A View of Walton Bridge
The tourist doesn’t really see Venice. Escape becomes cityscape. Fantasy washes over the scene like a coat of pricey Prussian blue.
But the more the tourist looks for others in these scenes, for replacements of the figure lost from his life, the more he realizes he won’t find them. Oh why can’t these anonymous figures become the face he knows, the face that has left him on his own? The tourist is afraid the only person he’ll find is himself. He wants a vacation, but the part of him that wants this is the part of him he wants to forget.
After he saw the capriccio of Palladio’s bridge, Basilica, and Palazzo, Aldo Rossi, the twentieth-century Italian architect, wrote that Canaletto created “an analogous Venice.” He fashioned a scene “as if the painter had reproduced an actual townscape,” a city “that we recognize, even though it is a place of purely architectural references.”
In other words, Rossi asked a question: it looks like Venice, but why?
For him, Canaletto gave life to an alternative yet functional city, one of “geographical transposition.” The capriccio acknowledges the paths a city never takes and so presents a scene that assumes its counterpart’s shape—a fantasy to chameleon or ghost itself onto the real, just as Canaletto washed and shaded over his early drafts of a veduta.
The realization thrilled Rossi: “I believe I have found in this definition a different sense of history conceived of not simply as fact, but rather as a series of things, of affective objects to be used by the memory or in a design.”
A city as a series of the hypothetical, the what-might-have-been. A city as a space for memory to use, to wander, to pick a trail through unspoken words and unchosen paths. Yet also a space for design, a blueprint for future forms. Either way, a fantasy—the reimagined past or posited future—what Rossi called “an analogical representation that could not have been expressed in words.”
And so perhaps this lends a bit of credit to those critics who argue that if we walked through a Canaletto, we would be reminded of any city. Not just Venice, but Paris, New York, London. Because really Canaletto does not paint cities. He paints possibilities for them.
Rio dei Mendicanti: Looking South
The tourist wakes up the next morning with a hangover. The Venetian sun! Does it ever stop shining? He looks out the back window and sees laundry hanging on the line. He starts to think of his mother back home alone and his father as well, until he notices that he can’t read any of the logos on the drying T-shirts. He checks his contact case and then the trash, but they are both empty, and he blinks many times in quick succession until he feels an itch behind his eyelids. His contacts have done that thing where they travel up into his head. He sighs. He forgot his glasses as well. People will become blurs and he will go the rest of the day hoping the lenses settle back over his eyes so that he can see the sights once again.
If Canaletto created an analogous Venice through its architecture, what did he do for the figures he hatched and crosshatched? Do they form the texture of an alternative city as well, replete with their own fantasies to play out? Do they trace their own analogous lives out and around the corner of Canaletto’s cityscapes?
There is, of course, no real answer to this.
In the painter’s early work, the art historian Michael Levey writes that Canaletto treats “people as people.” They are “lively and individual, not serving as mere puppets or just providing a garnish to the solid meat of architecture . . . His pictures are rich in variety of costume, and even more in variety of action and characters—from boatmen to beggars, via Turks, Jews and priests, servant girls, noblemen, workmen, ladies and children.”
But not so in Canaletto’s later output. He peoples these with “stereotyped figures” (although what is the above quote, one itches to ask, if not a list of exactly that?) and reduces his characters to components within a composition, as replicable as windows in a facade. One needs imagine only the minute, hair’s-width golden ratio spiraled into the background of Whitehall and the Privy Garden from Richmond House to realize figures have become deftly placed forms: they are hieroglyphs, a shorthand of blobs and squiggles. Shapes without clear identity. Architecture. In other words, they cater to what people who have never been to one of Canaletto’s cities expect to see. Their roles are open, their histories anyone’s.
Detail of Whitehall and the Privy Garden from Richmond House
The tourist walks to a nearby Laundromat. His friends are still asleep. He wants a place to rest and nods off in a chair by the dryers. When he wakes up, he decides to walk to the station and take the train back to Rome. Without his contacts, he has trouble reading the street signs and can’t recognize the buildings he passed last night. It’s as if, the tourist thinks, he woke up in another city. He eats McDonald’s in the train station. He licks his fingers and walks to the platform but runs into his friends there. They are going for a cappuccino and cornetto and convince him to spend another day.
It wasn’t just the capriccios. Nearly every one of Canaletto’s paintings utilized some degree of invention or underwent some manipulation at his hand. He was the plastic surgeon of eighteenth-century Venice, the nip/tuck of colonnades and piazzas. He hid and rearranged buildings, lengthened and shortened sunlight and shadows as he pleased, blew distance up or dialed it down. He believed, once again, in the “artistic right to modify, move, and rearrange those facts in the interest of creating a picture.”
Canaletto painted both what was there and what was better off there, the large-scale logic founded upon the detailed lie. He fashioned the idealized into the believable and won that “old victory of arrangement over accumulation,” as Susan Sontag puts it. So that when a critic says that Canaletto “perceive[s] a serene, ordered structure of universal significance”—in a city’s fluted columns and arcades or its rows of rounded stone-set windows—that perception implies a good deal of eighteenth-century airbrushing.
A question wiggles its way in here: Isn’t there some complicity in all this? Doesn’t the viewer, the tourist, the eye desire deception? Don’t we want exactly what Canaletto gives us? To be able to forget, to be able to sigh and wish for a place and people that never existed?
Piazza San Marco
The tourist has rallied himself and taken a boat to the Murano islands, walked the arcades at Piazza San Marco, seen the Bridge of Sighs, and stopped in a cybercafé to write two emails. He tries to speak to the waiter at the trattoria where he eats lunch but doesn’t know enough of the language to make it past come vai and di dove é. He takes photographs and decides that when he arrives home again, he will make a gallery of the pictures. In both emails, he uses the phrase “I feel as if I’m seeing the real Venice.” The tourist has found in this declaration a different and alternative sense of history.
The painter puts the old drafts away and selects a fresh piece of paper. He stretches, rubs his hands, sips his muddy Venetian coffee. The sun comes out from behind a momentary cloud. And just like that Canaletto begins his sketch, his scaraboti, his quick crosshatch and etch. He slides out a drafting compass to help round the basilica’s domes, stretches his ruler flat to outline the square. He chalks a few figures on the ground—the blurry bellflower of a doge’s robe, the sweep with the flat of a pen to curve a sailor’s falling sash.
And then, once this is done, he arranges his oils. He paints from strength to weakness: first the sky, softened to a duller glow; then the buildings, worked up with impasto, layer upon layer of paint to bring sculpture to the canvas; then the water, so viscous and oily that the joke is he discovered pollution before it even had the chance to reach Venice; and finally the figures, those shapely ornaments to dot and fill a plane.
Except, of course, none of this is true. Or rather, the process is true, but the location is just another caprice. Canaletto did make rough sketches on scene, but the chances of his painting out of doors are nothing more than wishful thinking.
A misconception spread by Alessandro Marchesini, his first agent, to serve as selling point. Much like the tourist, Canaletto was never actually there. He painted from points of view—fifteen feet above the Grand Canal—that were impossible to inhabit. And so one more thing to add to the list of unknowns: how did he achieve a position that required fantasy to embody? We don’t know how he was able to see what he saw (with such detail! with such precision!), much less where he stood to begin with.
The Grand Canal and the Church of the Salute
The tourist takes a train back to Rome that night. His headache is gone. He lies down across his row of seats and bunches his jacket up beneath his head. He puts on his headphones. The conduttore makes a squiggle on his ticket and he mouths grazie. He closes his eyes and listens to music. The train makes many stops and at each one he opens his eyes and watches a few people file off. Then the train makes a stop and doesn’t start again. The lights turn off. He sits up, removes his earbuds. The engine turns off. A car is decabled. He looks around and doesn’t see anyone. He runs to the end of the car and peers through the glass, then runs to the other end of the car and does the same. He cups his hands and looks out the window on to his own reflection. Then he moves his head closer and looks out again. He sees black. No one is there.
Canaletto also used (and here Ruskin’s cries of “mindless imitation” and “daguerreotypeism” echo briefly) a camera obscura. It allowed him to frame a scene from multiple perspectives at once, to sketch and sow together a view more expansive than the one offered by reality. Visit his scenes and you will find no single point that encompasses their arrangement of buildings and water.
Although this shouldn’t constitute too much of a surprise: Canaletto was once an opera set designer, after all. Flights of fancy constitute the norm.
What if we then thought of Canaletto as trained not so much to insert fantasy into reality, but reality into fantasy? If the capriccio substitutes for the real thing, then does that captured city somehow become more representative of Venice than Venice itself? Is the city that can’t be seen—the city that requires some analogy or manufactured perspective to bring it into existence—any less real than the city that can?
And is the person who remains invisible any less real than the person who can be seen, than the anonymous figures the tourist decides to place meaning upon?
Piazza San Marco Looking South and West
The tourist pries open the car doors and walks back along the tracks. He passes solitary, detached cars. He’s in a refueling station, but it looks like a train graveyard. He’s outside a city, but he’s not sure which one. Up ahead a light shines from a single train car. He crosses the tracks and approaches it. Three men in uniform gather there. Two lean against the car’s side and the third sits on the steps. The tourist waves and says Ciao. The seated man stands up and walks down a step. Then he walks down the rest and stands with the others. The light pools. The tourist sees the men in close-up; he sees their faces as fully as he can see another’s face. They look at him and wait. His hands fumble again for his ticket. He realizes he’s now at the mercy of another’s whimsy. More practically, he realizes that, never having bothered to learn the language, he has no idea how to tell these men who he really is. He realizes he doesn’t even know the words to say “I am lost,” much less to explain that he never knew where he was to begin with.
But let us end on a high note. The Stonemason’s Yard is Canaletto at his finest, the perfect balance between his early and more developed styles. The painting bustles with life and the suggestions of the small everyday narratives that take place within the anonymous activities of a city. A small pantsless boy urinates in the foreground. A woman leans out her second-story balcony to whip a sheet through the air. Note how easily the eye is led across the water to the tower of the Carita across the way. Whistler compared this painting to Velásquez; even Ruskin admired it, admitting to a “determined depreciation” of Canaletto on his part.
On the left-hand side of the painting, there’s a breadth of alleyway, a slight shiver of light across the water. Here Canaletto “suggests the continuous, unfolding, and ever-alluring experience of the city.” He hints at what’s just out of sight, the next turn around the corner, the ever-expanding Venice, all the paths the viewer cannot take. One’s tempted to use Canaletto as map and compass, to stitch all his views and angles together to form one grand city of analogies, a city in which you can walk around the corner of one scene and into the next. The experiment would fail, of course—we would find ourselves in a city of gaps and lacunae, of hopeless doublings and overlay, an architectural chimera or worse, a Frankenstein as disordered and jumbled and prone to blackout as memory. We must not lose ourselves. That “serene, ordered structure”—one needs to privilege something just to make it back home at the end of the day. We must be content with the limits and edges of Canaletto’s paintings and leave those other cities to him. We will abandon him then, to pack up his pens and paper at the end of the day and make his lonely walk back home to the solitude no one knows about, out of the picture, out of Venice, out of Canaletto, somewhere and someone else entirely.
The Stonemason’s Yard
There are other times, stumbling around a corner, the afternoon sun nowhere to be seen, a shopping bag of souvenirs from Canal Street clinking against his leg, snowglobes and key chains and a five-by-eight-inch Venetian watercolor, when the bifocals are lifted, the contacts settle back in, and the tourist sees two figures frozen, about to move. There is a space between them as if meant for a small child, as if the hands are waiting for the child to rush up and grab them. He finds himself magically again in a Canaletto, a place that exists how he wants it to exist. He sees, in all its sunlight, a life for the analogy it might once have been.
The Rock Shop
Roger sets his sixty-four-ounce Polar Pop down on a case of Hohokam axes and says he wants to be preserved in amber when he dies. He throws his head back and shivers his limbs out to mimic a fly. His eyes flutter and neck strains, his expression stuck somewhere between ecstasy and grimace.
Roger mentions how humans have been preserving each other for centuries. The “tar people,” murdered bodies found in bogs, kept in tannic acid. Vampires with stakes stuck through their throats. A frozen iceman in Scandinavia discovered with his penis stolen.
Beads of cola sweat down from the rim of Roger’s Styrofoam cup. The axe heads are made of stone, willow branches boiled and wrapped around them for the handle, rawhide strapped around that for the grip. A rancher and his sons found them while grazing their cattle. Roger picks up his Pop and describes the kiva houses where the Hohokam held weddings. He leans in. Elders would take peyote and psilocybin, he whispers, and then ceremonially rape the child-bride.
As for the amber, Roger straightens up. “I decided I wanted to look out on all my belongings forever.” He gestures around the room, sips his soda, laughs. “Naked,” he adds.
The belongings Roger refers to sit twenty miles outside Tucson on Kinney Road, the lonely two-laner where you gas up before hitting the interstate south to Mexico. Nearby is a rifle and pistol range, a saguaro forest, and Old Tucson, a studio town of saloon doors and replica hitching posts that Hollywood built in the 1950s to film Westerns. A big canvas teepee stands in a gravel lot off Kinney where Geronimo’s grandson, or so he claimed, held court, charging tourists a dollar to take his picture until the day he was found in the mountains outside Oracle, slumped over in the van he was forbidden to drive since he was over one hundred years old.
Next to this teepee, tucked slightly off the road, you’ll find a storefront. Its wood will be weathered the color of root beer, its facade as if built for an Old Tucson shoot and then never taken down.
This is Roger’s shop. Rocks of all shapes and sizes fill its yard. Rocks in old wheelbarrows and mine trolleys. Rocks on a foldout table, in baskets and wire mesh cages. Rocks in a shallow ditch with wood trim where a garden was
once planned then thought better of. Geodes, two dollars a pound. Banded Onyx, one dollar. A green pickup in the gravel parking lot. On the glass of the store windows, stenciled-out cowboys ride over hills. A sign, handwritten in white paint, says, “We have a large selection of quartz crystals inside.” Another: “Proud To Be An American.” A third: “Open 9–5, Every Day of the Year.”
The Book of Resting Places Page 8
