Object Details
Artist
Antonio Canaletto
Date
ca. 1741
Medium
Etching on laid paper
Dimensions
Plate: 11 3/4 × 17 inches (29.8 × 43.2 cm)
Sheet: 16 3/8 × 20 9/16 inches (41.6 × 52.2 cm)
Credit Line
Museum Associates Purchase Fund
Object
Number
69.081
As far back as the sixteenth century, it had become customary for printmakers to make title pages or(…)
As far back as the sixteenth century, it had become customary for printmakers to make title pages or frontispieces for print series or books as fictive stone tablets with titles and inscriptions illusionistically “carved” into them by means of etching or engraving. One such example is this title page, in which Canaletto creates a massive architectural structure that serves as a kind of billboard on which to display his title and dedication for the series. As if to underscore his inscription advertising “Views, some taken on site and others imagined,” Canaletto places behind the wall examples of real Venetian vernacular architecture, such as a palazzo and a ribbed dome, juxtaposed with anomalies like the tip of a pyramid resembling the tomb of Gaius Cestius in Rome.
(Andrew C. Weislogel, “Mirror of the City: The Printed View in Italy and Beyond, 1450–1940,” catalogue accompanying an exhibition organized by the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, curated by Andrew C. Weislogel and Stuart M. Blumin, and presented at the Johnson Museum August 11–December 23, 2012)
