Venice, the Piazzetta looking north-west towards the Campanile, with the Biblioteca, the Procuratie Vecchie and the Torre dell'Orologio

This and the following lot can be considered masterpieces by Johann Richter, a Swedish-born artist who, along with Luca Carlevarijs, was one of only two specialist vedute painters active in Venice before Canaletto. Both works are among the grandest the Scandinavian ever painted and display his distinctive and beguiling figure types, executed with the bright palette and vivacity that characterises his work. Richter has been considered a highly innovative artist in the development of Venetian vedute. Though both canvases depict views of the Piazzetta, one of the Republic’s most famous landmarks, Richter frequently painted Venice’s less celebrated views, away from San Marco and the Bacino. By doing so, the Scandinavian anticipated the work of Canaletto in a way that no other artist had done.

This view of the Piazzetta looking north-west is dominated by the Campanile (Bell Tower) with Jacopo Sansovino’s Loggetta on its east side, both of which collapsed in 1902 and were subsequently rebuilt. To the left of the Bell Tower stands Sansovino’s Libreria, the architect’s masterpiece constructed in Istrian stone and begun in 1537 to accommodate the vast collection of manuscripts bequeathed to the Republic by the Greek Cardinal Bessarion of Trebizond in 1468. Cast in shadow, behind the Campanile stands the long arcade of Bartolomeo Bon the Younger’s Procuratie Vecchie, containing the apartments of the Procurators of San Marco, and, to its right, the Torre dell’Orologio (Clock Tower), designed by Mauro Codussi and completed in 1499. The view is completed on the east side with the south flank of the Basilica di San Marco.

When Richter arrived in Venice is unclear, but scholars generally agree that he almost certainly entered Carlevarijs's studio soon thereafter. By that time, he was already a proficient painter of landscapes, having studied in his native Stockholm with David Klöcker Ehrenstrahl and Johan Sylvius. Richter’s first documented Venetian works, showing The Piazza San Marco and the base of the Campanile and The Grand Canal with the Church of Santa Lucia, last recorded in the collection of the art historian Osvald Sirén in Stockholm, are said to be signed and dated on the reverse ‘Jean Richter Suezzese fece in Venezia l’anno 1717’. In December of that year, in a letter to the Florentine collector Francesco Gabburri, the painter Antonio Balestra described Richter’s work as ‘…accomplished with great love… showing particular propensity for a finished quality’.

Some of Richter's early paintings in Venice are virtually indistinguishable from those of his presumed master and many, including these two canvases, were considered to be by Carlevarijs until recently (see, for example, Pallucchini, op. cit., 1994). Rizzi further observes that both this and the following view once bore the apocryphal signature 'Antonio Canaletto' (op. cit., 1967). It is, however, a series of seven relatively recently rediscovered engravings by Bernhard Vogel (1683-1737) after paintings by Richter that confirms their true author. The engravings are inscribed ‘IOANNES RICHTER PINXIT VENET’ and labelled, described and identified in four languages (Latin, Italian, French and German), indicating how widely the artist intended their circulation. Five of the engraved views are taken from or looking at the Piazzetta in different directions, one a panoramic, distant view of the city from the Bacino and the last a view of San Michele di Murano.

While perhaps not the picture from which it was made, the present lot is, as Reale observed, very closely related to Vogel’s engraving. However, the work includes an additional five bays of the Libreria on one side and the corner of the Basilica di San Marco on the other. While the staffage does not match precisely, and each figure is different from his or her counterpart in the engraving, their placement within the Piazzetta does largely correspond, both in the foreground and the background. The engraving is more closely related to two canvases on a much smaller scale: one sold Sotheby’s, London, 10 July 2002, lot 76; the other sold Christie’s, New York, 24 January 2003, lot 164, though even in those works there are many departures from the engraving. Reale reproduces a further painting in a private collection with a similar correspondence to the engraving as the present lot (op. cit., p. 120, fig 11). Rizzi catalogued both that and the present picture as by Carlevarijs with the aid of a collaborator (op. cit., 1967). His recognition of these two works as having been executed in part by another hand was, in a way, the first step towards their reattribution to Richter nearly three decades later.