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Canaletto, born in the Venetian parish of San Lio in 1697, commenced his artistic career as
a painter of scenes for the theatre. The oldest of these, produced from 1716 onward, were made
for the Venetian theatres of Sant'Angelo and San Cassiano. In 1719 Bernardo and Antonio were
in Rome, where they had gone to work on the sets of Alessandro Scarlatti's Tito Sempronio
Gracco and Turno Aricinio, staged at the Teatro Capranica during the Carnival of 1970. It was
in Rome, if we are to believe the account of Anton Maria Zanetti ( 1771 ), that the young
Canaletto started to move in a new direction and, having �� left the theatre, weary of the
intrusiveness of dramatic poets, gave himself up totally to painting vedute from life.″
" This was," adds Zanetti, �� around the year 1719, in which he solemnly repudiated, as he put
it, the theatre." The extremely reliable testimony of the 18th century historian has been
interpreted in various ways, and some have pictured the young and ignorant artist suddenly
discovering, through his encounter with the works of such Roman veduta painters as Codazzi,
Panini, of Van Wittel, the new world of the veduta and, one is tempted to say, romantically
immersing himself in it.
It is likely, however, that things took a different course and that Canaletto's move from
scene painting to the veduta occurred in a more or less natural way. While it is possible,
in fact, that at the start of his career Bernardo worked in the baroque style of the Bibiena
family tradition, it is also true that a new type of scene painting emerged in the early
years of the 18th century, in Venice as well as in Turin and Rome: a style that could be
described as " pictorial " in contrast to that of the Bibiena, based on " perspective." In
practice this meant no more fantastic and absurd baroque sets, no more exaggerated forms and
strange fantasies with endless vistas of colonnades, monumental heap of architecture, and a
profusion of decorative elements, but scenes that were largely confined to the backdrop, with
themes linked to the painting of ruins and landscapes.
Most of the credit for introducing this new style to Venice must be given to Marco Ricci.
The painter had dedicated part of his carrer to stage scenery, with some succes if it is true
that the main purpose behind his first visit to England, made in the company of Giannantonio
Pellegrini between 1708 and 1712, was to participate in the staging of Italian operas at the
King's Theatre in the Haymarket. Subsequently, in 1716, Ricci resumed this activity in Venice
and, two years later, took over the job of painting scenes at the Teatro Sant'Angelo from the
Canal family.
We know little of Marco's activity in this field. However the fifty odd stage designs now in
the Royal Liberty at Windsor Castle --- dating from his last stay in Venice and coming from
the collection of the British consul Smith --- provide us with an excellent picture of how he
used the same figurative and thematic repertory in his set designs as he did in his paintings:
large squares with arcads, vistas of colonnades and courts, prisons, huge parks, and spacious
frescoed rooms, glimpsed through a series of arches decorated with historical scenes. So it
seems reasonable to assume that the young scene painter Canaletto would have been interested
in the innovations brought about by his more established colleague and that his sets --- of
which unfortunately nothing has survived --- were in some ways similar to Marco's. Support for
this hypothesis comes from an examination of Canaletto's earliest pictures, the Capricci in
private collections in Venice, Milan and Switzerland and in the Wadsworth Athenenum in
Hartford.
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