Venice Wall Art
WALL ARTVenice holds its own place in this archive because so much surviving painting of the city was made expressly for visitors rather than residents. The eighteenth-century veduta trade, led by painters such as Canaletto and Guardi, supplied Grand Tour travellers with accurate, saleable views of the canals, piazzas and festivals they had seen and wanted to carry home. That demand produced work unusually consistent in subject, the same bridges, churches and regattas recurring across decades and workshops, alongside more atmospheric later treatments of the same views. Printmakers extended the trade to buyers who never travelled. This grouping gathers that continuous record of one city as a painted subject.
