veduta

Veduta is the Italian word for 'view,' from the past participle of vedere (to see), from Latin vidēre. In art history, a veduta (plural vedute) is a highly detailed, large-format painting or print of a city view, typically depicting a recognizable scene with topographic accuracy. The genre emerged in the seventeenth century and reached its peak in eighteenth-century Venice, where the Grand Tour brought wealthy British, French, and German travelers who wanted painted records of what they had seen.

Giovanni Antonio Canal, called Canaletto, was the veduta's greatest practitioner. Working in Venice from the 1720s through the 1760s, he produced hundreds of paintings showing the Grand Canal, the Piazza San Marco, the Rialto Bridge, and other landmarks with an accuracy that bordered on cartographic. He used a camera obscura — a darkened box with a lens that projected the scene onto paper — to achieve precise perspective. His British patron Joseph Smith, the British consul in Venice, brokered sales to English collectors. Canaletto's vedute of Venice now hang in English country houses from Norfolk to Somerset.

The veduta had a cousin: the veduta ideata, or 'ideal view,' which combined real architectural elements in imaginary compositions. Giovanni Battista Piranesi's engravings of Roman ruins, published from the 1740s onward, often mixed accurate depictions with invented elaborations. The boundary between documentary and imaginative blurred. A veduta could be true to the scene, true to the feeling, or true to neither.

Photography made the veduta's documentary function obsolete after the 1840s. Why commission a painted view when a photograph cost a fraction of the price and took minutes instead of months? The veduta survived as a historical genre and as a collector's item. Canaletto's paintings, originally bought as souvenirs for a few pounds, now sell for tens of millions. The view became priceless after the need for it disappeared.