7. Antonio Canaletto
(1697-1768)
Landscape with a Tower and Two Ruined Pillars

(click on image to print)
Canaletto, Landscape

Landscape with a Tower and Two Ruined Pillars

Etching, 1744-46, 144 x 208 mm., DeVesme 25, P & G 27, Bromberg 28 ii/ii. A fine impression, as usual showing a slight weakness of printing at the tips of the upper left and lower right corners, on laid paper with a fragment of an unidentified watermark and with small margins all around. It took some years before collectors understood that Canaletto’s etchings were not tourists’ vedute (views), but highly imaginative works of art. They are about the play of light (much emphasized since the change in attitude), but there is also an imaginative pictorial idealism about them that proclaims that the scene is not reflective of reality but of something better than reality. In this they are more emotionally moving than many of his paintings.