There are also capriccios which are very different from those of  Canaletto and Guardi. Some are architectural fragments, which artists construct into weather-beaten murky mazes. Giambattista Piranesi was working as an artist in Rome at the time; his pictures, more than anyone else’s, illustrate this architectural juggling, making shivering enchantments with shadowy shapes for those who wished to nourish their dark imaginings. Also working in Venice was  Giuseppe Bernardino Bisson. With great ingenuity he brought buildings out of a distant past, combining them in a romantic, suggestive world s. 00, . At that time archaeology was all the rage and as so often with a new discipline, the interest in it was fed by a longing to discover miraculous worlds, to be seen here in the enchantment of a tiny gleam of light in an immense darkness.  

Venetian vedute painters left for other countries when their own city ceased to offer sufficient employment. But not only the painters of cityscapes packed their bags. History painters too, fanned out across Europe and with them the architects, the plasterers and other skilled decorators. This is the second reason for the great flight of 18th-century Venetian art. When the foreigners stopped coming to Venice, her artists went in search of the foreigners. Thus Venice became the first city to produce a truly European art. Venetians were to be found in St Petersburg, decorating splendid palaces for Catharine the Great. Indeed, the architect of the Hermitage, Carlo Bartolomeo Francesco Rastrelli, made no bones about how much he had learned in Venice. It’s no exaggeration to claim that Catherine and her court developed a Venetian taste. 

The Venetian Francesco Casanova, brother of the more famous seducer Giacomo, was one of  Catharine’s favourite painters. His work has recently been brought to the public attention by Irina  Artemieva, curator of Venetian Paintings at the Hermitage. One work by him in the collection there depicts a battle, very much in the style of Philips Wouwerman, but painted with a more powerful and vivid brushstroke. It is an eloquent reminder of the fact that war was once one of the greatest sources of inspiration for art .
 Among the oldest possessions of this museum are a considerable number of 18th-century Venetian paintings. For instance, there is a design drawing by Bartolomeo Tarsia for a painting that has been lost, intended to decorate one of the ceilings in Peterhof . .

The greatest Venetian artist to find employment outside his city was Giambattista Tiepolo s.  German princes and Spanish kings regarded him as the artistic genius of the eighteenth century. What Joseph Smith was for Canaletto, that was Count Francesco Algarotti for Tiepolo. Smith lodged in Venice and negotiated with wealthy tourists to purchase paintings of the vedute by his protégé. Count Algarotti went travelling. He was the perfect courtier, an elegant conversationalist, a man of wit, ambition and flair. He managed to pull in the most sensational commissions for Tiepolo, to paint the decorations in royal palaces. 

The Hermitage possesses a unique example of Algarotti’s arbitrations .  The representation was an idea of Algarotti’s, intended to ingratiate his painter with Count Heinrich Brühl, the powerful minister of August III. At the left of the painting, beside the enthroned emperor, is the figure of Maecenas, wealthy patron of the arts, presenting the personifications of the Fine Arts to the emperor Augustus in Rome. First comes Painting, with brush and palette. She also has a mask as attribute, which can be seen lying on one of the steps leading up to the throne. Behind her comes Sculpture, bearing a marble bust, followed by Architecture, with a pair of compasses. Then follows Music with a trumpet, leading the blind Homer, who represents Poetry.  The throne on which Augustus sits is flanked by images of Minerva and Apollo. Workmen can be seen in the background, busy completing an immense loggia. Through the archway on the left is a view of the palace of Count Brühl.

The message of this painting is patent. Furthermore, Algarotti wrote a letter clarifying his intentions: ‘Brühl, you are a perfect Maecenas and your counsels will turn the court of the New Augustus into a blossoming bed of culture. Dresden will become a new Rome.’ What he also wished to imply was: ‘But then I must be the architect and Tiepolo the artist.’ But unfortunately, Algarotti’s plans fizzled into nothing – although we do have to thank him for this magnificent painting as well as another work depicting Flora (now in the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco). In any case, he did at least manage to arouse an interest for Venetian history painters in the city of Dresden. And although not for August III, Tiepolo did leave a German palace with an example of one of the pinnacles of European painting. In the Residenz in Würzberg his wall painting adds allure to the monumental architecture, entirely as he had wanted. He has transformed an earthly house into a celestial dwelling place, conveying a dizzying illusion of airy life and light. 

But as for psychological profundity – don’t expect it from Tiepolo. He is, however, capable of orchestrating the most complicated scenario and forging it into a decorative unity as if this were child’s play. The adjective ‘decorative’ is quite often used in Dutch with a negative connotation when speaking of a painting, in the sense, ‘Oh, it’s only a decorative picture’. But in the Venice of the 18th century unabashed decoration, painterly skill that creates joy for the eye, was one of the major artistic challenges facing any artist. 

In the exhibition there is a design drawing for a painted ceiling, by Giuseppe Valeriano. This shows very clearly how ornamentation and figural composition is conceived as one decorative whole. There is also an oil sketch – known as a  bozzetto – by Giambattista Tiepolo’s son Giandomenico. Such sketches would often be shown to the commissioner of a work to convince him or her of the decorative quality of the composition .. This sketch is an example of brilliant illusionism. But Giambattista was a creative wizard.
There is a small painting by him in the Hermitage which displays all his exceptional qualities. The painting shows the Annunciation. This scene – the meeting between the angel and the woman chosen to be God’s mother – was reproduced countless times, an inspiration for many stimulating theological and psychological representations. Not so here. Giambattista’s work concerns the  dynamics of the angel appearing to Mary, whose attitude and gesture capture as it were the angel’s movement. A cloud thickens into the angel’s form, the woman emerges out of colours.

There was also a genre painter at work in 18th-century Venice. His name is Pietro Longhi. Whenever I see a painting by him, I am forced to recall what Michael Levey said of him in his book Painting in XVIII Century Venice. That work was a real eye-opener for me regarding the cultural-historical dimension of 18th-century Venetian painting. Indeed, it is one of the best studies about art that I know of. Levey compares Longhi’s tableaux showing daily life with other genre paintings and observes that Longhi never really seems to take sides with his figures. True, something is happening in his pictures but no one appears particularly interested. It’s just happening. Thus an alienating emptiness dominates his work. And this emptiness, according to Levey, is part of a culture in which it is dangerous to be really involved. Art produces a grandiose décor for a society on the verge of disintegration, with a corrupt government chiefly held together by the power of the secret police. Painting is not the only thing to wear a mask. But the quality of the décor is such that we can forget everything else; we abandon ourselves to bathe in visual ecstasy.

Venice managed to keep one great artist: Giambattista Piazzetta .His work is characterized by the meticulous silky softness of his modelé and colouring that suggests it has absorbed the light. Further, he could let his figures float upon the clouds and never lose themselves in a coloured mist. Tangibly present, his figures retain their plastic lines. His colouring too is deeper, with beautiful tones of black, grey and red. In a drawing of a woman’s head, attributed to him, you see how close to the viewer he brings a face, partly by having it fill the page, and also with his meticulous shaping and shading. Looking at his work you feel a connection with the 17th-century Venetian painters and with a tradition that ultimately leads back to Caravaggio.

One of the works by Piazzetta in the exhibition is a drawing illustrating a scene from Ludovico Ariosto’s work Orlando Furioso . . The drawing illustrates the masterly manner in which Piazzetta makes use of the white of the drawing paper. With his modelé he brings relief into that white and the figures gain a marvellous sensuality. Compare this with drawings by Tiepolo s. In these the white of the paper is also given a highly explicit significance by the virtuosic manner in which the figures are drawn by pen. But Tiepolo makes a kind of colour patchwork from the white. He is interested in the power of persuasion that a suggestion may have, while what Piazzetta wants to do is give life to  the plastic reality of his figural compositions on paper. In certain German states there was considerable demand for Piazzetta. But he stayed in his native city and was appointed the first director of the Academy of Fine Arts there. But in the end, he paid the price for becoming a fixture. No more commissions arrived. He died in poverty in 1754. His successor as academy director was Tiepolo, now a famous artist in whose idiom a whole generation of history painters went to work. Towards the end of his life as a painter, Tiepolo achieved a powerful dramatic atmosphere in his religious works. He died in Spain in 1770.

Henk van Os
Saint Petersburg, 10 June 2004 (translated from the Dutch by Wendie Shaffer)