Image: Detail of the bell tower of the Palazzo Balbi from Guardi’s Regatta in Venice, ca. 1770, oil on canvas, The Frick Collection. Photo: Michael Bodycomb. 

The foreground of the Frick Collection’s Regatta in Venice is equal in interest to the background. It also contains buildings of note, both architecturally and culturally. 

Image: Palazzo Balbi, 1582, Venice. Wikimedia Commons.

The most prominent building of the painting is the Palazzo Balbi on the left hand side. Taller and more defined than the other buildings, Guardi fills it with people pouring onto balconies. The palace was built by Alessandro Vittoria in 1582 and was the residence of the Venetian patrician family of the Balbi.

Image: Canaletto, Grand Canal, Looking Northeast from Palazo Balbi toward the Rialto Bridge, 1723-24, oil on canvas. Museo del Settecento Veneziano, Ca’ Rezzonico, Venice. Wikimedia Commons.

This palace was also painted by Guardi’s great predecessor: Canaletto. What differentiates Guardi’s painting in the Frick Collection is the addition of so many figures. Guardi also uses columns to draw the viewer’s attention to the foreground of the painting, thereby ensuring that the traditional Venetian event that the figures are partaking in is as prominent as the architecture.

Francesco Guardi, Regatta in Venice, ca. 1770, oil on canvas, The Frick Collection. Photo: Michael Bodycomb.

Francesco Guardi’s Regatta in Venice is one of his lesser-known paintings. Rarely on loan and rarely mentioned in scholarship, on closer inspection this understated landscape illuminates much about Guardi’s Venice.

The Frick Art Reference Library Reading Room with Guardi’s Regatta in Venice, ca. 1770, oil on canvas. Photo: Michael Bodycomb.

The Regatta in Venice, ca. 1770, was gifted to the Frick Collection by Henry Clay Frick. It is situated appropriately in the reading room of the Frick Art Reference Library, which Helen founded after her father’s death. She was the third child of Henry Clay Frick and played an active role in catalogue and expanding the art collection after his death. Guardi’s work fits into the Venetian thread of Henry Clay Frick’s collection, which most famously includes masterpieces by Bellini and Veronese.  

Francesco Guardi, Regatta on the Grand Canal, ca. 1770. Photo: Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon.   

Guardi painted many landscapes like the Regatta in Venice. In fact, an almost identical version exists in the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon. The Lisbon painting is titled Regatta on the Grand Canal, providing a more exact location. In the very distance of this painting you can see the Rialto Bridge. Its thick, diagonal shape with a semi-circular bottom is unique on the Grand Canal, giving us a sense of the artist’s viewing point. You can also see the tower of the Church of San Bartolomeo, which still stands near the Rialto Bridge today. 

Alongside the Rialto Bridge and the Bartolomeo bell tower is a dome. This is likely to be the dome of the Church of San Giovanni e Paolo, which continues to be the only visible and protruding dome near the Rialto Bridge today. 

A closer look at the Guardi painting in the Frick Collection, below, reveals similar details, and amidst the mesh of similar looking buildings it seems significant that this skyline is discernible.

Detail of the Rialto Bridge from Guardi’s Regatta in Venice, ca. 1770, oil on canvas, The Frick Collection. Photo: Michael Bodycomb.

Detail of the bell tower of the Church of San Bartolomeo (left) and dome of the Church of San Giovanni e Paolo (right) from Guardi’s Regatta in Venice, ca. 1770, oil on canvas, The Frick Collection. Photo: Michael Bodycomb.

Rialto Bridge, Venice. Wikimedia Commons

In 1551, Venetian authorities proposed a renewal of the Rialto Bridge. Many of the most famous Venetian architects produced plans, including Sansovino, Palladio, Vignola, and even Michelangelo. It was Antonio da Ponte’s design that was finally consecrated in 1591. 

France. Medal commemorating Venice being returned to Italy, 1805.  after 1879. Royal Collection Trust/© Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2016.

Few collections of Venetian landscapes are exempt from this landmark; it has become an icon of Venice, defying Scamozzi’s prediction that the complex engineering of the bridge would lead it to collapse. It features particularly prominently in Guardi’s paintings perhaps because it connects him with his preceding Venetian masters. 

Image: Francesco Guardi, Regatta in Venice, ca. 1770, oil on canvas, The Frick Collection. Photo: Michael Bodycomb. 

By painting a dynamic scene of a regatta occurring in the Grand Canal, it is clear that Guardi is interested in much more than the simple appreciation of the Venetian landscape; he is depicting the true experience of traditional Venetian culture.

Guardi places much importance on the animated figures in the foreground because he is depicting the most exciting part of a regatta race: the paleto. The paleto is a turning post that stands in the middle of the Grand Canal. At this juncture, the boats must turn and the winner normally takes the lead. The figures in Guardi’s picture push their oars into the water in different directions in a hurry to turn their boats. The chaos creates a sense of unorganized movement that contrasts with the linearity of the perspective and architecture.

Image: Detail of brightly colored bissone in Guardi’s Regatta in Venice, ca. 1770, oil on canvas, The Frick Collection. Photo: Michael Bodycomb.

The Venetian regatta race was normally preceded by bissone, traditional gondolier boats which would parade before the race to clear the waters and settle rowdy onlookers (shown in detail here). Guardi paints these boats in bright colors with figures in matching costumes. He turns their backs so that the viewer is made to feel like another spectator on the edges of the Grand Canal.

The Frick family actively traveled together, particularly when the children, Helen and Childs, were young. In 1912, Mr. and Mrs. Frick along with their daughter Helen Clay Frick and several friends took a four month trip to Egypt and Europe. This jam-packed journey included stops in Cairo, Beni Hassan, Karnak, Paris, Naples, Rome, Milan, Florence, Bellagio, and, of course, Venice.

Helen Clay Frick had visited Italy before and adored it, and her return was equally as enjoyable. She took photos on all of her trips, mostly of the sights and landscapes she encountered, but occasionally of the people around her as well. Her remarkable photographic eye captured the famous and the unknown, and allows us to see the city as she saw it. 

Images: Photographs from the Italy and Switzerland Album, Helen Clay Frick, 1912. The Frick Collection/Frick Art Reference Library Archives.

Helen Clay Frick had an incredible personal impact on her father’s art collection throughout her life, and her passion for Italy is possibly reflected in her support of his 1912 purchase of the two Veronese allegories in the collection and his 1913 purchase of the two Guardi works - these two Miss Frick retained until her death in 1984.

Read more about this topic:

Sanger, Martha Frick Symington, Helen Clay Frick: Bittersweet Heiress. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008.

_______, Henry Clay Frick: An Intimate Portrait. Abbeville Press, 1998.

The Archives recently completed a digitization project with a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York uniting and updating the online collection of institutional archives and the Frick Family papers. Included in the updated digital archive are receipts for the purchase of both the two Guardi paintings and the two Veronese allegories in the collection. Follow this link to see more!  

Image: M. Knoedler & Co. Invoice, 11 October 1913.  The Frick Collection/Frick Art Reference Library Archives.

Detail of Guardi’s depiction of the Santa Maria delle Penitenti. Francesco Guardi, View of the Cannaregio Canal in Venice, 1765-75, The Frick Collection. Photo: Michael Bodycomb.

Another important building, just barely recognizeable in the Frick’s View of the Cannaregio Canal in Venice, is the Santa Maria delle Penitenti, also known as the Ospizio dei Penitenti.

Just beyond the Ponte dei Tre Archi, on the northern bank of the Cannaregio Canal, you can just make out the church’s small pointed roof. A smaller roofed rectangular building extends from it on either side. Guardi took great care in depicting the church’s recognizable details despite its small scale, including the circular window under the largest roof, which centralizes the entire building. The church’s modest brown façade stands out in its simplicity, looking rather bare next to the luxurious, Baroque Surian-Bellotto Palace only a few houses down the canal. The reddish-brown color of the bridge and its slightly less brilliant surface creates a connection of sorts to the more rusticated and unassuming church in the background.

As mentioned previously, this is not the first time Guardi chose to include this the Santa Maria delle Penitenti in his paintings, showing the importance of the church despite its more modest appearance. 

As his career progressed, Francesco Guardi became more and more established as a painter of contemporary Venetian life. In 1782, he was hired to paint the events of the visit of the Russian Grand Duke Paul Petrovitch and his wife Maria Feodorovna, who traveled to Venice under the pseudonyms of the Count and Countess of the North.

One of the festivities for the visitors was a concert by the orphan girls in the choirs of all four ospedali at the Filarmonici Hall. This was a remarkable event, for the girls were usually forbidden to sing outside their ospedale. Guardi captured the moment in the painting below, now in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich. The girls can be seen on the far left of the painting, sitting in the top balcony above the spectators, all dressed alike in black and white. Two levels of musicians, also from the ospedali, sit in the balconies below them. On the floor, the aristocratic audience mingles.

Francesco Guardi, Concert for the Count and Countess of the North at the Filarmonici Hall, 1782. Alte Pinakothek. Wikimedia Commons

Art historian Caroline Giron-Panel notes how the presence of the choir at this important state visit demonstrates the prestige of the ospedali and their musical institutions to the presentation of Venice to outsiders as a cultural capital. These choirs were known throughout Europe, and helped cultivate a favorable image of the city of Venice in the eighteenth century, even as the political and economic climate of the republic shifted. In this painting, Francesco Guardi draws music and visual art together in a portrait of Venetian life.

Read more about this topic:

Goldfarb, Hilliard T. Art and Music in Venice: From the Renaissance to Baroque. Montreal: Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 2013.

Moschini, Vittorio, and Archibald Colquhoun. Francesco Guardi … Translated by Archibald Colquhoun. William Heinemann: London; Milano Printed, 1957.

Pask, Kelly. “Francesco Guardi and the Conti Del Nord: A New Drawing.” The J. Paul Getty Museum Journal 20 (1992): 45-52.

Music and visual art in Venice brought people together in unexpected ways in the eighteenth century – in this case, the two arts were the foundation of a marriage.

In 1716, Domenico Guardi, father of future artists Francesco and Antonio Guardi, died, leaving behind four children, all under the age of eighteen. Francesco was just four, and his sister Cecilia was fifteen. Though the Guardi family had aristocratic ancestry, Domenico’s painting studio was modest and not highly lucrative. His death left his family near destitution. With many mouths to feed and not enough to go around, Domenico’s widow placed her daughter Cecilia in the Ospedaletto of Santa Maria dei Derelitti, a home for poor orphans. Although Cecilia was not an orphan, she was admitted to the home as a pauper and as a soprano – the Ospedaletto, like other ospedali around Venice, was renowned for its girl’s choir.

In this same year, the very young Giambattista Tiepolo (whose work, like Guardi’s, is featured in the Frick’s collection) was creating his first known independent work. He painted at least one of the spandrels in the church at the Ospedaletto, depicting the sacrifice of Isaac. This work raised Tiepolo’s prominence as an artist in Venice, and also brought him together with Cecilia Guardi.

The two married in secret in 1719, as Tiepolo believed his family would raise objections to his marriage, likely because of the lack of connections or prospects of his bride. They went on to have ten children, and Cecilia was often a model for Tiepolo’s paintings throughout his long career, including this one.

Giambattista Tiepolo, Rape of Europa, ca. 1725, oil on canvas. L'Accademia di belle arti di Venezia. Wikimedia Commons

In this early work, Rape of Europa, now in the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice, scholar Michael Levey notes that Tiepolo depicts Cecilia as Europa. It was painted just a few years after the Tiepolos’ marriage, circa 1725, and Levey likens the journey of Europa, from a mortal life to one of bounty on Olympus, to the journey of Cecilia from poverty to comfort and love in marriage.

Read more about this topic:

Alpers, Svetlana, and Michael Baxandall. Tiepolo and the Pictorial Intelligence. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994.

Goldfarb, Hilliard T. Art and Music in Venice: From the Renaissance to Baroque. Montreal: Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 2013.

Levey, Michael. Giambattista Tiepolo: His Life and Art. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986.

Moschini, Vittorio, and Archibald Colquhoun. Francesco Guardi … Translated by Archibald Colquhoun. William Heinemann: London; Milano Printed, 1957.