Up close and personal with Canaletto

I've seen Canalettos in books. I've seen Canalettos on screens. I've seen Canalettos from 20 feet away as I've passed through the room full of Canalettos on my way somewhere else. One thing I've never done is put in the time just a few inches away from one. This changed on Sunday.

As so many painters have down the ages, Canaletto found a style and a subject and started churning out exquisite pieces almost like a production line. He is known for waterside views, typically with a placid sky, a lot of detail and plenty of human activity in the foreground and he did it very well and was in high demand as a result. What I find interesting is the bag of tricks he developed; his curious vocabulary.

Firstly, those glowing skies. They are exactly as I suspected - simple, slightly uneven graduations of closely-related colour heavily mixed with white which have all brush marks brushed out combined with delicate glazes - frequently including an interesting polluted brown tone - over which are painted thin, not-quite-flat, translucent areas for clouds. These are painted in simple, confident strokes and take on the underlying colour. Some are whiter, some are darker but the colour is carefully mixed. Finally there are a handful of thicker marks in a warm white which are far more opaque than anything else in the sky and are blended into the translucent areas. In the instance above, we have a clear bright blue with a much warmer blue mottled on top. Then this warm blue is combined with white to form the basis of a cloud and finally a warm white is painted on more thickly. He uses these thicker areas to give structure to the clouds, bring brightness and warmth to the sky and most of all as a contrast. The juxtaposition of their marks (perhaps the most physical part of the whole painting) with the perfectly glazed sky is surely intended to make the sky more delicate. The existence of these clear marks draws attention to the absence of any other marks in the vicinity. There is a delicate balance to be found; if the marks are too obvious then the sky becomes more physical than desired. If the balance is found the sky becomes an absence and the rest of the painting then seems more physical and more real.

The second thing I find fascinating is his approach to detail. By and large a painter has a decision to make - more liveliness or more detail. Too much detail and a painting becomes stultifying and lifeless. Less detail and the painting has the potential to live and breathe but there comes a point at which it becomes very difficult to read. A look through Turner's development will clearly show you a painter spending a lifetime grappling with this issue and starting a painting revolution as a result. As far as I can tell the secret is to give enough hints that the viewer's brain assumes there is more detail than there really is. That certainly appears to be Canaletto's approach. The curious thing is that his hints of detail are calligraphic rather than painterly. He draws wave shapes on the surface of the water. The details on the buildings are a simple grid of lines. People in the foreground are heavily stylised and those further back are nothing but an oval and a dot. Highlights are little beads of white paint standing proud of the surface. Again and again, details are just a line drawn in translucent paint. Again and again, they are just enough to tell your brain what to tell you at a distance. Up close, the calligraphic nature of the details makes the surface come alive in the same way that a more painterly surface comes alive. It is without doubt very clever and very well judged. It must take a very special temperament to do it so consistently without becoming mechanical.