Canaletto

Canaletto painted Venice with such precision that his views were bought as souvenirs and are now used as evidence. Born Giovanni Antonio Canal in Venice in 1697, he was the son of a theatrical scene painter and worked in that trade with his father, which taught him perspective and stage-set composition before he painted a picture. He went to Rome around 1719, saw the topographical views of Giovanni Paolo Panini, and returned determined to paint the vedute of his own city. His pictures are meticulous — the play of light on water, the brickwork of the Doge's Palace, the rigging of ships, the figures on the Riva — and they are not photographic. He rearranged buildings, widened canals, shifted viewpoints and combined vistas that cannot be seen together, producing an ideal Venice that is more convincing than the real one. He is thought to have used a camera obscura; one bearing his name survives in Venice. His market was the British Grand Tour. The merchant and later consul Joseph Smith acted as his agent, commissioning and selling to English visitors, and Smith's collection was eventually sold to George III, which is why the Royal Collection holds the largest group of his work. The War of the Austrian Succession stopped the tourist traffic, and Canaletto moved to England in 1746, staying nearly ten years and painting the Thames, Whitehall, Warwick Castle and Old Walton Bridge. His English work was thought stiff, and a rumour circulated that he was an impostor; he advertised public viewings of himself painting to answer it. He returned to Venice and died there in 1768.

• Lived: 1697 CE – 1768 CE
• Nationality: Italian
• Roles: painter