Giuseppe Bernardino Bison

Provenance: private collection

This view of the Canal Grande belongs to the tradition of the veduta, a pictorial genre highly prized in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, particularly...

Provenance: private collection

This view of the Canal Grande belongs to the tradition of the veduta, a pictorial genre highly prized in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, particularly among the devotees of the Grand Tour - the instructive trip typically undertaken by the most enlightened of English art lovers, during which they enjoyed collecting souvenirs of the places they visited in the form of paintings of the monuments and festivities that they encountered in the great cities.

This composition is thus a direct descendant of the work of Canaletto, Bellotto, Marieschi and Guardi, who, well before Bison’s time, established the genre and its prestigious credentials. This painting in fact draws its iconographical inspiration from the series engravings made by Antonio Vicentini after the works of Canaletto which were published in 1742.

Faithful to its illustrious model, Bison combines an extreme precision in the architectural rendering (clearly visible at the right is the majestic baroque façade of the Church of Santa Maria della Salute while behind it is the profile of the tip of the Dogana peninsula), with a highly poetic atmospheric sensibility. On the calm waters of the Grand Canal, several gondolas and merchant craft float, while tiny silhouettes strolling through the Church Square, lend a picturesque note to this peaceful evocation of the Serenissime. Bison meticulously renders the surface of the water with the reflection of the palace. The sky, with clouds being swept along in the wind, casts light only on parts of the scene, an effect the artist handles with brio: it starkly picks out the contours of certain buildings, thus suggesting the life behind their imposing façades, while others remain in shadow.

Upon closer examination, however, Bison proves less faithful to the vedutist repertoire as was defined by his predecessors than he might seem: the choice of a unique point of view, with one’s back to the busy activity of the Grand Canal, and the way that the painter sparingly integrates the groups of figures into the scene - whose clothes with crinolines and riding coats instantly date the scene to the 1830s – further confirms this. The sky, which is wide, takes up as good as three-quarters of the composition and it is the impressive manner with which this element has been rendered in all its changing and shifting beauty, that gives the work its originality, which is particularly well served by the use of gouache. The pastel tints, soft and light, together with an unusually deft execution bear witness to Bison’s consummate skills and his romantic sensibility.

Palmanova 1762 - Milan 1844

Born in Palmanova in Friuli in 1762, Giuseppe Bernardino Bison occupies a special place among the painters who prolonged the vedutist tradition at the turn of the 18th...