Lot Essay
Hitherto unidentified and unpublished, the present picture and its pendant, here offered as lot 254, are among the largest works ever executed by Carlevarijs, the founder of the great eighteenth century Venetian school of view painting, and are also exceptional for their allegorical content. Conceived as representations of the fruits of peace and the destructive effects of war, the prosperous seaport of the present picture, with its Austrian shipping and bustle of mercantile activity under the protection of a militia company, is dramatically contrasted with the sea battle of the following lot, in which the dominant warship is Sardinian, other ships are Venetian and in the foreground an Ottoman galley appears to have rammed and sunk a Sardinian galley.
Dr. Dario Succi, who intends to publish the paintings in his catalogue raisonné of the work of Luca Carlevarijs due to be published this autumn, dates them circa 1705 by comparison with the Capriccio of a Seaport, dated 1706, in the Accademia Carrara, Bergamo, and The Arrival of the French Ambassador Henri-Charles Arnauld, Abbé de Pomponne, at the Doge's Palace, 10 May 1706 on loan from the Rijksdienst Beeldende Kunst to the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (both included in the exhibition Luca Carlevarijs e la veduta veneziana del Settecento, Palazzo della Ragione, Padua, 1994, p. 191, no. 28, illustrated in colour p. 193, and pp. 200 and 206, no. 36, illustrated in colour pp. 202-3). This places them in the middle of Carlevarijs's decade of greatest creativity. While little is known of his work before he had reached the age of forty, in 1703 he had published his highly influential set of 104 engravings Le Fabriche, e Vedute di Venezia and in 1704 he is first recorded as a painter of views. By the end of the decade he had executed the 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.
While the Italian monuments depicted in the present picture, the Arch of Constantine, Castel Sant'Angelo and a domed church closely resembling San Giorgio in Braida at Verona, were to become characteristic motifs of Carlevarijs's capricci, this dating to the early years of the War of the Spanish Succession (1700-1715) would seem to suggest that the inclusion of Austrian shipping in the representation of peace and of Sardinian, Venetian and Ottoman shipping in that of war was not entirely arbitrary. Sardinia, which had been ruled by Spanish viceroys for more than two centuries, was to become a province of Austria in 1708, and Venice looked to Austria for assistance against the threat of the Ottoman Empire, which remained acute until the Treaty of Passarowitz of 1718.
A speedy end to hostilities in Austria's favour must have been a primary concern of the brothers Giovanelli, who presumably commissioned the pictures and in whose villa at Noventa Padovana they are first recorded in 1735, to judge from all that has recently been revealed about the family by the research of Federico Montecuccoli Degli Erri (op. cit. under Provenance above, pp. 691-752). Giovanelli properties near Bergamo and in Valsugana were, indeed, directly affected by the War of the Spanish Succession (ibid., pp. 699-700) but the brothers' desire for the removal of the threat of war must have been more general as they owed their vast fortune to trade and they had business interests in Austria and Hungary as well as Italy. Created Counts of the Holy Roman Empire and of all the hereditary Austrian States by the Emperor Leopold I in 1678, they epitomized the new Venetian nobility keen to show off their new status through the magnificence of their country house, the villa at Noventa Padovana on the Brenta. Described by J.J. de La Lande (Voyage en Italie... 1765 et 1766, Paris, 1786, VIII, p. 589) as 'une des plus belles maisons de campagne qui soit sour la route', the villa itself survives much as it was when it was visited by the composer Handel in 1709 and by the Duke of York in 1714 (see Montecuccoli Degli Erri, op. cit., figs. 1 and 4) but the park and the frescoes by Pellegrini and Sebastiano Ricci have gone and the picture collection was dispersed after the death of the last of the line in 1800.
The brothers' enthusiasm for art is recorded in surviving letters ('Non vedo l'ora di vedere li due quadri lodati universalmente' Giovanni Paolo wrote to his brother c. 1700) and documents reveal that it was they who were responsible for bringing to Venice Domenico Guardi and his young sons Gianantonio and Francesco. The extent and significance of their patronage and collecting is shown above all by their posthumous inventories of 1732 and 1735, in which sizes and, exceptionally, artists' names are given. Almost all the paintings are by artists who worked in the Veneto and there was a representative selection of works by painters whose styles are often related to that of Carlevarijs - Eismann, Stom, Monsù Montagna and Marini. The Giovanelli were evidently not adverse to pictures of considerable size, including a pair by Luca Giordano measuring 15 x 21½ quarte (= 255 x 365.5cm.) and a Belshazzar's Feast by Mazzoni measuring 11 x 23½ quarte (= 187 x 399.5cm.). However, the collection must have been dominated, both aesthetically and physically, by the 'Due Quadri grandi Architeture, e Figure d'Antonio Canal con soazze dipinte bianche, e Fillo d'oro alte q.te 14 larghi q.te 19', apparently en suite with two by Ghisolfi of identical size and in similar frames. The Canaletti, the only paintings in the collection identified by Montecuccoli Degli Erri, op. cit., are clearly the pair of capricci now divided between private collections in Italy and Switzerland (W.G. Constable, Canaletto, 2nd ed. revised by J.G. Links, Oxford, 1976, I, pl. 210; II, p. 449, nos. 479** and 479***), the largest works by the artist and one, dated 1723, probably the earliest dated work by him (the inventory exaggerates the height of these but is precisely accurate over the width measurement, as with the present paintings by Carlevarijs). The rediscovery of the present pictures not only helps to establish consistencies in Giovanelli taste but also shows that it was not just on one occasion that the brothers had the acuity to give to a highly promising but not yet fully established painter a commission which would encourage him to excel himself. What could have been more inspiring for Francesco Guardi in his formative years than to spend time in such surroundings.
Dr. Dario Succi, who intends to publish the paintings in his catalogue raisonné of the work of Luca Carlevarijs due to be published this autumn, dates them circa 1705 by comparison with the Capriccio of a Seaport, dated 1706, in the Accademia Carrara, Bergamo, and The Arrival of the French Ambassador Henri-Charles Arnauld, Abbé de Pomponne, at the Doge's Palace, 10 May 1706 on loan from the Rijksdienst Beeldende Kunst to the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (both included in the exhibition Luca Carlevarijs e la veduta veneziana del Settecento, Palazzo della Ragione, Padua, 1994, p. 191, no. 28, illustrated in colour p. 193, and pp. 200 and 206, no. 36, illustrated in colour pp. 202-3). This places them in the middle of Carlevarijs's decade of greatest creativity. While little is known of his work before he had reached the age of forty, in 1703 he had published his highly influential set of 104 engravings Le Fabriche, e Vedute di Venezia and in 1704 he is first recorded as a painter of views. By the end of the decade he had executed the 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.
While the Italian monuments depicted in the present picture, the Arch of Constantine, Castel Sant'Angelo and a domed church closely resembling San Giorgio in Braida at Verona, were to become characteristic motifs of Carlevarijs's capricci, this dating to the early years of the War of the Spanish Succession (1700-1715) would seem to suggest that the inclusion of Austrian shipping in the representation of peace and of Sardinian, Venetian and Ottoman shipping in that of war was not entirely arbitrary. Sardinia, which had been ruled by Spanish viceroys for more than two centuries, was to become a province of Austria in 1708, and Venice looked to Austria for assistance against the threat of the Ottoman Empire, which remained acute until the Treaty of Passarowitz of 1718.
A speedy end to hostilities in Austria's favour must have been a primary concern of the brothers Giovanelli, who presumably commissioned the pictures and in whose villa at Noventa Padovana they are first recorded in 1735, to judge from all that has recently been revealed about the family by the research of Federico Montecuccoli Degli Erri (op. cit. under Provenance above, pp. 691-752). Giovanelli properties near Bergamo and in Valsugana were, indeed, directly affected by the War of the Spanish Succession (ibid., pp. 699-700) but the brothers' desire for the removal of the threat of war must have been more general as they owed their vast fortune to trade and they had business interests in Austria and Hungary as well as Italy. Created Counts of the Holy Roman Empire and of all the hereditary Austrian States by the Emperor Leopold I in 1678, they epitomized the new Venetian nobility keen to show off their new status through the magnificence of their country house, the villa at Noventa Padovana on the Brenta. Described by J.J. de La Lande (Voyage en Italie... 1765 et 1766, Paris, 1786, VIII, p. 589) as 'une des plus belles maisons de campagne qui soit sour la route', the villa itself survives much as it was when it was visited by the composer Handel in 1709 and by the Duke of York in 1714 (see Montecuccoli Degli Erri, op. cit., figs. 1 and 4) but the park and the frescoes by Pellegrini and Sebastiano Ricci have gone and the picture collection was dispersed after the death of the last of the line in 1800.
The brothers' enthusiasm for art is recorded in surviving letters ('Non vedo l'ora di vedere li due quadri lodati universalmente' Giovanni Paolo wrote to his brother c. 1700) and documents reveal that it was they who were responsible for bringing to Venice Domenico Guardi and his young sons Gianantonio and Francesco. The extent and significance of their patronage and collecting is shown above all by their posthumous inventories of 1732 and 1735, in which sizes and, exceptionally, artists' names are given. Almost all the paintings are by artists who worked in the Veneto and there was a representative selection of works by painters whose styles are often related to that of Carlevarijs - Eismann, Stom, Monsù Montagna and Marini. The Giovanelli were evidently not adverse to pictures of considerable size, including a pair by Luca Giordano measuring 15 x 21½ quarte (= 255 x 365.5cm.) and a Belshazzar's Feast by Mazzoni measuring 11 x 23½ quarte (= 187 x 399.5cm.). However, the collection must have been dominated, both aesthetically and physically, by the 'Due Quadri grandi Architeture, e Figure d'Antonio Canal con soazze dipinte bianche, e Fillo d'oro alte q.te 14 larghi q.te 19', apparently en suite with two by Ghisolfi of identical size and in similar frames. The Canaletti, the only paintings in the collection identified by Montecuccoli Degli Erri, op. cit., are clearly the pair of capricci now divided between private collections in Italy and Switzerland (W.G. Constable, Canaletto, 2nd ed. revised by J.G. Links, Oxford, 1976, I, pl. 210; II, p. 449, nos. 479** and 479***), the largest works by the artist and one, dated 1723, probably the earliest dated work by him (the inventory exaggerates the height of these but is precisely accurate over the width measurement, as with the present paintings by Carlevarijs). The rediscovery of the present pictures not only helps to establish consistencies in Giovanelli taste but also shows that it was not just on one occasion that the brothers had the acuity to give to a highly promising but not yet fully established painter a commission which would encourage him to excel himself. What could have been more inspiring for Francesco Guardi in his formative years than to spend time in such surroundings.