Holy Laboratory
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Book Series
In the Shadow of the Lion of St. Mark, vol. 7
Venice Reimagined
The Resurgence of View Painting in Venice after the Fall of the Serenissima between 1797 and 1866
William Barcham
- Pages: 224 p.
- Size:240 x 240 mm
- Illustrations:186 col.
- Language(s):English
- Publication Year:2026
- € 125,00 EXCL. VAT RETAIL PRICE
- ISBN: 978-1-915487-71-1
- Hardback
- Forthcoming (Oct/26)
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This book explores how nineteenth-century Venetian viewscapes deviated from those of Antonio Canaletto and Francesco Guardi of the preceding one hundred years.
Subject(s)
BIO
William Barcham has written books, articles and exhibition essays on eighteenth-century art in Venice, especially on Giambattista Tiepolo, Antonio Canaletto and their contemporaries. Author of a biography of the Venetian cardinal Federico Cornaro, Bernini’s patron for the St. Theresa Chapel in S. Maria della Vittoria, Rome, he also collaborated with Catherine Puglisi on a monograph on the figure of the Man of Sorrows in the Venetian artistic tradition (Brepols 2019).
Summary
This book is the first comprehensive study of Venetian viewscapes painted between 1797, when the Republic of Venice fell to Napoleon’s armies, and 1866, the date of the city’s annexation into the new Kingdom of Italy. By examining the works of an international array of artists—nearly sixty men and one woman—from Venice and Europe, the U.S. and South America, and studying their art against Venetian political history of the period, I open a vivid panorama onto the artistic response to one of the world’s unique cities during foreign occupation, an era of national uprisings and the Industrial Revolution. Departing from Canaletto’s and Guardi’s viewscapes of the previous century, those of the nineteenth century yield many surprises. Some artists like Richard Bonington depicted old sites but from novel vantage points; Ippolito Caffi and others portrayed neighborhoods never before considered; watercolors of anonymous bridges and small corners of the city by James Holland and William Callow attracted collectors as did their oil paintings of famous monuments; and a number of foreign painters such as Peter Christian Skovgaard and Edward William Cooke ventured into the remote Venetian lagoon to capture its loneliness. Lastly, the advent of the railroad and the invention of photography reshaped the genre after mid-century. Yet despite the popularity through most of the period of what I call depictive views, they began to disappear after c.1870. Questioning why they were replaced by pictorially novel and affectively charged images concludes my book’s account of the view tradition in nineteenth-century Venice.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface
Introduction
Chapter One: The Beginnings, 1797–c. 1820
Chapter Two: The First Foreigners Arrive, c. 1820–c. 1835
Chapter Three: The 1830s
Chapter Four: The Late 1830s into the Mid-’40s: Artists Returning and Artists Arriving for the First Time
Chapter Five: Artistic Renewal amidst Revolution and Defeat, c. 1845–c. 1855
Chapter Six: Changing Viewscapes and Changing Styles, 1855–c. 1865–1875
Conclusion
Bibliography
