Works on Paper 2019 - Jean Luc Baroni

This superbly preserved and grandly proportioned
drawing, with its centuries-long English provenance,
is considered to rank among the greatest works on
paper that Canaletto ever made. It belongs to the
highly original series of depictions of the ceremonies
and festivals of the Doges, known as the Feste
Ducali, illustrating the election and installation of
the Doge and the Venetian ceremonies and festivals
in which he took the leading part at different times
of the year. The drawings were conceived as largescale
finished works, which were then engraved in
the same direction by Giovanni Battista Brustolon
(1712-1796) (Fig. 1). Ten drawings from the series
exist, four of which are in the British Museum and
two in the National Gallery of Art, Washington 2 .
Canaletto revelled in depicting the Venetian crowds
and Venice’s buildings and its traditions In its scale
and compositional complexity this is one of the
most ambitious of all his representations of the city.
The rendering of detail and light and shade animates
the scene with captivating effect, giving incredible
variety to the stonework of architectural decoration
and animation to Sansovino’s sculptures of Mars
and Neptune, as well as to the onlookers peering
over the window ledges and balustrades and the
characteristic dogs wandering among the motley
assembly of La Serenissima’s inhabitants.
Although architectural accuracy is at the heart of
Canaletto’s art, images of actual historical events
are relatively rare in his work. The grand ceremonial
staircase, the Scala dei Giganti, leading up through
the central courtyard of the Doge’s palace, is the
focus of this scene, which became the third in the
engraved series. As the figures of the innumerable
spectators and the guards become more diminutive
the higher up the staircase they lead, so we are
brought to locate the tiny figure of the Doge himself
– the hat, or Ducal Horn – held above his head.
His early training from his theatrical set-designing
father may have encouraged Canaletto to compose
the scene with a maximum of wit and drama. By
telescoping our view into the event, and through the
extraordinary wealth of detail he depicts, Canaletto
expresses all the liveliness and magnificence of the
city and its ceremonial traditions.
The series dates from late in Canaletto’s career;
the intended patron may well have been the
publisher and book seller Ludovico Furlanetto, and
the size of the drawings and their extraordinary
quality indicate the importance of the project.
Canaletto was particularly proud of his abilities as
a draughtsman in his later years, as is shown by a
more or less contemporary drawing in Hamburg
which he inscribed “I Zuane Antonio da Canal, Have
made the present drawing … at the age of 68 Years
Without Spectacles. The year 1766”. The brilliance
of the compositions is witnessed by the immediate
success of the engravings and a matching series of
paintings by Francesco Guardi, after the prints 3 .
The first eight prints were announced for sale by
the publisher Ludovico Furlanetto in March 1766.
Four months later, he extended the series to twelve
plates. The order in which the drawings were made
is not known, nor the year in which work began
but as one of the drawings now in Washington,
The Doge attends Giovedi Grasso in the Piazzetta,
includes the arms of the Doge Alvise Mocenigo IV,
who was elected in 1763, it can be assumed that
this was a significant year and probably the subject
for the series. 1763 was also the year that Canaletto
was finally elected to the Venetian Academy.
Might it be that the drawings were a riposte to
the Academicians who had overlooked Canaletto
previously, possibly on the grounds that he could
be categorised as a view painter 4 ? It might also be
conjectured that Canaletto’s painting of 1760, The
Return of the Doge in the Bucintoro on Ascension
Day, now in the Dulwich Picture Gallery, London,
a record of this triumphant annual ceremony, may
have been a catalyst for this series of drawings. There
is no record of Canaletto’s eleventh and twelfth
drawings for the series and the request for the Feste
Ducali was probably his last major commission. In
fact, of the twelve engravings, we can only be sure
that ten were made from Canaletto’s drawings or
from copies of them reversed for the engraver 5 , no
paintings generally accepted as being by Canaletto
were made of the compositions 6 , and judging from
differences in the character of the engravings, the
two missing models may have been the work of
Francesco Guardi 7 . The Venetian dealer Giovanni
Maria Sasso remarked to Sir Abraham Hume in
a letter of 1789 “che sono Belli quanto quadri”,
and indeed the engravings after them by Giovanni
Battista Brustoloni, one of the most able engravers
of Canaletto’s work, are inscribed ‘Antonius Canal
pinxit’ rather than the more customary delineavit.
The extraordinary skill and artistic delight seen in
the present work testifies loudly to the fact that
he was absolutely at the height of his powers as a
draughtsman at this moment, as W.G. Constable
wrote: The Feste Ducali “are as elaborate as any
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