The Grand Canal, Venice, Looking Southeast, with the Campo della Carità to the Right
| Support Type: | Canvas |
| Paint Type: | Oil Paint |
| Current Location: | Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (accession no. 2019.141.4) |
| Location History: | Originally with Joseph Smith in Venice, the painting passed to Charles Spencer, 3rd Duke of Marlborough, at Langley Park, Buckinghamshire, and by descent through the Spencer and Bateson-Harvey families until the mid-twentieth century. It was on loan to the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (1936–38) and the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery (1938–c. 1957), before passing through the dealer Colnaghi in London and being sold in 1965 to Mr. and Mrs. Charles Wrightsman of New York. It remained in the Wrightsman collection until Mrs. Charles Wrightsman's death in 2019, at which point it entered the Metropolitan Museum of Art through her bequest. |
Canaletto's characteristic precision, even that of a surveyor, gives the Grand Canal a sense of receding into the distance, the Campo della Carità providing anchorage on the right, and gondolas and a few passing boats keeping the water busy yet never dominating the overall composition, which is essentially about architecture. The subject of this canvas is significant, but not its only significance: Canaletto's painting of the Grand Canal was a recurring theme for him, but the one included in this particular project is one of twenty similarly sized view paintings that were likely produced to order for Joseph Smith, British consul in Venice from 1744-60, whose patronage gave the Cityscape genre its most significant and tightly unified aspect. But that serial thinking was important to Canaletto's English patrons especially, who tended to see his paintings less as individual works and more as a collection of documents, mapping the city of Venice as a whole, from the largest public spaces to the more obscure churches and private palaces. But, as the curators at the Metropolitan Museum point out, Canaletto was often guilty of deliberate falsifications of a site's true topography; he altered the angle or the extent of a facade's visibility to create the most legible, aesthetically appealing view of a location possible, though not necessarily documentary.
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