Word: canaletto
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...perspectives have challenged and eluded more artists than any other city in the world. Of all the painters who have attempted to capture the visual music of Venice-and some of the greatest have been Venetians-none was better attuned than Giovanni Antonio Canal, better known by his nickname Canaletto...
...Canaletto's Venice was the 18th century's most worldly and sensual city. In the last, decadent century of its independence, the old republic was all pageantry and intrigue. From Piazza San Marco to the Rialto, it was a gaudy blur of masquers and courtesans, actors, singers and sightseers. As the sunny antithesis of London, and most colorful way-point of the Grand Tour, Casanova's Venice even then drew 30,000 Englishmen a year. So many top-chop Londoners returned with Canaletto's etchings and oil paintings that an Englishwoman visiting the city...
...First Postcards. Most visitors took home oil-painted vedute, facile, panoramic views of the city that predated the picture postcard. Canaletto was a vedutista with vision. Trained in theatrical scene painting, disciplined by Roman academicians, influenced by Dutch artists' oils of classical ruins, he swiftly caught the eye of visiting and resident English milords, who collected and commissioned such far-from-vedute fantasies as Tomb of Lord Sowers (see opposite page), a highlight of North America's first comprehensive Canaletto retrospective, which opened this week in Toronto...
When he was 52, he attempted suicide several times, with a sword by his side so that he would die with the appearance of a knight. Finally he succeeded. But without the Venetian visionary's work, such 18th century masterworks as the airy cityscapes of Canaletto and Guardi, the angel-frosted ceilings of Tiepolo and the imaginary prisons of Piranesi might never have come to grace great museums...
...carved after a design by Rogier van der Weyden and for centuries belonged to the Dukes of Arenberg. The Cleveland Art Museum's acquisitions in the old master class range from a landscape by Claude Lorrain through a newly discovered drawing by Rembrandt to a sweeping view by Canaletto of Venice's Piazza San Marco...