Postcards from an Eighteenth Century Gap Year - Canaletto at the National Gallery

If you were a young and expensively educated nobleman in 1735, you didn’t take your gap year in Thailand or Brazil or India. You went to Italy. Instead of a Full Moon Party, you went to the Carnevale di Venezia and instead of Machu Picchu you climbed Vesuvius. Modern Gap Yahs come back with 1,200 photos destined for Facebook; their eighteenth century counterparts came back with a Canaletto.

Venetian view painters are often cast in a mercenary light. They are the purveyors of dead cert commercial hits. Why starve in a garret when souvenirs sell?  Canaletto was no maverick, no revolutionary.  He painted what the punters ordered: immaculate reproductions of Venice’s top tourist attractions for maximum bragging rights back home. Been there, done that, bought the painting.

The National Gallery’s autumn show Venice: Canaletto and his Rivals demonstrates that commercial success and genuine artistry can go hand in hand. It’s an unshowy exhibition: chronological, safe, uncontroversial, no radical reassessments here. It does however bring together fifty paintings by eleven different artists in such a way that the paintings are allowed speak for themselves. The advantage of such unobtrusive curatorship is that it encourages a certain amount of thinking for oneself. It’s an exhibition which emphasises looking over reading.

Canaletto doesn’t emerge as the uncontested hero. There's no doubt that he's superior to, say, Luca Carlevarijs who tends towards high camp festivities (his regattas would give the Notting Hill Carnival a run for its money) but pitted against a Michele Marieschi or a Francesco Guardi it’s a tightly fought contest.

Marieschi does mind-altering things with perspective. He twists bridges, canals and even entire islands into arrangements which would fox M.C. Escher. He goes in for bold lighting effects: the courtyard of the Doge’s palace cast into Stygian shadows or pink lightening flashing through storm clouds over the Rialto bridge.

Guardi is a wonderfully sinister artist.  Venice can be a creepy, choleric sort of place and Guardi paints the city at its dankest and most overcrowded. His is the Venice of Thomas Mann or Henry James. If you see a flash of red on the jacket of a boatman in a Guardi painting it elicits a Don’t Look Now shiver.

But it’s not all damp, consumptive gloom.  Canaletto, his pupil Bernardo Bellotto and Johan Richter all possess a wicked sense of humour. Richter punctures the ego of a vain gondolier when he has him clamber clumsily from a boat onto a boardwalk with his arse pointing into the air. Bellotto paints a snivelling child wiping his nose on his sleeve while his exasperated father drags him across the Campo. Canaletto crams his paintings full of incidental detail: a trawlerman scratching his backside, a toddler squalling on the ground, a cat licking its armpit, mongrels squaring up to fight.

Venice looks delicious. Palaces and churches are seen through a lattice of ships’ masts and sail ropes.  Pomaded Grand Tourists in full skirts and frock coats (and that’s just the men) promenade through the piazzas past beggars, fishmongers and novice nuns. From every balcony grandees admire the lagoon while housemaids beat dusty brooms from fourth floor windows. No one has ever made Venice look such a desirable holiday destination as Canaletto and his contemporaries.