The Grand Canal in Venice from Palazzo Flangini to Campo San Marcuola, about 1738, Canaletto (Giovanni Antonio Canal), oil on canvas
The J. Paul Getty Museum
Transcript
[lively classical chamber music]
[sound effects approximating the sounds of Venice’s Grand Canal]Female Narrator: This postcard-perfect scene of the Grand Canal on a clear day, by Canaletto, on the left, was meant as a traveler's souvenir. It’s an idealized tribute to Venice’s most famous waterway, rather than a record of how the canal looked at a particular moment.
Here’s how Pietro Guarienti, a contemporary art connoisseur and biographer, described Canaletto’s work:
Male Actor with Italian Accent: “He paints with such accuracy and cunning that the eye is deceived and truly believes that it is reality it sees, not a painting.”
[sound effect of raging fire]
Female Narrator: The painting’s pristine calm is a stark contrast to the one at right by Francesco Guardi, which shows a specific, dramatic event in the same part of Venice: a fire near the Campo San Marcuola. We’re thrust into a group of bystanders, watching with horror as people on the rooftops try to protect their buildings from a raging inferno. The painting is alive with frenzied movement, licking flames, and billowing smoke.
A local newspaper reported:
Male Actor with Italian Accent: “The sad spectacle of Saturday the 2th November and the subsequent night was the most terrible and destructive fire to have ravaged our city in this century.
[sad classical music with clarinet]
Witnesses have spoken of their unspeakable fear in the face of its horrors. Only the flowing lava of Vesuvius, whose dreadful image is used in poetic fantasy to describe the scourges of Hades, could approximate such chaos, when the elements themselves could no longer be distinguished.”
Female Narrator: While Canaletto’s main intention here was to capture the unique topography of Venice, Guardi’s painting is a visual reportage that turns the viewer into an eyewitness at a momentous occasion.
[music ends]