Canal, Bernardo

Description:

Venedig 1674 - 1744
55 x 82 cm
View of St. Mark's Square with the Basilica, the Old and New Procuracies together with the Campanile. Oil/canvas, relined.
Lower Saxon private collection. With an expert report by Dario Succi, 2025. Bernardo Canal, born in Venice in 1674, is best known today as the father of the more famous painter Giovanni Antonio Canal, known as Canaletto, whose work would later have a decisive influence on the international image of Venice. He was the first pittor, the first painter, in the family.
A member of the Venetian painters' guild Fraglia dei Pittori, he initially worked on the design and decoration of Antonio Vivaldi's operas in the important theatres of S. Angelo and S. Cassiano in Venice, the latter being one of the first public opera houses in Europe. His work in this field demonstrates a high degree of spatial understanding and perspective - skills that he later applied to his vedute.
From around the 1720s onwards, Bernardo increasingly turned to veduta painting, an art form that was in great demand in Venice at the time and enjoyed great popularity among the numerous aristocrats on their Grand Tour. During this period, he also worked closely with his son Giovanni Antonio, including in Rome for Alessandro Scarlatti's operas.
Father and son Canaletto later worked together in a studio. Other members of the family, including Bernardo Bellotto (1722-1780) and Pietro Bellotti (1725 - around 1800), also trained there in the 1730s. Bernardo Canal was highly regarded in Venetian artistic circles. In 1739, he was appointed prior of the painters' guild, which met at the Scuola di San Domenico in San Giovanni e Paolo. Bernardo Canal's own vedute are often unjustly overshadowed by his son's works, yet they display the same attention to detail and a sure sense of composition and lighting. His paintings and drawings are important art-historical testimonies to the artistic development of Venetian veduta painting in the early 18th century.