#vedutisti

[lionofchaeronea]

Venice, the Entrance to St. Mark's Basilica, Antonietta Brandeis (1848-1926)

[oncanvas]

The Grand Canal with Santa Maria della Salute, Michele Marieschi, circa 1738-1740

Oil on canvas 83.5 x 121 cm (32.87 x 47.64 in.) Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, Spain

[revolutionoftenderness]

“To shift the structure of a sentence alters the meaning of that sentence, as definitely and inflexibly as the position of a camera alters the meaning of the object photographed. Many people know about camera angles now, but not so many know about sentences.”

— Joan Didion

[Portico, 1765 - Canaletto]

• Canaletto (1697–1768), probably the greatest of vedutisti (painters of highly detailed, usually large-scale cityscapes and architectural vistas), painted precise views of Venetian architecture that are found in most of the world’s major art museums. He was professor of perspective at the Accademia of Venice and as such recognised as an authority on the topic. Since he took the liberty to deviate from the rules of traditional linear perspective with regard to distances in depth, it is interesting to scrutinise other aspects of perspective in his paintings of extant scenes... More: https://brill.com/view/journals/artp/8/1/article-p49_49.xml?language=en

• Generally, writers who hold readers’ imaginations across decades do so because there’s something unsolved in their project, something that doesn’t square and thus seems subject to the realm of magic. In Joan Didion’s case, a disconnect appears between the jobber-like shape of her writing life—a shape she often emphasizes in descriptions of her working habits—and the forms that emerged as the work accrued. For all her success, Didion was seventy before she finished a nonfiction book that was not drawn from newsstand-magazine assignments. She and Dunne started doing that work with an eye to covering the bills, and then a little more. (Their Post rates allowed them to rent a tumbledown Hollywood mansion, buy a banana-colored Corvette Stingray, raise a child, and dine well.) And yet the mosaic-like nonfiction books that Didion produced are the opposite of jobber books, or market-pitched books, or even useful, fibrous, admirably executed books. These are strange books, unusually shaped. They changed the way that journalistic storytelling and analysis were done. More: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/02/01/what-we-get-wrong-about-joan-didion/amp

[flyse]

The Campo di SS. Giovanni e Paolo, Venice, Bernardo Bellotto (Italian, Venice 1722–1780 Warsaw), 1743–1747

Oil on canvas

[lionofchaeronea]

Title: Rome, a view of the river Tiber looking south with the Castel Sant'Angelo and Saint Peter's Basilica beyond Artist: Rudolf Wiegmann (German, 1804-1865) Date: 1834 Genre: cityscape, veduta Movement: Neoclassicism Medium: oil on canvas Dimensions: 68.3 cm (26.8 in) high x 99 cm (38.9 in) wide Location: private collection

Rudolf Wiegmann, from Nordstemmen, Lower Saxony, trained in architecture and retained an interest in that discipline throughout his life. In the late 1820s, he worked at Pompeii on behalf of the German Archaeological Institute and later published a book on Pompeiian wall painting. His specialty was vedute like the one seen here. Two peasant women talk in the foreground, making a contrast with the imposing forms of St. Peter's (center background) and the Castel Sant'Angelo (right background).

[lionofchaeronea]

Title: The Torre d'Orologio in Piazza San Marco Artist: Francesco Guardi (Italian [Venetian], 1712-1793) Date: 1775 Genre: veduta Movement: Rococo Medium: oil on canvas Dimensions: 44 cm (17.3 in) high x 70.5 cm (27.7 in) wide Location: Alte Pinakothek, Munich, Bavaria, Germany

A generation younger than Canaletto, Francesco Guardi was one of the last Venetian artists to practice vedutismo, painting sweeping views of his native city at a time when the Venetian Republic was rapidly losing influence in Europe. Guardi's mature style, pintura di tocco ("painting of touch"), used small, careful brushstrokes; a hundred years after his death, the French Impressionists would admire his work for this very reason.

[lionofchaeronea]

Piazza San Marco Looking South and West, Canaletto, 1763

[lionofchaeronea]

Title: Capriccio with Gothic Building and Obelisk Artist: Michele Marieschi (Italian, 1710-1743) Date: ca. 1741 Genre: veduta; capriccio Period: Rococo Medium: oil on canvas Location: Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice