Le Grand Canal du palazzo Vendramin-Calergi vers San Geremia

Description

“This is one of a series of twelve views by Canaletto of the Grand Canal which are all the same format. The pictures form the basis of the fourteen engraved plates in Visentini’s Prospectus Magni Canalis Venetiarum (Venice, 1735), thus providing an uncontested date for completion. It is thought that they originated in the years around 1730. The paintings were all acquired by George III with the collection of Consul Smith.
To the right is the imposing Renaissance façade of Palazzo Vendramin-Calergi, commissioned in 1481 from Mauro Codussi. Canaletto erroneously added a balustrade to the second floor, and depicted two arched windows either side of the door opening onto the canal - there should be just one either side, flanked by a rectangular window (Canaletto drew the palace correctly in the Sketchbook). In the distance is the tower of San Geremia, correctly proportioned but with three rather than two openings on each side of the bell-storey, and without its flags. Canaletto rendered the pitched-roof church itself very inaccurately - whether deliberately or not - with the windows completely at odds with those shown in the previous painting. Visentini corrected these inaccuracies, and those in the façade of Palazzo Vendramin-Calergi, in his engraving after the painting.
From the left, in shadow, are Ca’ Tron and Palazzo Belloni-Battagia; only the latter, by Longhena, retains the obelisks on its roof. Beyond is the brick façade of the fifteenth-century granaries, the Deposito del Megio (i.e. miglio, millet), followed by the Fondaco dei Turchi, the offices and warehouse of the Turkish traders between 1621 and 1838, built in the twelfth or thirteenth century, and one of the finest Byzantine buildings in Venice. In 1858 it was acquired by the state and essentially destroyed in a complete ‘restoration’; it is now the Natural History Museum. The Deposito should be stepped back from Palazzo Belloni-Battagia, and the canal should curve to the left here. Canaletto flattened and straightened the left bank to show the Deposito and Fondaco, which would otherwise be half-hidden and extremely foreshortened, and the two sunlit buildings beyond would not be visible at all.

Catalogue entry adapted from Canaletto in Venice, London, 2005.”

https://www.rct.uk/collection/search#/14/collection/406982/the-grand-canal-looking-west-from-palazzo-vendramin-calergi-towards-san-geremia