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TIn 18th-century Venice, there were no giant cruise vessels. No Rialto Disney store, no Biennale. Instead, a few aristocrats took leisurely gondola tours on quiet canals on their grand tour. Instead of taking home a mask, a bottle of grappa, and instead of getting a painter named Canaletto to paint them a few views.
Lord John Russell, a visitor to the country, ordered 24 souvenirs. The items are on display at National Maritime Museum. While their original home, Woburn Abbey in Bedfordshire is being restored, they are now on view at National Maritime Museum. They are breathtaking. The museum attempts to create a narrative that is too long for what is essentially a chance to see stately home treasures. No, they insist – this is a chilling insight into the peril facing Venice today, when flooding caused by the climate crisis and egregious levels of mass tourism threaten to destroy this precious human ecosystem. The show ends with a salutary video of the city’s recent floods and a powerful interactive tool that lets you see, from year to year, how the worst flooding in Venice’s history has hit in just the last few years. There were many years when there were no floods.
Canaletto’s views don’t much benefit from all this information. I was gripped by the drama of the floods on screen, though, shamefully spellbound by the spectacle of people wading through St Mark’s Square up to their hips in water. Although such apocalyptic visions can be important and they are necessary, it does not do justice to the serene, precise paintings of the Venetian master. They make Canaletto’s golden views look boringly picturesque. It reminded me of that bit in Spiderman: Far from Home when Peter Parker’s school trip to see Venice and all its sublime architecture is suddenly enlivened by a monster destroying the Rialto Bridge.
This is unfair on Canaletto as he isn’t a tourist view artist. His detailed souvenir of Venice that he created for the future fourth Duke of Bedford includes all the iconic landmarks, but these paintings are also rich with lesser-known sights. The view is blocked off by the walls of monasteries or convents. Dilapidated palaces hide in the shade and old facades bake in sunlight. White marble is often stained and not spotless. It doesn’t dominate, yet it is part of a patchwork of reds and yellows, all reflected in green water.
Canaletto painted a city that was not in its prime, but rather a place that had seen better times and was gradually losing its shine. The golden age in Venice was centuries ago, when it conquered colonies such as Nafplio and Cyprus. Titian and Giorgione were its artists. British tourists were conscious of being representatives of a rising empire beholding a dead one – and Canaletto does not hide the sense of ruin. He shows mouldering details on the Doge’s Palace and gives glimpses of tottering, uncared-for houses. One view, The Campo Francesco Morosini, San Stefano, shows a spectacle of human hustle amid architectural rot. People are seen strolling in puffy wigs, visiting the shops on ground floors of former palazzi. At the far end, you can see fine buildings reduced into grey, bleak, slums.
“The square now attracts large numbers of tourists,” points out the wall text, but there’s another difference – these buildings are now much better cared for. Modern tourism is not a bad thing. John Ruskin, an architect and historian who first documented and celebrated every detail of Venetian medieval architecture in the 1800s, was one of the key players in modern tourism. Cleaning preserved palaces that may have fallen over otherwise.
Without mass tourism, Venice would still have been the exclusive domain of a few aristocrats like the Duke of Bedford. Would we really want that? This exhibition also shows how culturally devastating that would be. Canaletto is quietly absorbing, at his best, but I found myself longing for Monet’s incandescent paintings of Venice, a city dissolving in light – or the cinematic Venice of Luchino Visconti.
The city that filmmakers, writers, and artists portray is one of shadows and memories. It is a place where dreams and reality are hard for us to distinguish. This mystery is also found within the meticulous and rational views of Canaletto. But 24 views is quite a lot. And I am glad the city’s history did not stop in 1731 but has come into modern times when we plebeians can go there, too – even if we do spoil the view.
