CAPRICCI by Thomas Mira y Lopez
Midmorning, the oils mixed, the canal clear and alive with chatter, the painter sits down to his veduta. He lays pen and ink beside him in case he needs a quick sketch – quills for the soft lines, metal points for the sharp. It will be a simple scene: the Rialto Bridge spanning the Grand Canal, the Basilica of Vicenza and Palazzo Chiericati on either side. Already the painter can pinpoint what will fall into his view, what will background and sell his work to the English patrons who trek the Grand Tour across the continent. He used to be a scenographer after all, a designer of opera sets just like his father. And so those seagulls swarming upon a mess of nets, picking at something not-quite-dead, not-quite alive – they must go. Same for the shade cast over the water by that colonnade; he’ll scale that back a bit and replace it with light. He has always preferred, in any case, painting sunlight to water. But the dozen or so people peppering the scene, the figures who assume other shapes in the distance – the robed pear standing by the side of the stairs; the gondolier upright like a mantis, punting his extra leg of an oar – these he will keep. These are his drama.
Venice: View with Palladio’s Design for the Rialto Bridge
The tourist would like to take a brief vacation. He would like to see everyone from a different angle. Don’t we all need to get away from ourselves sometimes? He looks at the people before him and decides that the robed man next to the bridge’s stairs – most likely a priest – resembles not just a pear, but a bell. And that the white-stockinged gentleman in front of the canal has the legs of a crane. But the pose of each – or at least this is what it seems like to the tourist – reminds him most of the conduttores on the train he took from Rome to Venice. One drearily trudges down the corridor in midnight blue, tapping his fingernails on the seatbacks as he passes; the other crosses his arms in impatience as the tourist fumbles for his ticket, for his admission to scene and city.
The year is 1745, it is unsurprisingly sunny in Venice, and the painter is Giovanni Antonio Canal. He goes by Canaletto, “the little canal,” the diminutive given to the painter of water channels and son of Bernardo (the Big, the Pappa, the Grand) Canal. Canaletto paints vedute, landscapes and cityscapes, and his large-scale work ranks at the forefront of Venetian vedutistis.
Whistler would say that “Canaletto could paint a white house against a white cloud.” The American so loved the Venetian’s level of detail that when he visited the National Gallery in London, he went at once to “smell the Canalettos.” Pressed to explain his popularity, other critics put it more simply: Canaletto could make the sun shine in his pictures. True, he couldn’t do much with water – “chain mail laid over marble,” sniped one – but he paid special attention to mortar and stone, the coto belo chiaro and cenerin of gray-cobbled Venice. And who needed water when one could imagine a sky so uniformly blue that no tint or gild of sun seemed possible? So blue that his early commissions were always delayed until his patrons complained, threatening to leave him for a Piranesi in Rome, and the painter replied with demands for more time, whingeing on about the price of Prussian blue, that essential yet expensive pigment, the one color needed to finish off his masterful, scumbled skies and capture the real thing. Canaletto perfected a type of painting where the central unifier was hidden in broad daylight. He painted sunlight without the sun. He made what was present appear absent.
View of the Piazzetta
The tourist is soaking it in. How the sun shines from everywhere! The air smells faintly of sardines but no matter. There in the distance, a heavy white sail hangs from the boom of a barge – oh how it reminds him of the sheets his mother used to drape over the shower rod! He remembers bunching the heavy wet linens in a corner so that the showerhead would not spray them. How wonderful that everything has correspondence and similarity and analogy. The tourist is content. Today he will see the Grand Canal, today he will touch Murano glass.
Before he sets to work, Canaletto consults the sketches that came before. He rifles through his papers in the midmorning air and runs his hand over the brown ink’s crosshatches.
Canaletto is painting a still life, but he’s also painting a city. That’s one of the difficulties of the vedutisti. He must calm the commotion, let it stand as frozen but about to thaw, count the untold steps about to be taken. He is an efficient worker, over 585 paintings in his lifetime, but he must first have everything laid out in front of him. And so what does he do with those figures to his right, the group of men lounging by the wharf, passing back and forth a bottle of white, the sunlight glinting off the glass? Does he keep them or cut them out? What do they discuss so early in the day?
Whatever he decides, he wants his painting to appear timeless. His admirers marvel that Canaletto styled a Venice “closer to the celestial city of Revelation . . . pure gold, like unto clear glass.” That is, he depicted a city that was not just timeless but at any and all time, a city whose tourists can imagine themselves to be anywhere. Stroll through any first-rate metropolis, his critics say – a Paris, New York, or London – and sooner or later you will round the corner and come upon some aspect of a scene that will remind you so completely, so uncannily, of a Canaletto.
Grand Canal: Looking East from the Campo S. Vio
The tourist is drunk. All that thought about his mother hanging sheets has made him homesick. The corner store – he does not know the name for it, but calls it a bodega – has a chalk sign advertising a liter of wine for three euros. It is too good to pass up and he has just finished two liters of Nestle Pure Life. He fills the bottle up with white wine from the keg and finds his friend and they go and sit on a high bench by the Grand Canal. Their legs dangle. They drink the wine quickly because the sun is out and warm white wine has the faint taste of eggs, and he and his friend pretend they are the statues of fish in fountains and try to arc wine from their mouths onto the backs of pigeons that pass beneath their feet.
Yet those critics must be losing their minds! New York, Paris, London. How can Canaletto’s work pass for anywhere but Venice? Start in the 1720s and venture on and his paintings sell well enough that Canaletto’s name rings as synonymous with his city. When his nephew the painter Bernardo Bellotto sold his own work abroad, he signed his canvases with his uncle’s name to fetch a higher price. And the art collector William Beckford professed upon visiting Venice, “I have no terms to describe the variety of pillars, pediments, mouldings, and cornices that adorn these edifices, of which the pencil of Canaletti conveys so perfect an idea as to render all verbal descriptions superfluous.” Canaletto’s views became Cicerone to his city. Travelers experienced Venice through his eyes and Canaletto through their experience of Venice.
Although, just a moment please: Do these travelers and tourists see what Canaletto himself saw, or what he wanted them to see? Does it matter?
When it comes down to it, we do not know how he actually viewed his city. We only know how he thought his city should be viewed, which is to say how he thought it should be sold.
Capriccio: An Island in the Lagoon with a Gateway and a Church
Once he is drunk and the sun is setting and his friend returns to the hotel to meet the others, the tourist starts to feel romantic and so he ogles the pretty, passing girls. He imagines them aristocrats, the great-granddaughters of the Medici, wanderers of ruined villas. How much like sculpture, how beautiful! The men are not so bad, as well. On the way back to the hotel, he decides to get lost – a true Venetian experience, his guidebook tells him. Who knows, perhaps he will meet someone from long ago? Anyone, that is, to quell his loneliness and lend credence to the unreality in which he’s washed up.
In 1745, Canaletto is one of only a handful of painters working from direct observation – he gondolas to a certain spot and records what he sees – and so it becomes easy to substitute one of his vedute for a view of actual Venice, to assign it documentary accuracy.
But Canaletto also paints capriccios. If his vedute were the idealized made realistic, then capriccios were fantasy rendered believable, fiction turned non. Capriccio: a subset of land and cityscape painting in which the painter inserts some architectural invention – an archaeological ruin, an imagined assembly of buildings – into the supposed reality of the present day scene. An alternative way of imagining a city, raw topographic material granted pictorial license. Canaletto believed in the artist’s right to modify and redesign facts in the interest of creating a picture. So look again at where we started. The Grand Canal, the Rialto Bridge, the palazzo, and basilica? Fantasy. Pure Palladian fantasy. Canaletto is depicting not the actual Rialto, but a never-realized plan to replace the existing structure, a project designed by good old Andrea Palladio, the 16th-century architect and classicist. As for the Palazzo Chiericati and Basilica Palladiana, those are landmarks belonging to the city of Vicenza, 60 kilometers to the west.
If by hiding the sun in broad daylight, Canaletto made what was present appear absent, then the capriccio, well . . . absence becomes presence. Nostalgia springs magically back into the fold and whimsy forms solid architecture.
Capriccio: A Palladian Design for the Rialto Bridge with Buildings at Vicenza
The tourist walks around the city and sees what he wants to see. He projects long-lost faces onto anonymous strangers. Often he pauses on his walks along the canal banks, the side streets so narrow and filled with shade, and watches a father punting his son down the channel and says to himself, “Oh, if only that were me.”
Canaletto’s popularity came at some expense. John Ruskin, that stale old fart, steamrolled him in a diatribe that cemented the painter’s reputation for years: “The mannerism of Canaletto is the most degraded I know in the whole range of art. Professing the most servile and mindless imitation, it imitates nothing but the blackness of the shadow. Let it be observed that I find no fault with Canaletto for his want of poetry, of feeling, of artistical thoughtfulness in treatment. He professes nothing but coloured daguerreotypeism, no virtue except that of dexterous imitation of commonplace light and shade.”
Note the points on which Ruskin wants to skewer Canaletto: “mindless imitation,” “commonplace light and shade,” “daguerreotypism.” As if Canaletto were only aiming – and failing – at documentary photography. As if art and invention belonged to another figure entirely.
Yet what if Ruskin has a point? Take Canaletto out of Venice and even that dexterous imitation falls apart. The painter moves to London in 1746 and the quality of his work drops so dramatically that the art world accuses him of being an impostor. The public demands he give a painting demonstration to prove he is who he says he is. He so loses his knack for translation – no longer able to make of the English evening the silver and saffron of a Canaletto sunset – that the answer can only be that he’s no longer himself.
Though if we speak of the man himself, the hidden unifier, the arranger, we beg the question: who was Canaletto actually?
Nighttime Celebration outside the Church of San Pietro di Castello
The tourist goes to an inexpensive bar with his friends, stands outside, smokes Gauloises, and drinks too many Peronis. The bar’s not actually so inexpensive because he forgets to convert his euros into dollars. He and his friends buy a bottle of limoncello and drink it by the water and try to lift a smart car from the street onto the curb. They fail. At the hotel, the tourist wanders into a back room and pees in the corner. He tries to stack a number of wine glasses into a pyramid, but the pyramid falls down, and the glasses break. He sits on a balcony, nursing his cut hand, and kicks his legs out over the street. He didn’t expect this, but he is homesick. What does it mean to be homesick, when one can be anywhere? Two of his friends stand next to him and make out. He falls asleep in the bathtub.
What we know: That he was born in 1697. That his first signed and dated work was a capriccio. That his personality was, according to a Swedish count, ”fantasque, bourru, Baptistise” – temperamental, abrupt, clownish – but that this was perhaps a misconception his middlemen spread – the Joseph Smiths and Owen McSwineys of the world – men who knew the value of the blue and gold they had on their hands. That by 1755, Canaletto so tired of London he returned to Venice. That, at the same time, no record of him exists between 1755 and 1760 so that he might not have returned to Venice after all. That Bernardo Bellotto had good reason for signing Canaletto’s name on his own work because he painted some of his uncle’s vedute. That Canaletto’s father painted some as well. That Tiepolo quite possibly painted his figures. That although Whistler said of his paintings “here you will find no uncertainty,” the public painting demonstration proved very well warranted all the same. That in 1760 a young Englishman and his tutor saw a “little man painting” in a Venetian square. That the little man invited them back to his studio where he sold them a view of London. That this little man was most likely Canaletto. That his paintings so inexplicably deteriorated in quality after 1756 that Joseph Smith could sell only one more. That Canaletto wasn’t elected to the Venetian Academy until 1763 since a simple landscape painter was considered inferior to history and portrait painters. That when he was elected, he was expected to provide the Academy a painting, but that it took him – fantasque, bourru, Baptistise – over three years to submit something. That he submitted a capriccio. That his last signed and dated work ended with the boast: Anni 68, Cenza Oculi. Aged 68, Without Spectacles. That this was 1766. That two years later on April 19th, 1768, Canaletto would die at seven in the evening from a fever. That he left behind some old clothes, a few household goods, and 28 small and medium pictures of which nothing is known. That his assets were listed as a small property and 80 pounds sterling. That this was not very much for a supposedly prudent and stingy bachelor after 585 paintings in a lifetime. That Canaletto never married, never had any children. That he had very few friends. That he was, by all accounts, all alone. That the people in his paintings were almost always anonymous. That in his only known self-portrait, he appears as a miniature man in blue, a cow looking over his shoulder, as he sits and stares at the viewer, brush in hand. That he treats himself the way he treats his hastily thrown together figures – a man so unknown he could be anyone, though he just happens to be himself.
A View of Old Walton Bridge
The tourist doesn’t really see Venice. Escape becomes cityscape. Fantasy scumbles over the scene like a coat of pricey, Prussian blue.
But the more the tourist looks for others in these scenes, for replacements of the figures lost from his life, the more he realizes he won’t find them. Oh why can’t these anonymous figures become the faces he knows, the faces that have left him on his own? The tourist is afraid the only person he’ll find is himself. He wants a vacation, but the part of him that wants it is the part of him he wants to forget.
After he saw the capriccio of Palladio’s bridge, basilica, and palazzo, Aldo Rossi, the 20th-century Italian architect, wrote that Canaletto created “an analogous Venice.” He fashioned a scene as “if he had reproduced an actual townscape,” a city “that we recognize, even though it is a place of purely architectural references.”
In other words, Rossi asked a question: It looks like Venice, but why?
For him, Canaletto gave life to an alternative yet functional city, one “of geographical transposition.” The capriccio acknowledges the paths a city never takes and so presents a scene that assumes its counterpart’s shape – a fantasy to chameleon or ghost itself onto the real, just as Canaletto washed and shaded over his early drafts of a veduta.
The realization thrilled Rossi: “I believe I have found in this definition a different sense of history, conceived of not simply as fact, but rather as a series of things, of affective objects to be used by the memory or in a design.”
A city as a series of the hypothetical, the what might have been. A city as a space for memory to use, to wander, to pick a trail through unspoken words and unchosen paths. Yet also a space for design, a space to blueprint future forms. Either way, a fantasy – the re-imagined past or posited future – what Rossi called “an analogical representation that could not have been expressed in words.”
And so perhaps this lends a bit of credence to those critics who argue that if we walked through a Canaletto, we would be reminded of any city. Not just Venice, but Paris, New York, London. Because really Canaletto does not paint cities. He paints possibilities for them.
Rio dei Mendicanti: Looking South
The tourist wakes up the next morning with a hangover. The Venetian sun! Does it ever stop shining? He looks out the back window and sees laundry hanging on the line. He starts to think of his mother back home alone and his father as well, until he notices that he can’t read any of the logos on the drying t‑shirts. He checks his contact case and then the trash, but they are both empty and he blinks many times in quick succession until he feels an itch behind his eyelids. His contacts must have done that thing where they travel up into his head. He sighs. He forgot his glasses as well. People will become blurs and he will go the rest of the day hoping the lens settle back over his eyes so that he can see the sights once again.
And yet what of the people? If Canaletto created an analogous Venice through its architecture, what did he do for the figures he hatched and crosshatched? Do they form the texture of an alternative city as well, replete with their own fantasies to play out? Do they trace their own analogous lives out and around the corner of Canaletto’s cityscapes?
There is, of course, no real answer to this.
In the painter’s early work, Michael Levey writes that Canaletto treats “people as people.” They are “lively and individual, not mere puppets or a garnish to the solid meat of architecture. His pictures are rich in variety of costume, and even more in variety of action and characters – from boatmen to beggars, via Turks, Jews and priests, servant girls, noblemen, workmen, ladies and children.”
But not so in Canaletto’s later output. He peoples these with “figured stereotypes” (although what is the above quote, one itches to ask, if not a list of exactly that?) and reduces his characters to components within a composition, as replicable as windows in a façade. One needs imagine only the minute, hair’s-width golden ratio spiraled microscopically into the background of Whitehall and the Privy Garden from Richmond House to realize figures have become deftly placed forms: they are hieroglyphs, a shorthand of blobs and squiggles. Shapes without clear identity. Architecture. In other words, they cater to what people who have never been to one of Canaletto’s cities expect to see. Their roles are open, their histories belong to anyone.
Detail of Whitehall and the Privy Garden from Richmond House
The tourist walks to a nearby laundromat. His friends still sleep. He wants a place to rest and nods off in a chair by the dryers. When he wakes up, he decides to walk to the station and take the train back to Rome. Without his contacts, he has trouble reading the street signs and can’t recognize the buildings he passed last night. It is as if, the tourist thinks, he woke up in another city. He eats McDonalds in the train station. He licks his fingers and walks to the platform but runs into his friends there. They are going for a cappuccino and cornetto and convince him to spend another day.
It wasn’t just the capriccios. Nearly every one of Canaletto’s paintings utilized some degree of invention and underwent some manipulation at his hand. He was the plastic surgeon of 18th-century Venice, the nip/tuck of colonnades and piazze. He hid and rearranged buildings, lengthened and shortened sunlight and shadows as he pleased, blew distance up or dialed it down. He believed, once again, in the “artistic right to modify, move, and rearrange those facts in the interest of creating a picture.”
Canaletto painted both what was there and what would be better off there, the large-scale logic founded upon the detailed lie. He fashioned the idealized into the believable, won that “old victory of arrangement over accumulation,” as Susan Sontag puts it. So that when a critic says that Canaletto “perceives a serene ordered structure of universal significance” – in a city’s fluted columns and arcades or its rows of rounded stone-set windows – that perception implies a good deal of 18th-century airbrushing.
Although a question wiggles its way in here: Isn’t there some complicity in all this? Doesn’t the age – the viewer, the tourist, the eye – desire deception? Don’t we want exactly what Canaletto gives us? To be able to forget, to be able to sigh and wish for a place and people that don’t exist?
Piazza San Marco
The tourist has rallied himself and taken a boat to the Murano islands, walked the arcades at Piazza San Marco, crossed the Bridge of Sighs, and stopped in a cybercafé to write two emails. He tries to speak to the waiter at the trattoria where he eats lunch, but doesn’t know enough of the language to make it past come vai and di dove é. He takes photographs and decides, when he arrives home again, he will make a gallery of the pictures. In both emails, he uses the phrase: “I feel as if I’m seeing the real Venice.” The tourist has found in this declaration a different and alternative sense of history.
The painter puts the old drafts away and selects a fresh piece of paper. He stretches, rubs his hands, sips his muddy Venetian coffee. The sun comes out from behind a momentary cloud. And just like that Canaletto begins his sketch, his scaraboti, his quick crosshatch and etch. He slides out drafting compass to help round the basilica’s domes, stretches his ruler flat to outline the square. He chalks a few figures on the ground – the blurry bellflower of a doge’s robe, the sweep down with the flat of a pen to curve a sailor’s falling sash.
And then, once this is done, he arranges his oils. He paints from strength to weakness: first the sky, softened to a duller glow; then the buildings, worked up with impasto, layer upon layer of paint to bring sculpture to the canvas; then the water, so viscous and oily that the joke is he discovered pollution before it ever had the chance to reach Venice; and finally the figures, those shapely ornaments to dot and fill a plane.
Except, of course, none of this is true. Or rather, the process is true, but the location is just another caprice. Canaletto did make rough sketches on scene, but the chances of his painting out of doors are nothing more than wishful thinking. A misconception spread by Alessandro Marchesini, his first agent, to serve as selling point. Much like the tourist, Canaletto was never actually there. He painted from points of view – fifteen feet, say, above the Grand Canal – that were impossible to inhabit. And so one more thing to add to the list of unknowns: how did he achieve a position that required fantasy to embody? We don’t know how he was able to see what he saw (with such detail! with such precision!), much less where he stood to begin with.
The Grand Canal and the Church of the Salute
The tourist takes a train back to Rome that night. His headache is gone. He lies down across his row of seats and bunches his jacket up beneath his head. He puts on his headphones. The conduttore makes a squiggle on his ticket and he mouths grazie. He closes his eyes and listens to music. The train makes many stops and at each one he opens his eyes and watches a few people file off. Then the train makes a stop and doesn’t start again. The lights turn off. He sits up, takes his earbuds out. The engine turns off. A car is decabled. He looks around and doesn’t see anyone. He runs to the end of the car and peers through the glass, then runs to the other end of the car and does the same. He cups his hands and looks out the window onto his own reflection. Then he moves his head closer and looks out again. He sees black. He sees no one else there.
Canaletto also used (and here Ruskin’s cries of “mindless imitation” and “daguerreotypism” echo briefly) a camera obscura. It allowed him to frame a scene from multiple perspectives at once, to sketch and sew together a view more expansive than the one offered by reality. Visit his scenes and you will find no single point that encompasses their arrangement of buildings and water.
Although this shouldn’t constitute too much of a surprise: Canaletto was the son of an opera set designer, after all. Flights of fancy constitute the norm.
What if then we thought of Canaletto as trained not so much to insert fantasy into reality, but reality into fantasy? If everyone believes the capriccio substitutes for the real thing, then does that captured city somehow become more representative of Venice than Venice itself? Is the city that can’t be seen – the city that requires some analogy or manufactured perspective to bring it into existence – any less real than the city that can?
And is the person who can’t be seen any less real than the person who can, than the anonymous figures the tourist decides to place meaning upon?
The Piazza San Marco Looking South and West
The tourist pries open the car doors and walks back along the tracks. He passes solitary, detached cars. He’s in a refueling station, he recognizes, but it looks like a train graveyard. He’s outside a city, but he’s not sure which one. Up ahead, a light shines from a single train car. He crosses the tracks and approaches it. Three men in uniforms gather there. Two lean against the car’s side and the third sits on the steps. The tourist waves and says Ciao. The seated man stands up and walks down a step. Then he walks down the rest and stands with the others. The light pools. The tourist sees the men in close‑up, he sees their faces as fully as he can see another’s face. They look at him and wait. His hands fumble again for his ticket. He realizes he has walked into someone else’s chance arrangement, that he’s now at the mercy of another’s whimsy, that he’s become a figure to invent. More practically, he realizes that, never having bothered to learn the language, he has no idea how to tell these men who he really is. He realizes he doesn’t even know the words to say “I am lost,” much less to explain that he never knew where he was to begin with.
But let us end on a high note. The Stonemason’s Yard is Canaletto at his finest, the perfect balance between his early and more developed styles. The painting bustles with life and the suggestions of the small everyday narratives that take place within the anonymous characters and activities of a city. A small pantsless boy urinates in the foreground; a woman leans out her second-story balcony to whip a sheet through the air. Note how easily the eye is led across the water to the tower of the Carita across the way. Whistler compared this painting to Velasquez; even Ruskin admired it, admitting to a “determined depreciation” of Canaletto on his part.
On the left-hand side of the painting, there’s a breadth of alleyway, a slight shiver of light across the water to the left of the Carita. Here, Canaletto “suggests the continuous, unfolding, and ever-alluring experience of the city.” He hints at what’s just out of sight, the next turn around the corner, the ever expanding Venice, all the paths the viewer cannot take. One is tempted to use Canaletto as map and compass, to stitch all his views and angles together to form one grand city of analogies, a city in which one can walk around the corner of one scene and into the next. The experiment would fail, of course – you would find yourself in a city of gaps and lacunae, of hopeless doublings and overlay, an architectural chimera or worse, a Frankenstein as disordered and jumbled and prone to blackout as memory, as the attempts to strip together the life of an unseen eye. We must not lose ourselves. That “serene ordered structure” of his – one needs to privilege or impose something just to make it back home at the end of the day. So we must content ourselves with the limits and edges of Canaletto’s paintings and leave those other cities to him. We will abandon him then, to pack up his pens and paper at the end of the day and make his lonely walk back home to the solitude no one knows about, out of the picture, out of Venice, out of Canaletto, somewhere and someone else entirely.
The Stonemason’s Yard
There are other times, stumbling around a corner, the afternoon sun nowhere to be seen, a shopping bag of souvenirs from Chinatown and Canal Street clinking against his leg, snowglobes and keychains and a 5x8 Venetian watercolor nestled together, when the bifocals are lifted, the contacts settle back in, and the tourist sees two figures frozen, about to move. There is a space between them as if meant for a small child, as if the hands are waiting for the child to rush up and grab them. He finds himself magically again in a Canaletto, a place that exists how he wants it to exist. He sees, in all its sunlight, a city for the analogy it might once have been.
Thomas Mira y Lopez’s nonfiction has appeared in CutBank, Hotel Amerika, The Pinch, PANK, and Seneca Review.