Canaletto was born in Venice in 1697, the year after Tiepolo. His father Bernard Canal was also a painter (hence his son Giovanni being given the diminutive of the family name). The young Canaletto would receive his initial training in his father’s studio, which specialised in painting theatrical scenery for opera – a form that in many ways echoed the style that Canaletto himself would raise to the highest level. Sometime in his early twenties Canaletto travelled to Rome, where he was particularly struck by the street scenes (which were in certain ways an evident novelty to a Venetian). This inspired in him an interest in painting urban landscape, and on his return to Venice he began producing scenes of life in the streets of his own city. Initially these tended towards depictions of ordinary back-street, back-canal life – such as his early masterpiece The Stonemason’s Yard, painted between 1726 and 1730. This includes several small but realistic figures, as well as sheets hanging out to dry from the windows and a general sense of the shabbiness that characterised the more typical life lived by ordinary citizens behind the tourist façade. In such scenes his paintings became a symphony of muted colours, with precise renderings of peeling stucco walls and shabby balconies, and glimpses of the familiar towers and spires far away across the rooftops beneath faded skies. At this early stage it was the play and juxtaposition of surfaces that he sought to convey, as much as the image itself.
At the same time, he also began producing pictures of the better-known sights and grand events for which the city was famous. Typical of these was his 1732 work The Return of the Bucintoro to the Molo on Ascension Day, with the great golden hulk of the doge’s barge, along with the Doge’s Palace, the Campanile and Sansovino’s Library in the background, all conveyed with meticulous attention to detail, forming a play of different textures. As one critic put it, ‘He paints with such accuracy and cunning that the eye is deceived and truly believes it is reality it sees, not a painting.’ However, as Canaletto’s biographer J.G. Links perceptively observed of the artist’s work at this juncture, ‘They were pictures painted in Venice, rather than pictures of Venice; pictorial quality always took precedence over topographical accuracy.’ The emphasis on precise verisimilitude came later, though even then Canaletto frequently ‘remodelled’ the scenes for proportional effect.
Canaletto’s paintings soon began to attract the attention of rich buyers, mostly tourists, and he quickly outshone his established competitors who supplied this lucrative market. However, when it came to the actual sale of his works there were often difficulties. By all accounts Canaletto was not an easy man to get along with. He would remain a bachelor, and continued to live in the modest family apartment where he had been born. Although his creative output was high, even higher demand meant that delivery was not always certain; on occasion he would accept advances for commissions he could not fulfil on time, requiring a third party to sort out the consequent misunderstandings. He was soon commissioned to produce works for the agent Owen McSwiney, a gregarious Irishman based in London, who wrote of Canaletto:
The fellow is whimsical, and vary’s and his prices, every day: and he that has Mind to have any of his Work, must not seem to be too fond of it, for he’l be ye. worse treated for it, both in the price, & in the painting too.
He has more work that he can doe, in any reasonable time, and well.
McSwiney may have been an amiable character, yet unfortunately for Canaletto he developed the habit of going bankrupt. It was thus lucky that around this time Canaletto came into personal contact with the Englishman Joseph Smith, who resided in Venice for many decades. Smith was a collector-cum-artists’-agent, who purchased all manner of objets d’art and bric-a-brac for himself, as well as buying up paintings for trans-shipment to London, where they would be sold on to wealthy clients, many of whom had passed through Venice on their Grand Tour. Smith was not a pleasant man, being regarded by those who met him as a bumptious, egotistical snob – one contemporary even going so far as to describe him as ‘literally eaten up with vanity’. But although he may have been essentially self-serving in his dealings, Smith was also a man of perceptive taste and business acumen, all of which worked to Canaletto’s advantage.
It was now that Canaletto began adapting his style to something approaching a production method, although in the hands of such a skilled artist this seldom worked to his detriment. Figures may have been reduced to mere stylised occupants of their urban landscape, and the water of the canals to an opaque opalescent surface decorated with repetitive caricature wavelets, but the stone, stucco and facades of the city retained a masterly detail and perspective. This was certainly recognised by his competitors, who paid Canaletto the tribute of flooding the market with poor forgeries of his work.
Then suddenly the bottom fell out of the market, as Europe descended into war and the flood of English and other tourists dried up. In 1740 Charles VI, the Emperor of Austria, died without an immediate male heir, having stipulated that his daughter Maria Theresa should ascend to the imperial throne. By this stage the Hapsburg Austrian Empire straggled over vast territories of central Europe, from Translyvania (part of modern Romania) in the south-east to Silesia (part of modern Poland) in the north-west, as well as the Duchy of Milan and other territories in northern Italy. Frederick the Great of Prussia decided to use the accession of Maria Theresa as an excuse for marching into Silesia, thus beginning the War of the Austrian Succession; and in 1744 France, which supported Prussia, declared war on Britain. Despite suffering heavy defeats during the war, the Austrians managed to retain their northern-Italian territories. For the time being, Venice remained protected by its powerful northern ally.
Canaletto continued to eke out a living during the early years of the war, but when Britain entered the fray it became evident that his career in Venice was over. By now Joseph Smith had been appointed British consul, having characteristically recommended himself to the Foreign Office in London as a ‘middling genius’. Despite the international situation, Smith still did his best to promote Canaletto’s ailing career; and when the Campanile was struck by lightning on 23 April 1745, Smith regarded it as a promising omen. This was St George’s Day, that of the patron saint of England, and Smith decided that Canaletto should try his luck in England. He then arranged (through contact with McSwiney) for Canaletto to travel to London, where a number of lucrative commissions were set up in advance.
Canaletto arrived in 1746 in England, where he would remain for the next nine years. This proved something of a disaster. Although he would paint some fine scenes, mainly of London and its environs, his clients became disappointed with his treatment of the dull English light and the sheer size of the city. They still expected the translucent qualities and immediacy of his Venetian scenes. This appears to have plunged Canaletto into a form of depression that caused his abilities to deteriorate. What had previously been artfully stylised now degenerated into uninspired copies. The plain banality of Westminster Bridge and the Lord Mayor’s barge were as nothing beside the grace of the Rialto Bridge and the gilded magnificence of the Bucintoro. Indeed, things reached such a pitch that Canaletto was accused of being an imposter, and was forced to submit to the humiliation of a public demonstration of his abilities. During a lull in the European wars in 1755 the fifty-eight-year-old Canaletto returned to Venice for good.* In 1763 he was elected to the recently formed Venetian Academy (having been turned down just a few months previously). He continued painting, often working from old sketches that he had made years previously, often repeating popular scenes. The glory days were over, and he is said to have lived a life of some austerity, finally dying in 1768 in the very apartment where he had been born seventy years previously.
By now, Canaletto’s pupil Francesco Guardi had taken over his mantle as the painter of Venice, but this was no longer such a great honour and certainly did not promise riches. On the contrary: according to Links, ‘Guardi was known to have been so poor that he had bought defective canvases and used wretched priming and, to save time, very oily c
olours.’ Worse still was to come: in the last years of his life Guardi was even reduced to selling his canvases in the Piazza San Marco, at a spot by the Campanile and the Doge’s Palace. Here he would set up his easel so that spectators could watch him drawing sketches and painting small landscapes for sale as souvenirs.
A Venetian writer who would travel even further afield than Canaletto was Lorenzo Da Ponte, who will be renowned for ever for his operatic collaboration with Mozart. Amongst the picaresque details of Da Ponte’s life and oft-changing fortunes, his Venetian origins (and escapades) are sometimes overlooked. In fact, Da Ponte was very much a man who reflected the time and place in which he spent the first thirty years of his life. He was born in 1749 in the Venetian mainland territory some forty miles north of the city at Ceneda (now known as Vittorio Veneto), the son of a local tanner. Both his father and his mother (who would die in childbirth when he was five) were Jewish, but in this small provincial town they suffered fewer restrictions than their compatriots in Venice. Even so, they were far from fully integrated, having to return at night to their tiny ghetto in the old quarter, with the men being required to wear red berets and the women red headscarves when they travelled. According to Da Ponte’s not-always-reliable memoirs written in his later years, even as a child ‘I had a lively manner and a ready wit, but most of all I had an insatiable curiosity and wished to know everything, which soon gained me a reputation for a great memory and exceptional ability.’ His father hired a tutor, but one day his father unexpectedly entered the room:
to find the schoolmaster, a peasant’s son who had exchanged the ox and plough for the teacher’s ferule, yet retained the boorish demeanour of his birth … clouting me about the head with his clenched fist for making a mistake in a Latin lesson. My father seized the teacher by the hair and dragged him around the room, before flinging him downstairs, followed by inkwell, pens and Latin primer. And for the next few years there was no more talk in our house of Latin.
Even so, Da Ponte discovered a collection of forgotten books in the attic, and seems to have spent his time reading and rereading these. Amongst them was a book of poems by the Rome-born lyric poet and librettist Pietro Metastasio, who had achieved fame in Vienna where he was Poet Laureate to the imperial court. Da Ponte was enchanted by Metastasio’s work, claiming ‘It produced in me precisely the same feeling as music’ He would soon begin attempting poetry of his own.
When he was fourteen the family converted to Roman Catholicism, whereupon he shed his Jewish name, Emanuele Conegliano, taking on the name of the priest who baptised him, Monsignor Lorenzo Da Ponte, Bishop of Ceneda. However, the real reason for this conversion was so that his forty-one-year-old father could marry a local sixteen-year-old Christian girl. Only two years younger than his stepmother, Da Ponte quickly felt the need to leave home, hinting suggestively, ‘I foresaw what the consequences of such an unbalanced marriage would be.’ He entered the local seminary to obtain an education, but this also involved training to become a priest and he was ordained in 1773. The psychological pointers from his childhood did not augur well for his choice of vocation.
After he was assigned to a teaching post at a seminary in Treviso, he took the opportunity of making trips to Venice. Here he called at bookshops and visited one of the early coffee houses that were springing up in the city: the Caffe Menagazzo, often called the Caffe dei Letterati, where writers such as Carlo Gozzi and his brother Gasparo, the leading critic, would gather. It may have been here that Da Ponte made friends with another famous Venetian who also had literary ambitions, but had already achieved his Europe-wide fame in another sphere, namely Giacomo Casanova. And it was now that Da Ponte’s life began to take on a remarkable resemblance to that of his new friend. The tall, slim priest with the distinguished features and aquiline nose, who did not always wear his robes when in town, soon began attracting amorous attention. During the weeks of Carnival he entered into the spirit of the occasion, donning a mask – and quickly found himself becoming embroiled in a series of sexual adventures with a number of women, often under circumstances resembling a French farce. No one seemed to mind that he was a priest, nor did the good-looking young man of the cloth seem to care that many of the women with whom he became involved were married. At one point, he fell in love with Angiola Tiepolo, a member of the ancient noble family, though the branch to which she belonged no longer had any money. He described her as ‘one of the most beautiful and one of the most neurotic women in the city’. The latter point he learned to his cost – despite being in love, Da Ponte still found time for other affairs, which provoked Angiola to fits of jealousy. Only now did he learn that her behaviour had driven her first husband to flee their marriage and take refuge by becoming a priest. Angiola’s jealous rages knew no bounds. At one point she hurled a heavy inkstand at him, damaging his hand so that he was unable to write for a month; on another she came at him with a knife and tried to stab him; and on a number of occasions she resorted to hiding his clothes so that he could not leave the house.
Yet in the end he always had to return to Treviso and resume his teaching post at the seminary. Here he eventually decided to forswear love and concentrate instead on his literary endeavours. Even so, his long days amidst the provincial boredom of Treviso soon began driving him to distraction. One of his duties at the seminary was to compose a series of Latin and Italian poems to be recited by his pupils before the bishop at the local festival. Mediocrity and pious sentiments were the expected order of the day, but Da Ponte unwisely gave way to his true inspiration, writing a series of verses celebrating a life of freedom from the oppression of ordered society:
I long to live and sing
Without envying even a king,
Yet the law pummels my head
Making me earn my daily bread.
This was 1776: the American colonies had declared their independence from the British; meanwhile in France, Rousseau’s inflammatory ideas on the ‘natural freedom of life’, coupled with Voltaire’s demands for civil liberties, were fomenting talk of revolution. Such ideas were anathema to the ossified oligarchy of Venice and the heavy hand of the Catholic Church. Unfortunately for Da Ponte, the festive recital by his pupils was attended not only by the bishop, but also by the local chief magistrate. Both religion and the Law were outraged.
The twenty-seven-year-old Da Ponte affected indifference to the ensuing scandal, which quickly spread to Venice. Soon the city was split on the issue – the literati championed Da Ponte’s noble cause, while the authorities were determined that he should be punished. Da Ponte’s case was taken to the Senate, where he was defended by Gasparo Gozzi no less, who ironically had once held the post of state censor, yet now insisted that Da Ponte ‘was a young man of talent, who should be encouraged’. The authorities were not convinced, and Da Ponte was publicly reprimanded, stripped of his post at the seminary in Treviso and forbidden for life from holding any teaching post within the Republic of Venice.
Seemingly undaunted, he now embarked upon an even more scandalous period in his life. He took up residence in Venice and was appointed priest at the church of San Luca, in the crowded district north of the Piazza San Marco. Da Ponte found accommodation in a nearby lodging house, and here he fell for the second great love of his life, a duplicitous and disreputable woman named Anzoletta Bellaudi, who was also married.* This time the boot was on the other foot, and it was Da Ponte who was driven to bouts of extreme jealousy by the behaviour of his beloved, who not only still lived in the same house as her husband, but was also notorious for her wanton adventures. According to Da Ponte’s biographer, Sheila Hodges, ‘marriage did not stop her from taking lovers, and even in church she was observed to be engaged in mutual fondling of the most intimate kind with any young man who caught her fancy’. Meanwhile her husband was conducting an affair with a local girl, and took to placing his secret messages to her in the hands of the trustworthy young priest living in his house.
Although Da Ponte was now living a life tha
t would not have been out of place in an opera buffa, he had yet to try his hand as a librettist. He still concentrated on poetry, and although he remained clearly influenced by Metastasio, Goldoni and Carlo Gozzi, he was gradually beginning to forge a voice of his own, developing a rare facility for extemporising witty verse, yet at the same time writing more serious poems that expressed his liberal political views. It was now that he became a close friend of Caterino Mazzola, possibly through their mutual friend Casanova. Mazzola was just four years older than Da Ponte, and he was already beginning to establish himself as a librettist; indeed, they may even have discussed opera plots at the Caffe dei Letterati.
Da Ponte was still besotted with Anzoletta Bellaudi, but nevertheless resorted to his old ways, making several amorous conquests, who resented his continuing close attachment to her. This came to a head when three of Da Ponte’s lovers set upon Anzoletta with knives, and her life was only saved by Da Ponte’s swift intervention. As his life became ever more liberal, so did the ideas that he expressed in his poetry:
Always remember the Republic
Belongs only to the public,
To everyone
And to no one.
It is a man’s right to call
For justice for one and all.
This was dangerously subversive. Yet the authorities were well aware that in the prevailing political climate prosecuting Da Ponte for expressing such views would only stir up a hornets’ nest. The influence of Rousseau and Voltaire had led many intellectuals to espouse such views, to which the authorities preferred to turn a blind eye. Da Ponte would have to be silenced by other means and, given his lifestyle, these were not difficult to find. Someone (almost certainly a relative of Anzoletta, who was related to the chief prosecutor’s chef) was persuaded to lodge a secret denounciation of Da Ponte for immoral behaviour.
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