Catalogue-2014-Jean-Luc-Baroni

Francesco Guardi
Venice 1712-1793
14
Lagoon Capriccio with a Bridge
Oil on canvas.
26.2 x 39.2 cms. (10 ¼ x 15 3 /8 in.)
Provenance: Private Collection, France.
Few documentary records exist to record the events of Francesco’s life apart from his birth and death and the
marriage of his sister to Giovanni Battista Tiepolo in 1719. He was briefly inscribed into the Painters Guild of
Venice in the early 1760s and only became a member of the Venetian Academy in 1784, nine years before
his death. It has been a matter of dispute as to whether Francesco actually became Canaletto’s pupil as was
asserted by the 18 th century diarist Pietro Gradenigo. In 1923 Giuseppe Fiocco established from documentary
evidence that Francesco trained in his elder brother Gianantonio’s studio and that he collaborated on history
paintings. However, as James Byam Shaw suggested, it is likely that on his brother’s death, Francesco quickly
responded to the increasing popularity of view-painting and would most surely have had the chance to study
Canaletto’s paintings, such as those for Joseph Smith, the British Consul in Venice. Byam Shaw extrapolates
further that Guardi, would not have been above apprenticing himself to the famed Canaletto even in midlife
and numbers of his paintings are derived, often precisely, from drawings by Canaletto 1 . “Undoubtedly it
was the success of Canaletto’s Vedute that inspired him to try his hand at the type of paintings in which his
great natural gifts found a perfect medium of expression … But while Canaletto looked at Venice through
the camera obscura and corrected perspectives by rule and lines and angles .. Guardi painted his immediate
impression, the quivering air and the glittering lagoon” 1 . Unlike Canaletto and the Tiepolos, Guardi seems
never to have sought fame abroad, preferring to work almost exclusively in and around his native Venice and
creating a great reputation for himself as a master of skies and light and atmosphere, both in his depictions of
his city, its buildings and events and in his fantastical inventions.
In discussing the capricci, Alessandro Bettagno wrote of the extraordinary fertility of Francesco Guardi’s
imagination, which was perhaps initially inspired by the views invented by his compatriots, Luca Carlevarijs
and Marco Ricci. A less obvious inspiration, but one relevant to the present painting, and in Bettagno’s view
intrinsic to Guardi’s creative tissue, comes from that of another Venetian native, Giovanni Battista Piranesi 2 .
The motif of a rustic bridge with a Roman memorial monument at its centre, spanning the low waters of
the lagoon is one which appears in a small number of Guardi’s capricci, both horizontal and vertical in
format. Those which have been published are the vertical Capriccio con ponte, ara Romane e cavaliere, from
the collection of Vittorio Cini, Venice 3, and the so-called Capriccio rustico con ponte, a similar horizontal
composition in the raccolta museale collection of G. Cagnola, in Gazzada, near Treviso which was dated to
the 1780s in the recent exhibition at the Museo Correr 4 . Further examples are the one lost in 1943, formerly in
the Kunsthalle, Hamburg and another described by Morassi as being damaged due to overcleaning, formerly
with the Knoedler gallery in New York which appeared more recently at auction, where its poor state of
preservation and overpaint was confirmed 5 . Part of the delightfulness of the composition, and common to
all the versions mentioned, is in the Piranesian Roman monument which catches the sun and seems to perch
uncertainly on the rustic, dilapidating bridge. This previously unknown and very well preserved canvas,
is a new addition to the artist’s corpus of paintings of his mature style of the 1780s, which can be playful,
delicate in tone and with a particularly atmospheric, strong and silvery light. In this instance the brilliance
is partly created by Guardi’s innovative of a white base rather than the red base commonly used in 18 th
century painting, and which appears in earlier pictures by the Venetian Master as well. Writing of a view of
the Giudecca Canal and the Church of Santa Marta in the Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon, which dates from
the same period, Daniele D’Anza describes the manner in which Guardi uses remarkably dilute paint to
create a fusion of the elements of sky and water, which become almost monochromatic, creating a sense of
liquidity which is highly atmospheric. Guardi was described as working with furious speed through the use
of “colori molto ogliosi” and the effect is one which though not always understood by his contemporaries has
enchanted painters and art lovers through successive centuries 6 .
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