CARLEVARIS, Luca

This painting is an example of the type of coastal port scenes that Carlevaris began to paint from around 1710 onwards, perhaps as a result of his recent journey to Rome. They comprise a distinctive group within his oeuvre and must have found a ready market among his patrons.

The painting signed on a bale on a mule lower right: L+C and dated: MDCC/XIII.

Luca Carlevaris began his career emulating Northern artists by executing capricci of Mediterranean harbours such as the present one, only later turning his hand to painting topographical views of Venice for Grand Tourists.

As is apparent in many of his early works, Carlevaris fuses an imaginary seaport with elements taken directly from identifiable locations. Here, a pair of Corinthian columns topped by brown leaves recall those of the Temple of Castor and Pollux in the Roman Forum. Similarly inspired are the ruins in the right background, which derive from the Baths of Caracalla in Rome.

This etching is from the book Fabriche e vedute di Venetia, 2nd ed., Plate 80. Published in 1703 and containing a series of pictures of famous Venetian buildings, this book is considered an important contribution to the development of Venetian art of veduta in the 18th century. Among buildings considered worthy of inclusion by Carlevaris was the Palazzo Coccina, which until 1645 contained four paintings by Veronese (now in Dresden). Built around 1560 by Giovanni Giacomo de’Grigi for Giovanni and Girolamo Coccina, the family palazzo was adjudged by Francesco Sansovino in 1581 to be one of the most splendid on the Grand Canal.

The artist’s paintings are thronged with numerous figures, drawn from life in pencil in his sketchbooks, which bring to life the paintings with their activity.

The painting shows a river landscape with a capriccio view of the Ponte Rotto, Rome.

It is an example of the painter’s “vedute ideate” in which he often incorporated real buildings and monuments into his imaginary settings. Here the central focus is the famous Ponte Rotto on the Tiber river in Rome, which the artist has combined with various fabricated medieval buildings and structures.

This etching by Carlevaris from the series of 1703 shows the Grand Canal and the church Santa Maria della Carità with the monastery fagade from an imaginary, elevated angle whereby the entire complex is clearly visible. The campanile seems to be attached to the church. Canaletto appears to have chosen this as the point of departure for his composition The Grand Canal near Santa Maria della Carità (1726, private collection).

The Scuola di San Marco, decorated with paintings by Gentile Bellini and Carpaccio, the large Dominican church of SS Giovanni e Paolo, and Verrocchio’s statue of the famous condottiere Bartolomeo Colleoni, were among the best-known monuments of Venice; the combination of the three in one composition therefore made perfect sense. Carlevaris had included a this view in his series of etchings entitled Le Fabriche, e Vedute di Venetia of 1704.

This marine view clearly shows Carlevaris’s debt to the coastal painting of Dutchman Pieter Mulier, better known as Il Tempesta, who worked in Venice.

Carlevaris was born in Udine, the son of a painter, sculptor and architect. After being orphaned as a young boy, he moved in 1679 to Venice with his sister. While scholars have presumed a visit to Rome in his youth, this is undocumented and it is far more likely that he remained in Venice and its environs. Nevertheless, his early works do show some knowledge of the Bamboccianti, perhaps through the art of Pieter Mulier and Johann Anton Eismann, both of whom were in Venice during the last quarter of the 17th century.

A wooden boat-bridge stretches across the entire width of the scene, from Palazzo Gritti on the left towards the church of Santa Maria della Salute, which is not actually shown. The fa�ade on the right, behind the Punta della Dogana, is that of Andrea Palladio’s San Giorgio Maggiore. In the foreground we see a small group of people in a gondola; other figures are depicted on the bridge. Behind the bridge, on the Bacino di San Marco, are sailboats, gondolas and rowboats. The buildings on the Riva degli Schiavoni enclose the scene.

The composition is distinguished by the strong vertical accent created by the buildings on the left, which rise to the full height of the image, and by the horizontal line of the bridge. The bridge is not shown in its entirety, and must have been about twice as long in reality; wooden structures of this kind were normally elevated in the middle, as we can see on the right, to allow boats to pass underneath.

In July 1630 Venice was struck by another devastating plague. Doge Nicolo Contarini and the Senate decided to invoke the Virgin’s intercession, vowing to build a church if their prayers were heeded. The church would be consecrated to the Madonna della Salute — the word ‘salute’ meaning both ‘health’ and ‘salvation’ — and it would be the focus of an annual procession.

When the epidemic subsided in November 1631, construction of the church began and the first procession took place. To enable the faithful to cross the Grand Canal on foot, a floating bridge is built every year on about 21 November, the Feast of the Purification.

By comparison to other paintings of the subject concentrating on the massive procession to the Redentore, Carlevaris included a much smaller number of figures, shown crossing the bridge to the Salute either alone or in small groups. Most of the people on the bridge are returning to the city, and the gondola in the foreground is moving in that direction as well. Instead of the ceremonial journey it is the wooden bridge, an ephemeral topographical detail in the Venetian cityscape, that is the true focus of the composition.

Carlevaris’ s painting marks a new phase in the representation of historical and festive events. In contrast to his predecessors the master emphasized neither the procession nor its goal, but rather the cityscape itself, in which the figures play a subordinate role.

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The painting affords a view of the Serenissima’s most characteristic quay: the Molo, with the columns of San Marco and San Todaro (or Teodoro) framing the entrance to the city. On the left stands the Ducal Palace, rendered in minute detail. The steep perspective in which the building is captured continues into the background along the Riva degli Schiavoni. Cast in contrasting light and truncated by the upper border of the image, the column of San Todaro dominates the scene. Between it and the column of San Marco the mast of a schooner appears in the background; it marks the central axis of the composition. Together with the large schooner on the right, the column of San Todaro to some extent counterbalances the buildings which occupy the left side. There is much activity both on the water and in the Square, where most of the figures are gathered in small groups.

This view of the Molo and the Ducal Palace towards the east is highly unusual. Instead of depicting the Palace frontally, Carlevaris turned a quarter circle so that we look down the fa�ade of the building towards the Riva degli Schiavoni, a composition he also used in four later works. The vantage-point in all these works is from the loggia of the Library, directly opposite the Ducal Palace.

Although the architecture dominates the composition, the artist paid close attention to the human figures. Drawn or painted studies for several of the macchiette have survived. Scenes of people and situations drawn from everyday life were introduced to Italy in the first half of the seventeenth century by Dutch painters active in Rome. In the course of the century the so-called Bamboccianti cast such everyday scenes with growing frequency against a — sometimes identifiable — urban background. One of these painters was Johannes Lingelbach, whose work seems to have inspired Carlevaris’s vedute. The Venetian artist is thought to have spent some time in Rome, where he could have become familiar with Lingelbach’s work.

Carlevaris’s town views are also deeply rooted in the Venetian tradition of depicting historic or festive events. His View of the Molo with the Ducal Palace, however, does not document a procession, reception or other festivity; rather, it subordinates the human figures to a portrayal of one part of the city in meticulous, topographically correct detail from an unorthodox point of view.

With the help of central perspective, the artist leads the eye of the spectator from the Ducal Palace, over the Molo to the Fonteghetto della Farina, where the entrance to the Grand Canal is marked by the silhouette of Santa Maria della Salute and the Punta della Dogana. Further to the left, behind a throng of gondolas and other boats, we can see the hazy profile of the Giudecca.

Owing to the many figures in the foreground, the canvas seems to transcend the genre of the veduta. The schooner behind the gondolas in the left foreground has just fired a salute. A group of dignitaries crosses the Molo in the direction of the Ducal Palace, among them Procurators recognizable by their red robes. A curious crowd watches the procession; it includes many figures also found in Carlevaris’s lively oil studies of daily life in the Serenissima.

Carlevaris is not the inventor of this veduta: long before, in the 1660s to be precise, the French artist Israel Silvestre made a print of roughly the same view. The Venetian master is undoubtedly responsible for the sense of grandeur about the scene, achieved by raising the vantage point and adding the panorama on the left. Carlevaris often employed this device - especially to represent diplomatic receptions, for which he was famous - shifting the point of view slightly each time. He situated these events in front of the Ducal Palace, where the newly appointed ambassadors presented their credentials to the Doge and Senate, the climax of a ceremony that lasted altogether several days. The Entry of the Earl of Manchester into the Doge’s Palace, which the Earl himself commissioned in 1707, is one of the masters best-known works in this series and also one of his two earliest veduta.

The Reception of Cardinal C�sar d’Estr�es represents a similar event, so similar, in fact, that until recently this canvas was assumed to be an autograph variant of the English reception. Judging from the staffage, however, it was not a repetition. Unlike the Entry of the Earl of Manchester a French, not an English mission is shown here, witness the fleur-de-lis on the Ambassador’s gondolas in the left foreground. Furthermore the composition draws attention to the prelate in the midst of the crowd; since only one French ambassador to Venice held an ecclesiastical office - Cardinal d’Estr�es - the reception must be his.

C�sar d’Estr�es (1628—1714), a bishop of Laon who was created cardinal in 1672, was a seasoned diplomat. In January 1701 he was sent to Mantua and Venice to convince them to deny the imperial army passage to Milan despite their neutrality on the issue of the Spanish succession. D’Estr�es’ mission proved fruitless inasmuch as the Republic refused to alter its position; in April the prelate left empty-handed for Naples to join the Spanish king. Carlevaris may have received and executed the commission during the three months the Cardinal spent in Venice or shortly thereafter. Though it is still unclear whether Venice or the diplomat himself took the initiative, the latter possibility seems most likely, given the fact that most of Carlevaris’s paintings of diplomatic receptions were prompted by the ambassadors involved.

The scarcity of information about Carlevaris’s work prior to 1703, the year of publication of his famous series of engravings, Le Fabriche, e Vedute di Venetia, accounts for the importance of this painting. A handful of landscapes and several capricci are all that is known of his oeuvre before then. His first documented commission for painted vedute only dates from 1705, while the two earliest, securely dateable works in this category were executed two years later. The Reception of Cardinal d’Estre�s is thus probably the first indication of Carlevaris’s competence in this genre; more importantly, however, it is arguably the prototype of the eighteenth-century veduta.

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Carlevaris is not the inventor of this veduta: long before, in the 1660s to be precise, the French artist Israel Silvestre made a print of roughly the same view. The Venetian master is undoubtedly responsible for the sense of grandeur about the scene, achieved by raising the vantage point and adding the panorama on the left. Carlevaris often employed this device - especially to represent diplomatic receptions, for which he was famous - shifting the point of view slightly each time. He situated these events in front of the Ducal Palace, where the newly appointed ambassadors presented their credentials to the Doge and Senate, the climax of a ceremony that lasted altogether several days. The Entry of the Earl of Manchester into the Doge’s Palace, which the Earl himself commissioned in 1707, is one of the masters best-known works in this series and also one of his two earliest veduta.

The Reception of Cardinal C�sar d’Estr�es represents a similar event, so similar, in fact, that until recently this canvas was assumed to be an autograph variant of the English reception. Judging from the staffage, however, it was not a repetition. Unlike the Entry of the Earl of Manchester a French, not an English mission is shown here, witness the fleur-de-lis on the Ambassador’s gondolas in the left foreground. Furthermore the composition draws attention to the prelate in the midst of the crowd; since only one French ambassador to Venice held an ecclesiastical office - Cardinal d’Estr�es - the reception must be his.

The majority of the ‘vedute” based on other representations derive from early eighteenth-century series of prints. The two most important of these are the one hundred and three prints in Le Fabriche, e Vedute di Venetia published by Luca Carlevaris in 1703, and II gran teatro di Venezia probably published by Domenico Lovisa in 1717.

The composition of the etching depicting the Rialto Bridge was borrowed by Marieschi and Canaletto. However, it is noteworthy that the paintings represent the bridge from the opposite direction and opposite side of the canal with respect to the print.

This is one of the earliest view of Venice by the artist.

The artist’s paintings are thronged with numerous figures, drawn from life in pencil in his sketchbooks, which bring to life the paintings with their activity.

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This magnificent view of the Molo originally formed part of a set of four views of Venice, which are believed to have been purchased circa 1710-1715 by Christopher Crowe, British Consul in Leghorn. It presents a view of the Molo with the Doge’s Palace looking west towards the Zecca and the church of Santa Maria della Salute in the distance

This painting, like its companions, is impressive for its highly sophisticated rendering of a site that would have been extremely familiar to visitors of Venice. The scene is populated by over one hundred colourful, individually defined figures and the spectacular architectural setting is unified by a warm, soft light that is both naturalistic and atmospheric.

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The View of a River Port is a fine example of Carlevaris’s imaginary landscapes, painted shortly after his return to Venice from Rome and therefore datable to the first years of the eighteenth century. The painter has here assembled architectural motifs gathered from various places in the papal city. The arched bridge could be one of those over the Tiber, perhaps the Ponte Rotto, the equestrian monument is based on Bernini’s Constantine and the houses in the background are a partial view of the Isola Tiberina. Although Carlevarijs was not interested in the precise representation of reality in this work as he was in his subsequent Venetian views, but rather assembled elements from life in an imaginary whole, the elements typical of his mature work are already evident, particularly in the central section with the quay flooded in sunlight and the lively characters painted in bright colours.

This painting is a lovely composition that shows the essential traits of the artist’s training, with a northern Baroque fondness for ruins and a central Italian form of scenographic landscape.

The View of a River Port is a fine example of Carlevaris’s imaginary landscapes, painted shortly after his return to Venice from Rome and therefore datable to the first years of the eighteenth century. The painter has here assembled architectural motifs gathered from various places in the papal city. The arched bridge could be one of those over the Tiber, perhaps the Ponte Rotto, the equestrian monument is based on Bernini’s Constantine and the houses in the background are a partial view of the Isola Tiberina. Although Carlevarijs was not interested in the precise representation of reality in this work as he was in his subsequent Venetian views, but rather assembled elements from life in an imaginary whole, the elements typical of his mature work are already evident, particularly in the central section with the quay flooded in sunlight and the lively characters painted in bright colours.

This painting is a lovely composition that shows the essential traits of the artist’s training, with a northern Baroque fondness for ruins and a central Italian form of scenographic landscape.

Carlevaris was a painter and mathematician and is considered to have been the founder of the Venetian urban landscape, known as the veduta. He combined topographical precision with an ability to convey a sense of space.