Canaletto:From Venice to London, the views of a world of splendour

Introduced to painting and perspective by his father, a theatre decorator, the Venetian Giovanni Antonio Canal, known as Canaletto (1697-1768), is best known for his vedute. Whilst the amateurs of his time brought back their landscape paintings as evidence of their travels in Italy, Canaletto became the incarnation of La Serenissima of the baroque period. A forerunner in his method of spacing out the different planes of his works, he embellished his pictures with details in order to better highlight the distances and used a camera obscura in the composition of his paintings. With the precision of the lines and the tonality of the palette, Canaletto’s paintings are still the most beautiful panoramas in the history of art. Over the course of this inspired, richly-illustrated text, Octave Uzanne shares with the reader his passion for this striking Venetian painter of the eitghteenth century.