Lot Essay
Luca Carlevarijs was born at Udine, the son of a minor painter who died when he was a child, moving to Venice with his sister in 1679 when he was sixteen years old. Little is known of his life or work before he had reached the age of forty, but in 1703 he published Le Fabriche, e Vedute di Venetia, a set of 104 etchings which had enormous success and influence, being used as a compositional sourcebook by Venetian view painters for several following decades. He himself first emerged as a painter of views in 1704, but by the end of the first decade of the century he had executed masterpieces now at Birmingham, Schleissheim and Frederiksborg, in the J. Paul Getty Museum at Malibu and in the Lehman Collection in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. With works such as these he established in Venice a type of painting which was to grow with the appetite of the market as the century progressed until it became the pre-eminent genre for which eighteenth century Venetian painting is known. Carlevarijs was to remain the unrivalled master of Venetian vedutismo until the mid-1720s, and his method of placing the viewpoint close to the ground or canal thereby allowing the spectator almost to feel as if they were a part of the city rather than simply observing it, was to revolutionize vedute painting. By 1728, when progressive paralysis put an end to his career, it was clear to contemporaries that his successor had already appeared in the form of the young Canaletto. As William Barcham has written, '...the views of Canaletto are unthinkable without Carlevarijs's example...' (W. Barcham, in the catalogue of the exhibition, The Glory of Venice, London, Royal Academy of Arts and Washington, National Gallery of Art, Sept. 1994-April 1995, p. 99).
The present painting shows the extent to which Carlevarijs's achievements anticipate those of Canaletto. Carlevarijs's intense interest in capturing the atmosphere and bustling, mercantile life of the city as well as its buildings is amply displayed in the attention given to the figures in the present painting, where the artist enlivens the scene with his machiette, small daubs of color he used to represent the city's population. A surviving group of forty-nine oil studies of figures, themselves worked up from drawings, is in the Victoria and Albert Museum; and a fifty-two page book of drawings (inscribed 'these sketches are from the hand of Lucas Carlevarijs, an excellent painter of Udine better known by the name of Ca' Zenobia') is in the British Museum, London. These were used by the artist throughout his career and a number of figures in the present painting are taken from them (see figs. 1-2 in this catalogue; and Rizzi, op. cit., 1967, bozzetti, figs. 43 and 51; and disegni, fig. 57).
Carlevarijs painted the Piazzetta from an almost identical viewpoint on at least two other occasions, although in both of these the artist displays less sky than in the present picture, and omits all of the boats moored along the waterfront of the Molo. One of these is listed by Rizzi as in a private collection, New York (op. cit., fig. 139); and the other is in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (ibid., figs. 137-8; and D. Succi, in the catalogue of the exhibition, Luca Carlevarijs e la veduta veneziana del Settecento, Palazzo della Ragione, Padua, Sept. 25-Dec. 26, 1994, p. 50, fig. 11). Dario Succi, in a letter dated Dec. 9, 1997, dates the present painting to between 1720-24, slightly earlier than the Los Angeles County Museum version of this composition, which he dates to circa 1727 (ibid., pp. 49-50). The Los Angeles picture was part of a series of four vedute commissioned by Field Marshal Count Johann Mathias von der Schulenburg (1661-1747) which were sold at Christie's, London, April 12, 1775, lots 47-8 and 57-8, and the Los Angeles picture again at Christie's, London, Feb. 22, 1924, lot 77.
We are grateful to Dott. Dario Succi for his assistance in cataloguing this lot.
The present painting shows the extent to which Carlevarijs's achievements anticipate those of Canaletto. Carlevarijs's intense interest in capturing the atmosphere and bustling, mercantile life of the city as well as its buildings is amply displayed in the attention given to the figures in the present painting, where the artist enlivens the scene with his machiette, small daubs of color he used to represent the city's population. A surviving group of forty-nine oil studies of figures, themselves worked up from drawings, is in the Victoria and Albert Museum; and a fifty-two page book of drawings (inscribed 'these sketches are from the hand of Lucas Carlevarijs, an excellent painter of Udine better known by the name of Ca' Zenobia') is in the British Museum, London. These were used by the artist throughout his career and a number of figures in the present painting are taken from them (see figs. 1-2 in this catalogue; and Rizzi, op. cit., 1967, bozzetti, figs. 43 and 51; and disegni, fig. 57).
Carlevarijs painted the Piazzetta from an almost identical viewpoint on at least two other occasions, although in both of these the artist displays less sky than in the present picture, and omits all of the boats moored along the waterfront of the Molo. One of these is listed by Rizzi as in a private collection, New York (op. cit., fig. 139); and the other is in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (ibid., figs. 137-8; and D. Succi, in the catalogue of the exhibition, Luca Carlevarijs e la veduta veneziana del Settecento, Palazzo della Ragione, Padua, Sept. 25-Dec. 26, 1994, p. 50, fig. 11). Dario Succi, in a letter dated Dec. 9, 1997, dates the present painting to between 1720-24, slightly earlier than the Los Angeles County Museum version of this composition, which he dates to circa 1727 (ibid., pp. 49-50). The Los Angeles picture was part of a series of four vedute commissioned by Field Marshal Count Johann Mathias von der Schulenburg (1661-1747) which were sold at Christie's, London, April 12, 1775, lots 47-8 and 57-8, and the Los Angeles picture again at Christie's, London, Feb. 22, 1924, lot 77.
We are grateful to Dott. Dario Succi for his assistance in cataloguing this lot.