On Art, Wealth, and Power: The Venetian Republic.

Abstract

In the city of Venice, the combination of light, water, and architecture of buildings and public spaces has inspired artists, photographers, and filmmakers (1). Venetians have cultivated the image of their city as a place of exceptional beauty and deliberately used art to enhance it (2, 3). Its art goes back to the Byzantine period. Today it maintains a prominent position in the art world through art festivals, such as the Venice Biennale established in 1895, which includes alternating the International Art Exhibition and, from 1980, the Architecture Exhibition (4). During the Italian Renaissance, the Venetian approach emphasizing color was contrasted with the Florentine one, which favored drawing ( disegno ), although there is also a rich tradition of Venetian drawing (5). The leading Venetian school was that of Giovanni Bellini (1430–1516) and several members of his family, followed by Giorgione (1478–1510) and Titian (1490–1576), and later Paolo Veronese (1528–88) and Tintoretto (1519–94) (5, 6). In the 18th century, the leading Venetian painter was Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (1696–1770) (6–8). And then there were the view painters ( vedutisti ) of the 18th century (9). The paintings representing city views were desirable souvenirs to acquire during a Grand Tour—a period of continental travel fashionable among North European elites between the 17th and 19th centuries. The most prominent vedutisti were Giovanni Antonio Canal (1697–1768), known as Canaletto; his nephew Bernardo Bellotto (ca 1722–80); and Francesco Guardi (1712–93) (10). Canaletto's pictures were painted with great precision and, apart from the architecture, contained a broad range of figures representing Venetian life. In contrast, Guardi's paintings were more impressionistic, being painted with looser brushstrokes. Fig. 1 shows one of them, representing the church of Santa Maria …