The Best Artists

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The Grand Canal and the Cannaregio by Canaletto

In the Royal Library of Windsor Castle (73/8 x 105/8 inches or 187 x 270 mm)

How did Canaletto draw such complex scenes? He seems to have helped himself with a device called a camera obscura. That was invented years before and used by the German artist Dürer. By means of mirrors and lenses, the camera projected on the artist’s paper an image of the scene he had before him. In this way, he could trace its lines.

The camera was an aid but it by no means explained the astounding results of his drawings. The projected images helped him fix the perspective lines and the relative sizes of buildings in his picture. But every single line, every cross-hatched shadow, was hand-drawn.
It was his aesthetic judgment that determined each stroke of the pen. It was his genius that kept the lines from becoming sterile, pedantic.

Canaletto doesn’t seem to have thought that the sureness of his hand was worth bragging about. But in old age his good eyesight surprised him. He signed one of his last drawings this way: “I made the present drawing…..at the age of sixty-eight, without glasses”.

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The most famous views of Old Venice were made by Canaletto, and by two of his students, Bellotto and Guardi.
Canaletto learned to paint broad views of Venice from his father, who was a scenery painter for the theater.
His paintings show you what the great city looked like but they are not as lively as his drawings. The pen-and-ink sketches and studies he made for the oil paintings give you a feeling of the very moment they were recorded. You seem to sit with him on a gondola and see the scene he was copying on that very day in 1725 or 1730; and to watch as each stroke of his pen magically turns into a cloud, a shadow, or some other feature of his picture.

Here is a quick sketch. That’s the Doge’s great ship, the Bucintoro, docked at the Mole.

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