A Regatta On The Grand Canal transfixes me. The feeling of spectacle, shared endeavour and celebration reaches out from the frame. Everyone is going about their business, whether in boats or in the streets or in the windows of the houses and apartments, on the steps of churches and palaces.
The streets (canals) are crammed with hundreds of people which Canaletto cleverly paints with precisely placed and shaped blobs of colour and black. For a technique so structural and ordered it is amazing how alive he conveys a supposedly chaotic scene.
Then lastly there is Canaletto’s systematic and almost cartoonish covering of white highlights he places all over the painting’s finely rendered details, a controlled but playful counterpoint to all the painstaking work towards realism that went on before. No-one or nothing in the picture escapes this whimsy, the gondoliers, the masked ladies and gentlemen, the festooned parade boats and the waters agitated by all the activity.
Not only can you hear the people you can smell the air, you feel present there. It is all the more seductive as our real situation is changing the whole way we see gatherings of this kind. They are taking on a threatening quality rather than a celebratory one. This picture is not only of a time long past, it also seems nostalgic for a way of being that evokes more emotion in me than might have done if looking at it pre-Covid-19. The irony is not lost on me that the region that the virus has hit the hardest in Europe is Northern Italy, and Venice has cancelled the very event I am witnessing in the painting.