|
Italian painter, the best-known member of a
family of artists. He is now famous for his views of Venice, indeed next
to Canaletto he is the most celebrated view painter of the 18th century,
but he produced work on a great variety of subjects and seems to have
concentrated on views only after the death of his brother Gianantonio
(1699-1760). Until then Francesco's personality was largely submerged in
the family studio, of which Gianantonio was head and which handled
commissions of every kind.
The last of the great Venetian vedutisti, Francesco Guardi has achieved
recognition only in the 20th century. In comparison to Canaletto and
Bellotto, Guardi distinguished himself by a very liberal concept of the
cityscape. He did not strive to represent each object accurately and
minutely, choosing instead to emphasize the general mood and atmosphere
of the scene. This holds true not only for his capriccios, but also for
his cityscapes. This subjective approach held out little appeal for
those who bought vedute in the eighteenth century, a substantial number
of whom were foreigners and preferred the exact, almost photographic
views of Canaletto and Bellotto. It was only much later that Guardi's
painterly qualities came to be valued.
Concerning the life of Francesco Guardi there is little documentation
available. Most of the large number of paintings attributed to him can
not be dated with certainty. There has accordingly been a good deal of
speculation on questions of chronology and stylistic development in his
work, one contentious area being the precise moment at which Francesco
began painting veduta, and his motives for doing so. Given the fact that
the first year Guardi's name appears in the registers of the Venetian
painters guild is 1761, it has been assumed that he took over the
leadership of the family studio following the death of Gian Antonio the
previous year, and that this period also witnessed his first incursions
into the genre of cityscapes. It would appear more plausible that,
alongside history pieces, Francesco also executed town views in his
elder brother's studio. Vedute by Guardi's hand cannot, however, be
dated before the second half of the 1750s.
Since the first monograph on Francesco Guardi in 1904, Guardi was
thought to have been a pupil of Canaletto. Nowadays it is generally
assumed that Guardi did not actually study with Canaletto, but only
learned to paint vedute after the old masters death by imitating the
latter's works.
In the 1760s Guardi introduced the Venetian Lagoon as a theme in view
painting. Lagoon views and capriccios based on them were to remain an
important part of his work. In the same decade his style underwent a
change that was primarily expressed in a new preference for stark
contrasts of light and shade. Canaletto's work would remain important to
Guardi, however, as regards the subject-matter and composition of his
town views. Guardi not infrequently took as his point of departure
compositions or individual motifs from the paintings of Canaletto or
from prints after his work.
Guardi produced his most personal work in the last twenty years of his
life. Every attempt to reproduce the cityscape exactly has been
abandoned. Linear perspective, that rules supreme in the work of
Canaletto and above all that of Bellotto, has no more than a subordinate
role with Guardi; depth is suggested by atmospheric effects. Despite the
subjectivity of Guardi's approach, his paintings, no less than those of
the two older painters, are also illustrations of a Venetian reality.
The city is admittedly not depicted with a view to accuracy, but through
the use of transparent colour and through the nervous brushwork a
shimmering atmosphere is reproduced, creating an authentic image of the
specific mood and the unique character of Venice.
|
music and food
|
The Grand Canal at the Fish Market (Pescheria)
c. 1765
Oil on canvas, 56 x 75 cm
Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan
The painting is the companion-piece of The
Grand Canal, Looking toward the Rialto Bridge, also in the Brera.
Formerly considered an imitator of Canaletto, Guardi is actually a
romantic interpreter of Canaletto's "scientific" views. In his hands the
crystalline geometry of buildings is dissolved in atmospheric colour.
Guardi is a "virtuoso," like those eighteenth-century musicians who went
from execution to interpretation, to variation, to improvisation, and
sometimes even to creative invention. His variations, with respect to
Canaletto, concern not only the technique of painting, but also the
perspective framework.
The composition of this work is less
rigidly constructed and less scientific, with a multiplicity of
vanishing points that slow down and articulate the scene in more
dramatic form. An outstanding passage is on the right where the shifting
of the vanishing points creates a succession of images and conveys the
sense of the canal's turn. |
|
.jpg)