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| Giambattista Tiepolo Virtue & Nobility bestowing Honors - Aurora dispersing Clouds of Night (ceiling decoration from Palazzo Mocenigo, Venice) ca. 1759-61 oil on canvas Museum of Fine Arts, Boston |
"Tiepolo represents the height of uniquely Italian skills. Only he was able to master and arrange with infinite imagination colors, figures, clouds, and all sort of animals and objects inside luminous skies."
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| Giambattista Tiepolo Bozzetto for Apotheosis of a Poet - Allegory of Merit ca. 1755-60 oil on canvas Museum of Fine Arts, Boston |
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| Giambattista Tiepolo Apotheosis of Aeneas 1762 oil on canvas Museum of Fine Arts, Boston |
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| Agostino Brunias after Robert Adam Draped Women in Landscape (decoration for breakfast room at Kedleston Hall, Derbyshire) 1759-60 tempera on canvas Victoria & Albert Museum |
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| Agostino Brunias after Robert Adam Draped Women in Landscape (decoration for breakfast room at Kedleston Hall, Derbyshire) 1759-60 tempera on canvas Victoria & Albert Museum |
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| Pietro Paltronieri Capriccio - Antique Ruins at Bologna ca. 1740 tempera and oil on canvas National Trust, Shugborough Hall, Staffordshire |
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| Pietro Paltronieri and Biagio Rebecca Capriccio - Antique Ruins with a Pyramid ca. 1740 tempera and oil on canvas National Trust, Shugborough Hall, Staffordshire |
"Capriccios represented idealized worlds that were first of all aesthetically pleasing and could arouse the viewer's imagination and sense of wonder: the painter created a bizarre, picturesque world to take the place of reality. Conceived still within the rococo spirit, their function was mainly decorative. The veduta ideata was a capriccio with imaginary elements or features added to a real landscape. In 1759 Count Algarotti, a Venetian, wrote of a painting by his compatriot Canaletto: "A new genre of painting exists which consists in drawing a site from life and adorning it with beautiful buildings taken from here or there, or invented."
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| Michele Rocca Rinaldo and Armida ca. 1720-50 oil on canvas Walters Art Museum, Baltimore |
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| follower of Alessandro Magnasco Soldiers playing cards in rocky landscape ca. 1700-1750 oil on canvas Museum of Fine Arts, Boston |
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| Gian Paolo Panini Fountain of Trevi, Rome before 1765 oil on canvas Museum of Fine Arts, Boston |
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| Paolo Monaldi Peasants near Roman Ruins ca. 1760 oil on canvas Walters Art Museum, Baltimore |
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| Canaletto San Giorgio Maggiore from the Bacino San Marco, Venice ca. 1726-30 oil on canvas Museum of Fine Arts, Boston |
"To draw vedute means to study, as painters do, walking around various corners of the countryside or famous city sites, and reproducing with a pen or stylus, or with China ink or watercolors, towns, sylvan dwellings, cities, rivers, and similar views," wrote art historian Filippo Baldinucci in 1681. The urban veduta with faithful reproductions of reality had already achieved the status of an autonomous genre in 17th-century Holland. The 18th-century fashion of the Grand Tour created a growing demand for paintings or etchings to be purchased as souvenirs by foreign travelers. In addition, architects or simple amateurs wanted to own exact, almost documentary reproductions of squares, palaces, monuments, excavations, and ruins. . . . In Venice, a popular destination of English intellectuals and collectors, vedute were in very high demand. Among the Venetian vedutisti, Luca Carlevarijs and Canaletto stand out: the latter, who had trained in Rome, preferred realistic landscapes to scenographic or fanciful ones, which were also prized."
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| Canaletto Fonteghetto della Farina, Venice ca. 1735 oil on canvas Museum of Fine Arts, Boston |
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| Carlo Labruzzi Ruins at Capua ca. 1789 watercolor Yale Center for British Art |
– texts drawn from European Art of the Eighteenth Century by Daniela Tarabra, translated by Rosanna M. Giammanco Frongia (Getty Museum, 2008)