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Lot Essay
A younger contemporary of Canaletto, Marieschi is thought to have trained and practised as a set-designer before turning his attentions to capriccios and vedute, inspired by the example of Marco Ricci, Luca Carlevarijs and most notably Canaletto. He had established a reputation as a view painter by the mid-1730s, adding lustre to the genre with his lively use of brushwork. His paintings are distinguished from those of Canaletto by their exaggerated perspective and more atmospheric palette. Few of his view pictures have early recorded provenance, with his only known patron being the great collector Field Marshall Count Johann Matthias von der Schulenburg (1661-1747).
This view on the Grand Canal is dominated at the centre by the white marble façade of the church of Sant’Eustachio (San Stae in local Venetian dialect), designed by Domenico Rossi and richly decorated with statuary by Giuseppe Torretto, Antonio Tarsia, Pietro Baratta and Antonio Corradini, which is flanked to the left by Palazzo Foscarini-Giovanelli and to the right by Palazzo Giustinian, then Contarini.
The composition relates closely to a painting in a private collection in Paris, which includes the same three magnificently gilded and decorated gondolas in the same positions in the water. When cataloguing the Paris picture, Ralph Toledano identified the two-headed eagle adorning the felze (cabin) as corresponding to the Giustinian coat of arms (Michele Marieschi: Catalogo ragionato, 2nd ed., Milan, 1995, p. 118, no. V. 41). A similar view with a wider perspective, also incorporating the gondolas, but this time in different positions, was offered for sale in Paris in 1912 and is now in a private collection (ibid. p. 120, no. V. 42). Toledano dated these works to the last phase of the artist’s life. When Filippo Pedrocco came to catalogue these same two works, he pointed out that the double-headed eagle was in fact the symbol of the imperial ambassador to Venice and that these works therefore likely commemorated the ‘entrance’ of the patriarch Francesco Antonio Correr in February 1735 (Michele Marieschi: La vita, l’ambiente, l’opera, Milan, 1999, pp. 239-40, nos. 19 and 20). Pedrocco linked these two works with two other paintings by Marieschi featuring the same golden gondolas – a view of the Rialto Bridge at Claydon House, National Trust (ibid., no. 17) and a view of the Bacino di San Marco in a private collection (ibid., no. 18) – believing them all to date to the same early moment of 1735.
Marieschi focused his energies exclusively on painting landscape and architecture, working in tandem with a number of different figure painters to complete the staffage in his vedute, including Gaspare Diziani, Francesco Simonini and Giovanni Antonio Guardi.
This view on the Grand Canal is dominated at the centre by the white marble façade of the church of Sant’Eustachio (San Stae in local Venetian dialect), designed by Domenico Rossi and richly decorated with statuary by Giuseppe Torretto, Antonio Tarsia, Pietro Baratta and Antonio Corradini, which is flanked to the left by Palazzo Foscarini-Giovanelli and to the right by Palazzo Giustinian, then Contarini.
The composition relates closely to a painting in a private collection in Paris, which includes the same three magnificently gilded and decorated gondolas in the same positions in the water. When cataloguing the Paris picture, Ralph Toledano identified the two-headed eagle adorning the felze (cabin) as corresponding to the Giustinian coat of arms (Michele Marieschi: Catalogo ragionato, 2nd ed., Milan, 1995, p. 118, no. V. 41). A similar view with a wider perspective, also incorporating the gondolas, but this time in different positions, was offered for sale in Paris in 1912 and is now in a private collection (ibid. p. 120, no. V. 42). Toledano dated these works to the last phase of the artist’s life. When Filippo Pedrocco came to catalogue these same two works, he pointed out that the double-headed eagle was in fact the symbol of the imperial ambassador to Venice and that these works therefore likely commemorated the ‘entrance’ of the patriarch Francesco Antonio Correr in February 1735 (Michele Marieschi: La vita, l’ambiente, l’opera, Milan, 1999, pp. 239-40, nos. 19 and 20). Pedrocco linked these two works with two other paintings by Marieschi featuring the same golden gondolas – a view of the Rialto Bridge at Claydon House, National Trust (ibid., no. 17) and a view of the Bacino di San Marco in a private collection (ibid., no. 18) – believing them all to date to the same early moment of 1735.
Marieschi focused his energies exclusively on painting landscape and architecture, working in tandem with a number of different figure painters to complete the staffage in his vedute, including Gaspare Diziani, Francesco Simonini and Giovanni Antonio Guardi.