PROVENANCE -

Conte Pietro Manfrin (d. 28 August 1833), Palazzo Manfrin, Venice.

Private Collection, England.

LITERATURE -

Inventario e stima della Galleria Manfrin, Ms. (ASVe, Conservatoria del registro e tasse, b. 1581, Eredità nuove estinte, fasc. 1443), 23 March 1834, Camera C, no. 4 ‘Tela – Antonio Canal detto Canaletto – Veduta della piazza di San Marco – [Valore austriache lire] 130’.

J.G. Links in W.G. Constable, Canaletto: Giovanni Antonio Canal 1697–1768, 2nd ed. revised by J.G. Links, Oxford, 1976, under no. 169.

L. Borean, La Galleria Manfrin a Venezia. L’ultima collezione d’arte della Serenissima, Udine, 2018, p. 110.

Luca Carlevarijs was the first native Venetian painter of views of the city. Though born in Udine, a Venetian possession since 1420, he was orphaned by the age of seven and was taken as a teenager to Venice in 1679 by his sister Cassandra. They moved into a house on the Fondamenta del Carmine which Carlevarijs was to occupy for the rest of his life. Little is known about the first forty years of his existence. Carlevarijs’s contemporary, the art historian P.A. Orlandi (1660-1727) states that he ‘had no real master, but studied here and there’.[i]

The first fixed point for Luca Carlevarijs as a vedutista is the publication in 1703 of his Le fabriche, e vedute di Venetia disegnate, poste in prospettiva, et intagliate da Luca Carlevarijs, a set of 103 engravings of Venetian views. Without precedent in their scope, compositional variety and convincing perspective, these were to serve as a pattern book for Venetian view painters for decades to follow. In his view paintings, on the other hand, Carlevarijs restricted his subject matter almost exclusively to the area around the Bacino di San Marco and between it and the Piazza San Marco, which would have been most immediately recognizable to foreigners. This no doubt contributed to the speed with which he attracted and built up a Grand Tour clientele. One of his innovations proved of irresistible appeal to visiting dignitaries – views of the city incorporating formal receptions or regattas given in their honour and in which they themselves would feature. The earliest of these is that identified as The Reception of the French Ambassador Joseph-Antoine Hennequin de Charmont at the Doge’s Palace, 29 April 1703, in the Terruzzi Collection.[ii] Venetian views, mostly destined for foreign visitors, dominate Carlevarijs’ work thereafter.

The Galleria Manfrin boasted Giorgione’s Tempesta and La Vecchia, both now in the Gallerie dell’Accademia.[iii]

The painting was misattributed to Canaletto by the early nineteenth century, which is perhaps all the more curious as four capricci by Carlevarijs are recorded in the Manfrin collection.[iv]

Canaletto painted a version of the composition in the early 1740s, now in the Barber Insitute of Fine Arts, Birmingham.[v]

The Galleria Manfrin also included by 1833 the view of The Rio dei Mendicanti and the Scuola di San Marco in the Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice.[vi] Now firmly attributed to Bernardo Bellotto, that is also in the Manfrin inventory as the work of Canaletto.[vii]

[i] ‘non ha avuto positivo maestro, ma ha studiato or qua or là’ (P.A. Orlandi, Abecedario pittorico …, Bologna, 1704, p. 226). 

[ii] Succi, op. cit., pp. 114-16, no. 1, illustrated in colour.

[iii] See L. Borean ‘Il caso Manfrin’, Il collezionismo d’arte a Venezia. Il Settecento, ed. L. Borean and S. Mason, Venice, 2009, pp. 192-216, and Borean, op. cit., passim. 

[iv] 1794 Inventory, nos. 169-70 and 236-7; only three are recorded in the 1834 Inventory, Camera C, no. 23; and Segue camera E, nos. 45 and 60 (Borean and Mason, op. cit., pp.352 and 354; Borean, op. cit., pp. 98, 101, 110, 114 and 115).

[v] Constable, op. cit., I, pl. 18; II, no. 39.

[vi] Ibid., I, pl. 56; II, no. 291, as Attributed to Canaletto.

[vii] 1834 Inventory, Camera C, no. 22 (Borean, op. cit., p. 110).