Word: canalettos
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...Venice's once-grand traditions, none seemed destined for a more in glorious end than painting. Not that good painters did not exist. Canaletto and the Guardi brothers turned out thousands of panoramic Venetian views whose impeccable architecture and exquisite plays of light have since delighted generations, while Pietro Longhi mastered a mellow irony to reveal the domestic texture of Venetian life. But it remained for an extraordinarily forceful young artist named Giovanni Battista Tiepolo to ascend that decaying stage and transform shimmer and shadow into one last dramatic moment for Venetian painting...
...zanne still life that seems to tilt a plate of cherries into the viewer's mouth, is brought together to demonstrate one of the museum's strengths. Great Renaissance paintings, still in short supply despite loans of Botticellis, Van Dycks, and an individual Bellini, Giorgione and Canaletto from the Norton Simon Foundation, share space with Andrea di Orcagna's incomparable trecento marbles of musicians with musette, timbrel and zither, like pearly leprechauns playing away the centuries...
German-descended George III may have lost the American colonies, but he brought the greatest royal acquisitions from Italy to England. Through a vendor, Joseph Smith, who wheedled a post as consul to Venice, the King's additions to the royal collection increased by batches of Canaletto. Horace Walpole scorned Smith as "the merchant of Ven ice," but that shrewd gentleman sold his purchases for some $300,000 to the King on the installment plan-with interest. George Ill's wife, Charlotte of Mecklenburg requested a sketch of Florence's Uffizi Gallery from a compatriot named Johann...
Such was his fame in England that Canaletto's patrons persuaded him to stay there and paint their murky land. His precise, atmospheric views of London, painted in the 1740s and '50s, helped shape English landscape painting, lured later artists such as Turner and Whistler to Venice to seek new understanding of light and water. But the essential music of Venice, if not its counterpoint-sun-stippled plazas, majestic palaces, bustling, brightly clad people-always escaped them. In later life, painting steadily until his death in 1768, Canaletto essayed fanciful variations on his theme with almost surreal capriccios...
...Newton were demonstrating man's command of his environment through advances in science. Sir Christopher Wren had surpassed romantic vision with brick and stone. Napoleon was soon to end forever Europe's old order. And in Venice, where romance had always been well salted with practicality, Canaletto's lucid art bridged the opposed worlds. He stands to this day, as it was said of his city, "between the morning and the evening lands...