Veduta

A veduta (Italian for 'view'; pl.: vedute) is a highly detailed, usually large-scale painting or, more often, print of a cityscape or some other vista. The painters of vedute are referred to as vedutisti.

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(jazz music) Dr. Zucker: Cities are chaos and it has led people from ancient times to the present to imagine what the ideal city might look like. We're in the Gemaldegalarie in Berlin and we're looking at one image of an ideal city by Francesco di Giorgio. This is a panel that may have originally been part of a piece of furniture or perhaps embedded in the frame of a wall, so that it was probably not meant to be an individual work of art. Dr. Harris: You can see the incredible illusion of space that the linear perspective creates and the intense rationalism that we know was so important to the Renaissance, here applied to an image of a city. Dr. Zucker: The ancient Romans had planned their cities as garrisons that were formed out of a grid, sometimes a rectangle, sometimes a square, but they were rational and they were meant to be rational. During the Medieval Period, that thousand years that followed, cities grew organically and they became complex and did not facilitate the movement of people or goods. As one can imagine now, in this revival of the classical, in the Renaissance, this idea of returning to a kind of geometric purity. What would that city be like and how might it affect its culture? How might a city that was geometrically perfect, that was ideal, affect those that lived within the confines of it. Dr. Harris: If you think about the Italian city states and new notions of being a citizen of a republic and rising to the virtues of living in a republic then we could indeed see how artists of the Renaissance would try to imagine what kind of city space would foster an ideal citizen. Dr. Zucker: It makes so much sense because the medieval feudal tradition had been a kind of organic system, but now people were taking responsibility for the development and planning of government. Why not also take responsibility for the planning of their civic spaces? In places like Florence, there were squares that were cleared very consciously, so that you had ideal vistas, you had ideal views. This notion of urban planning was one that was developing and was very much at the forefront. Dr. Harris: Artists like Leonardo Davinci is applying that kind of geometry to the form of the body. Dr. Zucker: Right, exactly. One might think of the Vitruvius Man, where you actually have this beautiful coming together of perfect geometry and the ideal human form, a man of perfect proportions. You mentioned earlier the severe linear perspective. It's so seductive the way in which our eyes rocket back into space towards those ships. I'm really taken with the playful element that is we can see where the vanishing point would be, but very close to it but not quite there is a ship. There's a dot and and we expect that to be the vanishing point, but it's not and we're reminded that outside of the built environment, on the sea, in the water, these rules don't apply. The idea of the rational is the idea of the man-made. This is a space that we can control. Dr. Harris: What we're seeing here is a coming together of a Renaissance interest in illusionary space, in the architecture of classical antiquity, and in notions of the ideal. Dr. Zucker: That's right, there's a nobling idea of the rational. (jazz music)

Origins

This genre of landscape originated in Flanders, where artists such as Paul Bril painted vedute as early as the 16th century. In the 17th century, Dutch painters made a specialty of detailed and accurate recognizable city and landscapes that appealed to the sense of local pride of the wealthy Dutch middle class. An archetypal example is Johannes Vermeer's View of Delft. The Ghent architect, draughtsman and engraver Lieven Cruyl (1640–1720) contributed to the development of the vedute during his residence in Rome in the late 17th century. Cruyl's drawings reproduce the topographical aspects of the urban landscape.^[1]

18th century

As the itinerary of the Grand Tour became somewhat standardized, vedute of familiar scenes like the Roman Forum or the Grand Canal recalled early ventures to the Continent for aristocratic Englishmen. By the mid-18th century, Venice became renowned as the centre of the vedutisti. The genre was pioneered by Luca Carlevarijs, and its greatest practitioners belonged to the Canal and Guardi families of Venice. Some of them went to work as painters in major capitals of Europe, e.g., Canaletto in London and his nephew Bernardo Bellotto in Dresden and Warsaw.

In other parts of 18th-century Italy, idiosyncratic varieties of the genre evolved. Giovanni Paolo Pannini was the first veduta artist to concentrate on painting ruins. The Dutch painter Gaspar van Wittel (who worked in Rome, where he was known as Vanvitelli) and others painted veduta esatta, i.e. exact vedute, which was a topographically accurate depiction of a cityscape or monument and in which the human and animal figures played a secondary role.^[2] His collaborators included Hendrik Frans van Lint, who would become one of the leading vedute painters in the first half of the 18th century.^[3] Through his more realistic representation in the vedute he executed at the end of the 17th century and beginning of the 18th century, the Flemish painter Jan Frans van Bloemen anticipated developments during the 18th century, when there was a shift away from the classically oriented Roman landscapes of French vedute painters in Rome such as Gaspard Dughet.^[4]

In later developments of the vedute, Pannini's veduta morphed into the scenes partly or completely imaginary elements, known as capricci and vedute ideate or veduta di fantasia.^[2] Giambattista Piranesi was the foremost master of vedute ideate etchings. His topographical series, Vedute di Roma, went through many printings.

19th century

In the later 19th century, more personal "impressions" of cityscapes replaced the desire for topographical accuracy, which was satisfied instead by painted, and later photographed, panoramas. There was a sizeable community of émigré artists active in Venice, such as Antonietta Brandeis, the Spanish painters Martín Rico y Ortega, Mariano Fortuny, Antonio Reyna Manescau and Rafael Senet and the Peruvian painter Federico del Campo. These artists responded to the large international market for their city views of Venice, and they made such big names for themselves through this genre that they painted nothing but Italian views.

Demand for Federico del Campo's views, particularly from English tourists, was so strong that he painted several views multiple times,^[5] and the same can be said of Reyna Manescau, that repeated the same urban landscapes in many occasions with minimal variations.^[6]

References

^ Lieven Cruyl's veduti (or city views)
^ ^a ^b Rudolf Wittkower, Art and architecture in Italy: 1600-1750, Penguin Books, 1980, p. 501
^ Edgar Peters Bowron, Joseph J. Rishel, Art in Rome in the Eighteenth Century, Philadelphia Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2000, p. 236-237
^ Christine van Mulders and Alain Jacobs. "Bloemen, van." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press. Web. 5 Dec. 2014
^ Federico del Campo, Peruvian, Gondolas by the Doge's Palace, Venice at Sotheby's
^ "Museo Carmen Thyssen Málaga". www.carmenthyssenmalaga.org (in Spanish). Retrieved 2018-11-20.

External links

Media related to Veduta at Wikimedia Commons

This page was last edited on 23 December 2023, at 18:21

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