A Gondola Trip down the Grand Canal

It's a perfect day in Venice, that most picturesque of cities, most desired of travel destinations. Just look at those fluffy clouds in the sky. Not too hot, not too sunny. Scarcely more than a light breeze to stir the surface of the canals. Certainly no hint of a flood in the offing for this miracle of civilisation constructed in a lagoon in the Adriatic Sea.

 
Your gondola awaits. Climb aboard for an hour or so, for a trip around the sights. Your guide is none other than Canaletto, that master of the 18th-century painted cityscape and a man who has helped shape our vision of Venice right down to the present day. This is Canaletto's Venice Revisited, at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich.

There are 24 stops on this tour, 24 canvases by Canaletto. They've come to Greenwich from Woburn Abbey in Bedfordshire, where they normally hang in the dining room, but which is now undergoing restoration. This exhibition offers a rare chance to view all these paintings at eye level, to devote time to them individually. And also, and we'll come back to this later, to think about Venice in peril, a city now threatened with destruction through overtourism, depopulation and climate change.

It was early tourism, though, that brought these canvases to England in the first place. Lord John Russell, the future 4th Duke of Bedford, commissioned the pictures as a souvenir of his stay in Venice in 1731. He paid Canaletto at least £188 for the series, which sounds a snip, until you consider that that was more than five times the annual earnings of a skilled tradesman.

Venice was a stop on Russell's Grand Tour, designed to round off the young man's education with an exposure to the classical art and history of Europe. In many cases, well-heeled young Brits just went to Italy. Russell, however, devised an ambitious 85-city itinerary, akin to a fantasy gap-year Interrail schedule, taking him as far away as Marrakesh, Damascus, Agra, Samarkand and Moscow.

But there's no room here to explore the Taj Mahal or the Kremlin; let's head off down the Grand Canal.

And let Canaletto show you not just the great sights -- the Doge's Palace, St Mark's Cathedral, the Rialto Bridge -- but also the everyday life of the city. It really does seem to be la dolce vita; everything is so easy on the eye, daily tasks don't look in any way strenuous and the architecture is so harmonious, with its regular design complimenting the soft colouring.

 
As you travel along sedately, the excellent captions are your interpreters, ensuring, for example, that you don't miss the laundresses hanging out white linen to dry high above the canals.

Look out, too, for more workers on the skyline. In one picture, a palazzo has a temporary wooden roof, awaiting a tiled replacement. There are labourers on top of another building across the canal, apparently busy, though not frantically so, with retiling. Once you get an eye for it, you see an awful lot of rooftop workers around, carrying out what must have been frequent repairs. And everywhere, there are the huge chimneys that appear like flowers about to open, so designed, we learn, to catch any embers that have blown up the flue and pose a fire risk.

Canaletto's extensive output and, let's be fair, a certain repetition of subject matter, might lead you to think he just whipped off one painting after another in a hurried fashion to meet the demands of those young lords eager for reminders of their Grand Tour. But it's absolutely worth taking the time to explore the details of these pictures; Canaletto was surely influenced in some fashion by the Dutch cityscapes from the previous century of artists like Gerrit Berckheyde or the church scenes of Emanuel de Witte, with their profusion of human and canine incident.

And just like in Johannes Vermeer's View of Delft, Canaletto wasn't averse to moving round the architecture of Venice to create a more pleasing composition.

Here's your chance, too, to appreciate Canaletto's painting style; these are complex pictures but in many ways the application of paint seems pared back. Swishes of cream or beige paint produce awnings or tarpaulins; crowd scenes are almost pointillist, with a black dot for a hat above a whitish dot for a head, below which is a tiny smudge of red or blue paint indicating the upper body.

Nor is Canaletto's water particularly intricate; the greeny blue of the canal is covered in fine wisps of white to suggest the ripples on the surface. Movement is also conveyed in the careful placement of the ferò da próva, the distinctive prow of a gondola. On occasion, you can see the ferò da próva at the edge of the frame, suggesting the boat is just entering the painting.

And part of the pleasure comes from the muted and golden tones of southern Europe which are shown off to perfection in this superbly lit exhibition. Crimson is softened with a burnt brown. The works ooze with caramel and clotted cream. The buildings are mellow with old pink and terracotta. And the busy regularity of architectural features like balustrades is softened by golden honey. Reflections of boats and buildings in the water take off harsh edges.

Canaletto's paintings are of course Russell's expensive set of picture postcards home; the beauty that is Venice. But even though the pictures do demonstrate Venice at work, everything appears as ordered as in 17th-century Holland; there's no real hint of the darker, grimmer side of life, nothing to show the outbreaks of disease and pestilence that came with the city's prominent place in international trade and the tightly packed housing, even if the curators are on hand to tell us in one caption of a church that was built after a bout of plague.

Other dangers face Venice today, of course, and towards the end of the exhibition there's a wealth of visual and audio material to demonstrate how flooding in the city has been increasing, how mass tourism has completely changed its face, and just how inexorably the inhabitants have been leaving town. Scientists have studied the position of the green algae marks indicating high water on canalside buildings in Canaletto's paintings and compared them with the current staining, suggesting that the sea level has risen by 60cm over that time, caused by a combination of climate change and subsidence.

Venice is in a truly desperate plight, sinking into the mud and plagued by swarms of day trippers who bring little to the local economy. At least the massive cruise liners that disgorged waste into the fragile lagoon waters have now been banned from docking in the city centre.

We did have a slight feeling that this wonderful display of Canalettos and the rather less wonderful but necessary warnings about the fate facing the city had been to a certain extent shoehorned together. But there's a really eye-catching depressing physical exhibit on display that hammers home the point in the shape of these single-use plastic boots, sold to tourists to wade through the flooded streets of Venice.

If flooding in Venice is part of the new Grand Tour, we really aren't taking climate change seriously, are we?

Practicalities

Canaletto's Venice Revisited is on at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, south-east London until September 25. It's open every day from 1000 to 1700. Full-price tickets are a reasonable £10 and can be booked online here. Allow 75 minutes or so for this show. The Maritime Museum is about five minutes walk from Cutty Sark station on the Docklands Light Railway; Greenwich station on the National Rail network with trains from London Bridge is a little further away.

Images

Canaletto, View of the Doge's Palace at the Piazzetta Seen from the Bacino, 1731-36, Woburn Abbey Collection
Canaletto, View on the Grand Canal, with the Bridge of the Rialto and the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, and the Palazzo dei Camerlenghi on the Left, 1731-36, Woburn Abbey Collection
Canaletto, detail from The Scuola di San Rocco, 1731-36, Woburn Abbey Collection
Canaletto, detail from View of the Grand Canal from the Palazzo Bembo to Palazzo Vendramin-Calergi, 1731-36, Woburn Abbey Collection
Canaletto, detail from The Piazza San Marco Looking from the Basilica San Marco to the Church of San Geminiano, 1731-36, Woburn Abbey Collection
Canaletto, The Entrance to the Grand Canal, with the Dogana and the Church of Santa Maria della Salute, 1731-36, Woburn Abbey Collection
Single-use plastic boots for protection from Venice floodwaters displayed in exhibition