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Vanvitelli

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Robliant and Voena
W1,

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Vanvitelli brings the grandest souvenir

 

Pomp and circumstance: a view of Posillipo looks across the Bay of Naples to Vesuvius, smoking on the right. Vanvitelli usually painted scenes of working life on the water; here he gives us, astonishingly, Venetian barges

On the waterfront: Vanvitelli drew with the accuracy of an engineer and architect, preferring to ignore the pictorial conventions of the day in favour of the real. His Porto di Ripetta, detail is a celebration of Rome

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Most rich young men who set out on the Grand Tour returned to Britain with souvenirs. For some it was a venereal disease, for the journey was as much a jaunt of sexual adventure for the inexperienced as it was an essential of their aesthetic education; for others it was the fraudulent old master or fake antiquity; and for others still it was the contemporary art of the day, the topographical souvenir of which the most familiar example is the view of Venice by Canaletto or a feeble imitator. Canaletto, however, born in 1697, was not the first tiller of this field; in Venice he was preceded by Luca Carlevaris, born in 1663, and in Rome, where he worked in his very early twenties, Gaspar Vanvitelli, almost half a century his senior, set a pattern for him.

Born in Amersfoort, just to the east of Utrecht, in 1652-53, Gaspar van Wittel was trained by a local still-life painter of strange imagination, Matthias Withoos, who occasionally turned his hand to pictures of Dutch ports; it was these, perhaps, that formed young Gaspar’s overwhelming interest in views when he undertook the journey to Italy that was an almost mandatory educational experience for Dutch painters in the 17th century. He was in Rome by 1675, known then by the Italian form of his name, and there, but for brief periods in northern Italy — of which views of Florence, Venice, Lago Maggiore and elsewhere in Lombardy are evidence — he stayed until his death in 1736 at a great age for his day. He married a Roman girl and Luigi, his more famous son, the architect appointed by the King of Naples to build his palaces, was born in 1700.

In a working life of more than 60 years Vanvitelli must have produced a prodigious number of paintings and drawings, far more than the hundreds recognised in the latest monograph; of this there is an unarguable indication in the 35 topographical views painted in 30 months between 1699 and 1702 for Luis de la Cerda, the Spanish Viceroy of Naples — not the tedious little things for which he is so often blamed but the six-foot canvases that released his hand and eye. Many drawings are those of a man who, for the most part, worked at phenomenal speed, his pen alternating between the decisive and determined stroke and the habitual activity of a man whose hand insists on continuing to scribble while his eye is occupied in analysis, washes of ink almost carelessly applied. At other times Vanvitelli drew with the accuracy of the engineer and architect that to some extent he was and his son was to become, his sense of the real absolutely predominant over the pictorial conventions of the day. These very conventions, however, were another of his habits, for when nothing occupied his eye in documentary preparation for a painting, his mind’s eye took command and his hand produced pretty fantasies of landscape, sometimes classical and Claudian, sometimes in the tradition of Asselyn and Breenberg, Dutch landscape painters who, wondering at the rock arch and the river gorge on the way, preceded him to Italy.

As for paintings, in these there is less variety in type and more variety in quality. Vanvitelli’s earliest views (vedute, the Italian word for them, has long been in use in English but it holds no extra meaning) were executed in Rome in the early 1680s and within a decade or so, certain constants in perspective and composition had evolved. To these he remained faithful and only the subjects changed. The paintings combined accurate recording of architecture and place within wide, even panoramic views, their viewpoints comfortably low enough to suggest to us, looking centuries later at his canvases, that they were painted from an attic window rather than the artificial swooping bird’s eye-view that had earlier been the common device with which to encompass a wide landscape. Even more remarkable is Vanvitelli’s avoidance of the ancient ruin much revered and everything that anticipates the picturesque. He was, of course, ­compelled to supply the market with pictures of the Colosseum, the great arches of ancient Roman triumphalism and other grandeurs of the past but in these, though they are often proudly signed and dated — and thus ­documented as from his high maturity — the quality slips into decline and they are evidence that, though he did not have or attempt to pursue the means of mass production that enabled Canaletto to produce so many degraded variants of his ­originals, Vanvitelli must at least have had assistants on whom he could rely to replicate his subjects, though not his quality.

Vanvitelli’s most important variation of the souvenir lay in his interest in the Rome of his day and in its few urban improvements, and in his paintings of these his rise to the highest quality is immediately evident. He painted the Tiber and its banks as the Grand Tourist saw them, the river wide, slow-flowing, sandy-banked, busy with traffic and readily accessible — not as it is now, largely hidden from the city’s view, running fast like a flushed sewer between embankments high and hostile. His view of The Porto di Ripetta, a baroque landing-stage built in the first decade of the 18th century to a design initiated by Carlo Fontana (see a drawing of 1703 in the Royal Collection) but, alas, destroyed in 1890, is an example of his celebrating modern Rome, and his other views of the Tiber, more quotidian and again in the tradition of earlier Netherlandish painters of the city, are unprecedented in their sense of realism and the absence of their generic romantic gloss and any veneration of the ruin. If Vanvitelli included a ruined bridge, it was because it was a matter of accuracy and document, not because he saw in its ruined state some et in Arcadia ego reference to the enchantments of antiquity.

No painting better makes the point that these works record the city’s daily life than his View of the Tiber at the Ripa Grande, even though the figures in the foreground have something of a biblical air and echo the staffage of Salvator Rosa; the canvas is big, roughly one metre high and two wide, the scale at which he is most at ease. The broken bridges have no significance and only the topographically literate will recognise landmark buildings old and new huddled on the horizon and made insignificant too by distance. Vanvitelli’s interest lies with the shorelines of Rome’s ancient river as a place of work, of goods transported and unloaded, of labourers labouring, and the river as a means of transport with which all who lived in Rome were intimate. This is an end-of-the-day picture, the raking mass of shadow anticipates the shadows of Bellotto, Canaletto’s nephew, and the dying bustle is only of workers who have nothing of the wealthy cittadino class with which Canaletto enlivens his canals. Is this what, years before, Withoos taught him with his harbour scenes?

What then are we to make of Vanvitelli’s View of Posillipo, looking across the Bay of Naples, with Vesuvius gently steaming on the right? Where we might have expected a bather and a fisherman, we have instead a gathering of baroque barges of distinctly Venetian caste. Is this a conceit devised by Vanvitelli to amuse or is it the record of a peculiarly Venetian festival, now forgotten, translated to Naples for the Viceroy’s pleasure on some diplomatic occasion?
As Vanvitelli is represented in neither the National Gallery nor the Royal Collection, it is not easy, in London, to make acquaintance with his work, yet he is more inventive, influential and important than, from his obscurity, we might suppose. An exhibition of his paintings and drawings, some of the highest quality, some not, and some distressed by overcleaning and exposure, now in the gallery of Robilant and Voena, is an opportunity not to be missed — though one may easily miss the gallery. It is at 38 Dover Street, on the left when walking from Piccadilly, on the first floor; the door is at the top of a flight of steps and one of several bells, hardly legible without a magnifying glass, must be rung for access — and there be dragons, one might say.

Vanvitelli is at Robilant and Voena, 38 Dover Street, W1 (020 7409 1540) until 19 December. Mon-Fri 10am-6pm. Admission free.

Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.

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