THE PROPERTY OF A LADY
Giovanni Antonio Canal, il Canaletto (1697-1768)

The Redentore, Venice

Details
Giovanni Antonio Canal, il Canaletto (1697-1768)
The Redentore, Venice
oil on unlined canvas
18 5/8 x 30½in. (47.4 x 77.3cm.)

Lot Essay

The Redentore, the masterpiece of the ecclesiastical architecture of Andrea Palladio, was built by the Venetian Senate in 1577-92 in fulfilment of a vow on the deliverance of the city from the devastating plague of 1575-6. The Doge and Senators also vowed to visit the church annually in perpetuity; this they did by processing across a temporary causeway over the Giudecca canal on the third Sunday of July, giving rise to the Festa del Redentore, a major Venetian festival.

The present, hitherto unrecorded, picture is closely related to two other views of the Redentore, that sold from the collection of John T. Dorrance, Jr. at Sotheby's, New York, 11 January 1990, lot 7 (W.G. Constable, Canaletto, 2nd ed. revised by J.G. Links, Oxford, 1989, I, pl. 59; II, pp. 346-7, no. 317), and that once in the Neave Collection sold (with a pendant) in these Rooms, 9 December 1988, lot 40 (ibid., II, p. 347, no. 318). Of identical size, the three pictures are so similar in style that they must have been executed at the same date, probably after Canaletto's arrival in England in May 1746. While in the Dorrance painting the church is seen from the other side of its central axis and is lit from the left, the Neave composition is superficially strikingly close to that of the present work and in both the foreground is dominated by an almost identical ship's prow. A moored ship is also a prominent feature of all three of Canaletto's other views of the Redentore (ibid., nos. 316, 318* and 318**, pls. 59, 203 and 236).

A view of Palladio's other great Venetian church, S. Giorgio Maggiore, sold in these Rooms, 10 December 1993, lot 65, is identical to the present painting in size, style and remarkably good condition (similarly unlined), suggesting that the two works originally formed part of the same series; that picture is said to have been acquired in London in 1850 or 1852 from an agent acting on behalf of the Duc d'Aumale.

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