“Each of these pictures is as preparatory and convincing as the first chapter of a novel.”

Giovanni Boldini’s relationship with Venice was made up of pleasure trips, exhibitions and official commitments, which increased at the peak of his career in the 1890s with constant travels throughout Europe. His interest in Venetian art, especially of the 18th century, is proclaimed in a letter of 1886 to his Florentine friend Cristiano Banti: “I intend to visit Venice and will be delighted if you want to come too. We’ll go and see the Tiepolos, which I’ve never seen there, and then I’ll do something but on a large scale, only large. I no longer have eyes for anything other than large-scale painting. The outlines have been running through my mind for some time now.”¹ Other visits are connected with his numerous commissions, including the portrait of the Marchesa Casati in 1908, and institutional roles such as liaison with the French artists within the framework of the committee sponsoring the first edition of the Venice Biennale in 1895. Some views of Venice were also shown at the International Exposition in Berlin the following year, together with the now renowned portraits. The water, the horizon of the sea, the churches, the bridges and the canals practically impose a particular iconography, and indeed genre, addressed by the skilful painter in his dynamically angled compositions and slashing, rhythmic brushstrokes. 

It has always been thought that the undated work in the Cerruti Collection was produced in 1907 during a trip documented by nothing other than a group of works on Venetian themes. Although the support and the format suggest a study from life, this view of a canal is actually a more finished work produced by combining motifs jotted down in his sketchbooks: the steep upward view of the façades, the horizonal shimmering of reflections on the water and the elegant diagonals of the moored gondolas. The element around which this composition is constructed, namely the two poles that cut through the picture in the foreground, were indeed sketched in pencil during one of his visits (fig. 1). In virtue of the highly calibrated mastery of the vertical format and the dizzying perspective, the work is a virtuoso tour de force culminating in the theatrical miniature of the passers-by kissing on the bridge. 

The work was shown and sold at the Galleria Scopinich in Milan when Boldini’s widow Emilia Cardona decided to sell off the contents of the studio on Boulevard Berthier, thus bringing a large number of paintings, drawings and studies onto the Italian market. The 1933 sale was commented on by Raffaele Calzini in terms that reveal an idea of the studio as a fascinating place, where the artist’s being is laid bare: “For the first time, the public enters the sancta sanctorum of his painting. A treasure chest of canvases, cartoons, stretchers and sheets of paper painted with oils and watercolours or a series of images with the thoughts, spectres and realities of every day? A world. […] Each of these pictures is as preparatory and convincing as the first chapter of a novel.”² Works like Canale a Venezia, which Boldini kept for himself, reveal a taste in many ways diametrically opposed to the showy, glittering works painted for his aristocratic clients: “Venice was another subject dear to Boldini’s imagination: a Venice of wealth and of poverty: an elegant, festive Venice and a simple, almost rustic Venice. It was the latter that he loved to see again in the dimness of his studio in the reflection of the lights of Paris. Opaline solitude and the peace of deserted canals and idle jetties.”³ 

Filippo Bosco 

¹ Letter from G. Boldini to C. Banti, 8 July 1886, in Dini 2002, vol. I, p. 193. 

² R. Calzini in Milan 1933, [pp. 1-2]. 

³ Ibid., [p. 8].