading

Coming up at Sotheby's, a nice drawing by the baroque master Guercino. Amazing that such a name has a low price (£15,000) compared to, for example, Parmigianino starting at £60, 000. But forget about the money- and just enjoy this lovely allegory which is obviously connected to the more famous work in Rome reproduced above. Click on the link for the drawing Continue reading

Slides. Luca Carlevaris, Piazza San Marco, Venice, c. 1709, oil on canvas, 50.5×120 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Modern photograph of tourists in San Marco. Vanvitelli, View of Naples, 1700-10, oil on panel, 45×98 cm, Private collection. William Marlow, View of the Bay of Naples from Posillipo, 1777-79, oil on canvas, 65×100 cm, Private collection. Luca Carlevaris, The Bacino, Venice, with the Dogana and a Distant View of the Isola di San Giorgio, c. 1709, oil on canvas, 50.8×119.7 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Luca Carlevaris, The Piazzetta and the Library, 1720s, oil on canvas, 46×39... Continue reading

The Last Great Venetian Artist? If there was a painter who could be classed as Venice’s greatest artist in the city’s twilight years, it was G. B. Tiepolo. However despite Tiepolo’s support of Venice, it hardly treated him well: he was forced to go to Spain in 1761as a gesture of reconciliation between the two powers. In his early career Tiepolo worked in a Venice fraught with social tensions which were exacerbated as the gap between the rich and poor increased due partly to the lost money spent on wars with the Turks in the preceding century. Due to the... Continue reading

Reversing the Trend With the popularity of artists like Tiepolo, Fragonard and Boucher, it’s salutary to remember that once this kind of painting full of fantasy and colour, and produced for a rich elite, was attacked by art historians just after the Second World War. Leading the charge was the veteran Italian scholar, Roberto Longhi, who during the age of Italian neo-realism, defended 18th century genre artists like the other Longhi, whilst dismissing Tiepolo and his rhetorical style. The trend has been reversed due to publications by Francis Haskell, Michael Levey and others who have worked hard to put Tiepolo... Continue reading

Venetian Arcadias and Pastoral Realism It is hardly surprising that landscape was a neglected genre in 18th century Venice. Both patrons in the city or foreign visitors either craved the weightless fantasies of Tiepolo, or the architectural views of Canaletto, or the marine impressionism of Guardi. However, even such an important patron of Canaletto like Consul Smith began to seek out landscape artists like Francesco Zuccarelli who became famous for landscapes filled with English architecture, much admired by the likes of Lord Burlington. After Zuccarelli left Venice for England in 1752, Smith employed Guiseppe Zais whose pastoral landscapes are not... Continue reading

Veduti and the Historical Moment. In a joint exhibition held at the Getty and Cleveland Museum s held last year, a number of paintings by Guardi, Canaletto and Panini were used to illustrate how some view painting by these artists actually marked a historical event such as a visit by a VIP to a building or site.1 These pictures- in the words of the exhibition’s curator “simultaneously record an occasion and its topographical setting.”2 As the title of the exhibition suggests, this makes the painter something of a historical eye witness observing distinguished visitors like kings, princes, ambassadors absorbed into... Continue reading

Guardi Francesco Guardi (1712-93) is the most famous Italian painter of views after Canaletto. Like his famous countryman, Guardi is renowned for his views of Venice, though he also created works on other subjects, and only turned to view painting after the death of his brother Gianantonio (1699-1760). Guardi came from a family studio, of which his brother was head. Though he worked hard, Guardi wasn’t really successful in “wordly terms” unlike Canaletto who attracted the attention of foreign visitors, and Guardi died in poverty.1 Guardi’s method was to borrow from the compositions of other painters, and it was only... Continue reading

Views of Canaletto’s Views of Venice. Giovanni Antonio Canal was born in Venice, near the Rialto on 28th October, 1697, the son of a theatrical painter. Why and when he was named Canaletto, “the little canal” is not known.1 Nor is it documented if Canaletto met the founder of the vedute school of Venetian painting, Carlevarijs, but an encounter seems highly likely since the latter painted the Rialto. Canaletto was first introduced to English collectors by an Irishman, Owen McSwiney, who was a friend of the artist’s major patron Joseph Smith. In 1730, Smith emerged in the role he played... Continue reading

Consul Smith: An Englishman Abroad. S mith established himself as a merchant in 1709 rising to the prestigious, though modestly paid office of British Consul to Venice in 1744. Living in a palace in the English taste on the Grand Canal, Smith entertained many important cultural luminaries; he was an avid devotee of opera and theatre, and married the controversial opera singer Catherine Tofts. The celebrated dramatist Goldoni wrote a play about him and entitled it, perhaps with some irony: Il Filosofo Inglese. Walpole sarcastically dubbed him “The Merchant of Venice” and he appears to have been generally disliked. Yet... Continue reading

Visions and Vedute in Venice. Anybody casting an eye over the state of Venetian art in the late 17th and early 18th centuries might be forgiven for thinking that it fell into two distinctive categories. Firstly, there were the decorations of noble palaces and the ceilings of churches: allegories and apotheoses that might be collectively called the painting of visions, both sacred and secular. Then there was the growing interest in recording views of Venice to satisfy the hunger of collectors and connoisseurs interested in architecture, perspective or eager for a memento of Venice on the Grand Tour: this could... Continue reading

Between Truth and Fantasy in 18th Century Venice. Painting in 18th century Venice bloomed at a time when the intellectual climate was changing radically throughout Europe. The political, scientific and philosophical movement that is known as the “Enlightenment” stressed reason as opposed to the glorified fantasies of the baroque; it was inevitable that such an intellectual trend would have consequences for a school of painting that included Tiepolo whose art was completely irradiated with fantastic ideas and conceits. Yet it would be naïve to judge the stylistic opposite of Tiepolo, Canaletto, as lacking in imagination. Canaletto experimented with a genre... Continue reading

Panini & Veduti in Rome Giovanni Panini, sometimes Pannini (1691/1765) was an Italian painter born in the Piacenza who was trained in the tradition of stage designers at Bologna. By 1711, Panini had arrived in Rome where he became the “pre-eminent painter of real and imaginary views of the city.”1 He was also the first painter to to make a speciality out of painting ruins, which connects him with Frances’s greatest ruin painter Hubert Robert who painted the Louvre both intact and ruined to reflect the impact of time upon art. Panini also did a lot of paintings of public... Continue reading

Defining Veduta As most of the paintings shown today come under the category of “veduta,” it is worth defining for the uninitiated, I shall take the definition from The Oxford Dictionary of Art: Veduta. Term (Italian: ‘view’) applied to a representation of a town or landscape that is essentially topographical in conception, specifically one that is faithful enough to allow the location to be identified (an imaginary but realistic-looking view can be called a vedute (for example Carlevaris, above) are called vedutisti.1 1Ian Chilvers, Harold Osborne, Dennis Farr, The Oxford Dictionary of Art (OUP, 1988), 514. Continue reading

Slides. Giovanni Paolo Panini, View of Rome from Mt. Mario, in the Southeast, 1749, Oil on canvas, 102×168 cm, Staatliche Museen, Berlin. Hugh Frederick Hamilton, Portrait of Frederick Hervey, Bishop of Derry, and Fourth Earl of Bristol, 1774-1778, oil on canvas, measurements not known, National Gallery of Ireland. Laurent Pécheux, Portrait of Margherita Gentili Sparapani Boccapudli, 1777, oil on canvas, Private Collection, Rome. Pompeo Batoni, Portrait of Sir Wyndham Knatchbull-Wyndham, oil on canvas, 233.05 × 161.29 cm, Los Angeles Museum of Art. Johann Baptist Lampi II, Portrait of Antonio Canova, after 1806, oil on canvas, 113×93 cm, Akademie der bildenden... Continue reading

A Portrait of International Antiquarianism: Tischbien’s Goethe in the Roman Compagna. Tischbein’s portrait of Goethe in the Roman countryside is a visual summary of the international antiquarian culture that was established during the era of the Grand Tour. Though the exact date of the painting is not known, there is reason to believe it was finished by Tischbein in Naples in 1786, who may have added certain associations between its subject and the antique itself. As Patrick Hunt says, some scholars claim that the pose of Goethe may owe something to figures on the frieze of the Elgin Marbles, which... Continue reading

Goethe and the German Community of Painters in Rome. Johann Wilhelm Goethe (1749-1832) was one of the most intelligent minds of the age. Not only a novelist, playwright and poet, he was also a scientist with interests in botany, geology, anatomy and colour theory. His Italian Journey (published about 1817) is one of the most famous written accounts of the Grand Tour, though the focus is predominantly on Rome and Naples. Goethe arrived in Rome on 29th October 1786 and left it on 23rd April 1788. As Elizabeth Einberg states, Goethe transformed the conventional Grand Tour into “an intense emotional... Continue reading

Batoni, Portraiture and the Constitution of his Sitters in his Roman Studio. The Italians had never really been interested in the genre of portraiture. At the start of the eighteenth-century Paris easily eclipsed Rome in this area. In his View of Society and Manners in Italy (1780) Dr John Moore observed that portraiture “is in the lowest estimation all over Italy” with hardly any pictures of the patrons who commissioned work in Italian palaces.1 Batoni himself had hardly begun in the field of portraiture; his early work is a fusion of renaissance and baroque history painting, though the realism of... Continue reading

On and Off the Beaten Track in Rome. By the late 18th century Rome had been mapped extensively, which was helpful to the visitor. Such authorities as Guiseppe Vasi the architect had created maps with engravings of landmarks, but a distinction has to be made between Vasi’s antiquarian knowledge and more “user-friendly” guides to urban space. The most useful thing for tourists is that guides tended to divide the city up into “giornate of sightseeing” (Sweet) containing detailed information on what was worth seeing, as can be seen in the detailed map by Dupays.1 Some visitors were advised to read... Continue reading

Ancient Rome. In the 18th century Rome could be divided into two cities: the city of the popes, St Peter’s and the city of the ancients, both symbolically and physically present in monuments like the Colosseum and the Pantheon. Something of the grandeur of the ancient city was evoked by the author of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon (above) whose sojourn amongst the ruins inspired him to write that historical work. Generally, the British viewed Rome as an illustration of ancient history and classical culture. For many erudite travellers, seeing the ruins provided certification of... Continue reading

Sensory Overload and the Roman Experience. In recent years the idea of contagion and illness has found its way into the scholarly literature eighteenth-century Rome. One theory is that, on arrival in Rome, artists were overcome by the abundant and dizzying choice of art on offer which threw them into confusion, awe (especially in the presence of Michelangelo’s Sistine frescoes) and even illness. This illness is then linked to the idea of contagion which is seen as; (a), a metaphor for the harmful influence of mediocre- or what are perceived as subpar painters- on artists in Rome; (b) the climate... Continue reading

Approaches to Rome on the Grand Tour. Unlike Florence, there was a very different cultural situation in Rome. There was no paucity of views, records, maps, written accounts of the Eternal City. It was clearly the main destination of travellers on the Grand Tour, and to most of them, Florence was just a place on the road to Rome, their ultimate cultural goal. Above all, in “a culture dominated by the classics, Rome was the focus of interest and tourists responded accordingly.”1 There was a thriving tourist economy in Rome, supported by a network of cicerones, antiquarians, dealers, artists, and... Continue reading

Artists, Studios and Self-Portraits There are a variety of types and we will start with the rarest: the large, ceremonial portrait of the studio during a visit or an important event. An excellent example of this is Marten’s large painting of a papal visit to the Danish sculptor Thorvaldsen’s studio paid in 1826, but painted four years later. There are scaled down views of artists’ studios such as the Dublin-born painter Hugh Douglas Hamilton’s view of Canova posing in front of a modello for his famous Cupid and Psyche group watched by his English friend, Henry Tresham who arrived in... Continue reading

The Artistic Community in Rome. The idea of an artistic community in Rome can be traced back to the 17th century when there was a huge cultural and national mix of painters working in the city. However, Rome never really became a truly European artistic community until the late 18th century. If an artist wanted to address his work to a “European rather than a national or regional constituency” he or she would find no better time than then.1 This international circle of connoisseurs and the culture of antiquity in Rome is perfectly captured in the over-elegant portraits of Pompeo... Continue reading