Canaletto before England: an exhibition at Palazzo Guistiniani in Rome focuses on Canaletto's career before his departure for London in 1746. It is visually rewarding, writes Francis Russell, and reunites some paintings that have long been separated

Apollo, June, 2005 by Francis Russell

Alessandro Bettagno, director of the Cini Foundation's Institute of Art History, who died last year, had a determined belief in the scholarly role of exhibitions. This exhibition, curated by his erstwhile colleague Bozena Anna Kowalczyk, is most appropriately dedicated to his memory.

Canaletto has been well served by exhibitions: those held in London, Venice, New York and Birmingham linger in the memory: and yet this relatively small exhibition--there are some twenty-eight pictures by the artist and over thirty drawings--does have a rewarding contribution to make. Kowalczyk must be congratulated on reuniting a number of pictures that have long been separated, and her selection offers a visually rewarding overview of Canaletto's career until his departure for London in 1746.

The exhibition opens with two of the rather dry Roman drawings of 1720 in the British Museum and the first room is dominated by the great ex-Giovanelli Capricci, which anticipates so many later pictures. The Hull Grand Canal and the two Venetian views from King's Weston, atmospheric as these are, demonstrate why the artist had to change tempo before he could expect commercial success. The direction of that change can be experienced in the Dresden Campo SS Giovanni e Paolo (1725)--in which, as the fall of light establishes, the renaissance facade of the scuola matters far more to the artist than the gothic front of the church or even the Colleoni monument--and in the recently rehabilitated Edinburgh Grand Canal from Campo S Vio (c. 1727) and the Uffizi Grand Canal of 1728. How far the artist was to develop is shown by the juxtaposition of the Edinburgh picture with the variant from the Abello collection--did Canaletto ever paint decaying render more sensitively?--and its pendant, dated 1733-34 by Kowalczyk.

The two 'interlocking' views from the Molo of 1730 from Tatton clearly establish Canaletto's commitment to a tourist audience. Two slightly later pictures, once at Swinfen (Constable, nos. 43 and 167), are brought together. These set the scene for the main room, understandably dominated by the San Rocco from the National Gallery, London, in which Canaletto exhibits a Grand Canal view very much in his earlier mode. The larger pair of Molo views once at Hornby--which are framed en suite with their erstwhile counterparts at Trafalgar Square--with two of the so-called Harvey series and a reunited pair once in the Hillingdon collection, testify to the standards Canaletto maintained in the busy years of the late 1730s.

By contrast, the two pictures from Consul Smith's Roman series of 1742 disappoint: the palace to the left of this shows that in the twenty years since he had been in Rome Canaletto had forgotten the prodigious scale of the Pantheon; and despite the wit of his figures his view of the Forum lacks the dramatic conviction of Bellotto's nearly contemporary canvas from Melbourne, which is hung nearby (disturbingly strained as the verticals in this are, presumably from relining).

Kowalczyk's selection of drawings is judicious--although the sheet from the Victoria and Albert Museum is so sunk that it reads better in reproduction. And no one interested in the subject can afford to miss the final room at the Palazzo Giustiniani, in which works by Bellotto (his violently sunlit views of the Piazzetta and the Arsenale from Ottawa), Marieschi (represented by his most sustained bacino-scape) and Guardi are confronted by four canvasses by Canaletto: the spectacular upright pair supplied by 1741 to Sir Hugh Smythson, now lent from Alnwick, of the Piazza San Marco looking west and the Scala dei Giganti, and the intimate variant of the latter, with its pendant interior of St Mark's.

The Smythson pair are particularly revealing of Canaletto's methods. In the Piazza, the foreground is shadowed by the building behind the spectator, and the light is from the south, taken evidently just before noon, to clarify the detail of Sansovino's Libreria: in the pendant, manipulation turns to falsification. The shadows show that the sun must be high to the north-north-west: again the artist's preoccupation is to depict the low relief decoration of the Ducal Palace and he chooses, for compositional effect, to place the south-facing front of the northern range in shadow. The viewpoint he chose for this meant that the break in the right-hand balustrade at the landing on the stairs is almost undetectable, an infelicity he was to avoid in the smaller picture by selecting a slightly different angle.

With Canaletto, questions of provenance can be important. Kowalczyk does not accept this reviewer's suggestion that the Hervey pictures were supplied to the 3rd Duke of Marlborough, preferring a reference to twenty-two pictures once in Turin: John Harris's discovery of a printed catalogue of the Langley collection stating that the twenty pictures there were bought with the house would seem to confirm the former hypothesis. Unfortunately, the information this reviewer supplied about the provenance of the Marieschi miscarried. That picture was acquired, as by Canaletto, by the merchant William Hayter, who left it to James Harris, for whom he had purchased at Venice in 1743 a pair of views correctly attributed to Marieschi and another pair given to 'Antonio Bellotti', i.e. Bellotto: the misattribution of the view of the Bacino suggests how baffling even informed contemporaries could find matters of attribution. However well-charted Canaletto's career is, our view of his achievement will continue to evolve. This exhibition contributes to that process.