Chapter 1. The arrival of this aesthetic.

            When Canaletto arrived in London in 1746, 209 years before Andreas Gursky was born, he brought a new idea[i] for a landscape market that had been flooded with 17^th century Dutch and Arcadian examples for years.[ii]  The older styles[iii] had a slow reveal, an intimate showing of their terrain to the eye in patches of light and shade.[iv]  Both aesthetics, in which the artist "composed" a landscape, harmonizing it by viewpoint, corroborate the 17^th century notion that space, a priori, is comprised of more and less important parts.[v]  By the mid-18^th century in England, that idea was enchanting nostalgia[vi] (which sold well) to wealthy Londoners of Enlightenment sensibilities, the very patrons to whom Canaletto hoped his new vedute—of their city now, no longer souvenirs of Venice—would appeal as an aesthetic of rationality.

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[i] This is not true—British travelers bought Canaletto during the 1720s and 30s in Venice.  Change this sentence to say something like "Canaletto brought Londoners a new way of seeing their city," or some such thing.

[ii] Allen, Brian.  "The London Art World of the Mid-Eighteenth Century." Canaletto in England: A Venetian Artist Abroad.  New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007, p. 35.

[iii] I include within this very-broad concept the 18^th-century British imitators of 17^th-century Dutch and Rome-based painting (George Lambert, John Wootton, the Smiths of Chichester, Richard Wilson) who sold well in the English marketplace, after most of the 17^th century foreign masters had been bought (cf. Barrell, p. 4, and Allen, p. 31).

[iv] For more on the compositional structure of Arcadian landscapes, particularly Claude Lorrain's, see: Barrell, John.  The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place. Cambridge: University Press, 1972, p. 1-12.  Barrell argues, with Tim Clark, that in Claude's (as well as Poussin's, Rosa's, and imitators) that one's eye moves from the foreground to the horizon before becoming engaged in a back-and-forth movement between the two, at which point the viewer takes in the various "stages" of distances in the painting.

[v] Footnote needed.

[vi] Not just for a bygone era of thought, but also for the Grand Tour.  However, Barrell cautions the latter: "[James] Boswell seems to have been more struck by the lack of interest shown by his compatriots in the galleries of Florence, and tells of two gentlemen who preferred to hop to the end of the Uffizi and back, for a bet, than make a respectful examination of the pictures" (p. 4).  However, it is possible that Canaletto's British patrons were nostalgic for the clarity views they attempted, or hired someone, to draw with the aid of a camera obscura.

The city's aristocrats bought every canvas the Venetian painted, but London's artists were not impressed.  Joshua Reynolds, intent on igniting a "grand style" of British painting within a disenfranchised generation of English artists, wanted none of Canaletto's "imitation," brushing off the entire Venetian school in 1759 as "the Dutch part of Italian genius."[i]  Reynolds, like art historians soon to come, didn't see the poetics of depiction that attended to the "petty peculiarities" of "literal truth and a minute exactness in the details"[ii]—pictures content to describe the world precisely as one commonly thinks it appears to the eye.  "It may appear strange," Reynolds argued,

…to hear this sense of the rule [Imitate Nature] disputed; but it must be considered, that if the excellency of a Painter consisted only in this kind of imitation, Painting must lose its rank, and be no longer considered as a liberal art, and sister to Poetry: this imitation being merely mechanical, in which the slowest intellect is always sure to succeed best; for the Painter of genius cannot stoop to drudgery, in which the understanding has no part; and what pretence has the Art to claim kindred with Poetry, but by its power over the imagination?[iii]

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[i] Reynolds, Joshua.  "To the Idler," no. 79 (Saturday, 20 October 1759, originally in the magazine Universal Chronicle), reprinted in The Literary Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds.  H.G. Bohn: London, 1846, p. 129-30.

[ii] C.f. Reynolds, "To the Idler," no. 79, p. 127.

[iii] C.f. Reynolds, "To the Idler," no. 79, p. 127.

Reynolds' dispute with "mechanical imitation" is aesthetic and prophetic for many reasons, but political at least for one.  Followers of Samuel Johnson's The Idler would have also understood by "mechanical imitation" the "drudgery" London's ambitious painters reviled—churning out Dutch or Venetian "views" for tasteless, cheeseparing aristocrats.[i]  Even if Reynolds' judgment was not sincere (which it surely was), his protectionist xenophobia would have already precluded him—and the "enlightened" members of Johnson's "Club"[ii]—from recognizing in the Dutch and Venetian styles the basis for a poetics akin to their philosophical moment.  Besides, for Reynolds, the extant sublimity of Michelangelo and Rafael[iii] proved once and for all that catering to the eye (or worse, the camera obscura[iv]) wasted the poetic capacities of both the imagination and the brush. 

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[i] C.f. Allen, p. 32-36.  While Reynolds seems to have escaped this chore, even Gainsborough did not, producing, with a cadre of English artists, roundel landscapes in the Venetian mode for the Foundling Hospital. 

[ii] Reynolds, Johnson, Edmund Burke, Oliver Goldsmith, Giuseppe Baretti, Adam Smith, Henry Thrale, David Garrick, and Angelica Kauffman, among others.

[iii] C.f. Reynolds, "To the Idler," no. 79, p. 129.  Reynolds appeals to these painters throughout his Discourses and his Journey to Flanders and Holland.

[iv] Another implied target of the epithet "mechanical imitation."