Canaletto--A View From England : Works of the Italian painter who caught the essence of 18th-Century Venice are in the U.S. for the first time

A few years back, visitors to London found a droll sort of protest afoot. Winsome toddlers in prams toured the parks with their nannies carrying yellow balloons emblazoned with the motto, “Save Our Canaletto.”

Cuisine-minded persons might have mistaken this for an appeal to aid a favorite pasta dish. Actually, they wouldn’t have been far off. The real subject, however, was a beloved 18th-Century Italian painter, Giovanni Antonio Canal. Nicknamed Canaletto, his views of Venice were bought by the yard back in the days of the English Grand Tour.

The protester’s problem was that a Canaletto was coming up for auction and they were afraid it would be spirited off by some rapacious American. Never mind that the royal collection has the world’s largest Canaletto cache. You have to watch those Yanks.

Now, by vivid contrast England has graciously loaned the lion’s share of a 110-work retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art to Jan. 21. It is the first Canaletto show to be seen in the U.S. and, alas, will not travel.

Alas, at least for those legions of folks who still think that the job of painting is to bring back memories of exotic vacation spots. Canaletto is their artist par excellence.

Look at his views of the funny Rialto Bridge, the grand sweep of Piazza San Marco, or the magnificent languor of the Riva degli Schiavoni and you recognize them with a clarity more vivid than memory. When 200-year-old pictures can do that, they reflect more than the enduring quality of the city. At very least, the artist had to have an amazing knack for distilling the essence of the place.

Canaletto has always been a popular artist whose character and aesthetic worth have stayed as murky as his hometown canals. He was born in 1697. His father, a theatrical scene painter, trained the boy in the craft. He evolved into a prolific producer of views for aristocratic connoisseur and tourist alike--including armchair voyagers who saw Venice only through his eyes.

The exhibition makes it clear he was a canny businessman capable of cranking out shameless potboilers. A distinction comes easily. His small paintings have all the brainless ease of still-lifes in Beverly Hills boutiques. When he painted bigger he tried harder.

His success eventually flooded his own market. On two occasions when business was bad, he sojourned to England, once for nearly 10 years. Anybody who thinks his art wasn’t the fruit of his spiritual link to Venice has only to look at his chilly topographic view of London’s Northumberland House. Flimsy as a paper model.

He captured some of the gruff grandeur of Warwick Castle but the English work carries a subtext of worry and fear.

He also did Roman scenes but scholars now think they are capriccios --pictures invented by consulting etchings and recombining various architectural and landscape features.

Scrappy hints about Canaletto’s character come mainly from his dealers. One wrote to a potential client in the style of the day: “He’s a covetous, greedy fellow & because he’s in reputation, people are glad to get anything at his own price.”

That sounds exceptionally frank except it was written by a middleman anxious that the buyer believe only he could deal with the temperamental artist. It’s an old trick. Horace Walpole called the dealer “the Merchant of Venice.”

It seems poetically apt that we should learn of the artist in such accents, given his town’s stereotypical reputation as a place fueled by vanity and intrigue.

In England he was seen as “a sober man turnd of 50” and later as “remarkable for reservedness & shyness in being seen at work, at any Time or anywhere.”

Canaletto died a bachelor at 71 and left only a paltry estate. He had suffered all his life from his lesser status as a “view” painter--being passed over by the Venetian academy in favor of a couple of hack history daubers. His feistiness and greed may have been the reaction of a proud fellow made to feel like a second-class citizen of the serenissima .

In the end, of course, we have to rely on the work. The Met’s show provides an unparalleled occasion to do just that. It gives an overview of paintings and drawings while a satellite show in the Lehman Pavilion looks at Canaletto’s graphics and those of his contemporaries. (A delay in the opening of the latter made it impossible to review here.)

Canaletto’s art is an odd stew that simultaneously engages, disappoints and surprises. One of the biggest surprises is the way it contradicts the generally held view of what it looks like. It seems to leave a mental residue that doesn’t match its real appearance. General descriptions say it is extremely precise--somewhere between the water-drop exactitude of 15th-Century Netherlandish art and modern photorealism.

Eyeball evidence swears that it’s just not so. Earlier works like one of the Grand Canal looking east from the Campo San Vio are quite muzzy with atmospheric brushing. They get more precise (and worse) with time, but painterliness is constant.

Their truth to the scenery of Venice is likewise more remembered than real. Canaletto exaggerated his perspective so radically that views down canals look 10 miles deep when they are two. Often, the angle of vision is higher than any building where he might have stood except the Campanile and that is liable to be in the picture.

True to his early training, he dramatizes so radically that the space is nearly as surreal as a di Chirico . They say he used a camera obscura--that grandfather of today’s camera viewfinder. It looks like he peeked through a drastic wide-angle lens that both broadens space and makes it tunnel like a rushing train.

His independent drawings are quite splendid, at once grand, intimate and free of a stale egotism that invades the paintings. But in the paintings, drawing sometimes goes out of whack. Black canal barges look like rubber boats losing air. And as the catalogue points out (it’s very good, by the way) for an artist in a town full of water, Canaletto was surprisingly inept at painting it. Sometimes it looks scummy and polluted (it wasn’t then) other times he renders its surface with naive little decorative scallops.

The conventional view of Canaletto has it that his vision stood somewhere between objectivity and sunny cheerfulness, giving buyers the Venice they wanted.

The real pictures belie that too. Sinister shadows skulk around buildings. Even the most festive pictures, like “A Regatta on the Grand Canal” have a hectic oddity.

His grand views are laced with small genre figures. They have the earthiness of Hogarth and the elegance of Tiepolo. The repellent combination curdles into a feeling of doltish, slimy character. A cardinal leaks pomposity. A group of idle peddlers could have night jobs as cutpurses. Everywhere figures chat with traditional Venetian contentiousness.

Canaletto’s art reeks with mixed motive. The principal one is a tension between his linear undergrid and his atmospheric paint. It creates a world where the edges of building are about to go woozy as if seen through desert heat waves.

The real key to this art--and maybe Canaletto’s character--is instability.

Today we know too well of Venice’s literal instability. Canaletto--like some Californian with suppressed earthquake neurosis--painted as if struggling to solidify the shaky, half-liquid place and calm his own unease.

When he achieved balance he painted a few masterpieces. “The Stonemason’s Yard” is his acknowledged chef d’oeuvre with its buildings of serene straight lines and tiny anecdotes of earthy life. A child falls and a distressed mother runs to its aid. Seems significant, this fear of falling.

Almost no water shows in the picture.

Canaletto’s most troubled masterpiece is probably “S. Cristoforo, S. Michel from the Fondamente Nuove, Venice.” Silhouetted figures stand near us. Some look at the land in the distance, land that seems about to disappear between sea and sky.

Like much of Canaletto’s art his skies read well but, closely inspected, are pure stage backdrop.

The artist turns out to be a more complex and haunted figure than we knew. No wonder historical opinion has been so divided.

Great observers of art like John Ruskin and Henry James held him in contempt. Great artists like Whistler and Turner admired him.

In a difference of opinion between observers and artists, always go with the artists. They’ve got the eye.

Canaletto was, at worst, interestingly uneven. At best, he got the complexities of Venice down to include the impressions of the happy tourist, the carnival fantasy of the privileged, the gouging practicality of the merchant and the decadent weirdness witnessed by Thomas Mann.