Capriccio, Venice

This Venetian capriccio from around 1813 belongs to a tradition of architectural fantasy in which artists rearranged real buildings in imaginary compositions — a practice with a distinguished history running from Canaletto's own capricci through the eighteenth-century vedutisti. Turner's use of the capriccio format before his 1819 visit to Venice is doubly interesting: it freed him from topographical obligation while allowing him to deploy the Venetian architectural vocabulary he knew from prints. The capriccio tradition gave painters license to idealise, concentrate, and dramatise the visual essence of a city without the constraint of geographical accuracy, and Turner — who would always prefer emotional truth to documentary fidelity — found it a congenial form. The composition belongs to the Calderdale Metropolitan Borough Council, suggesting it entered a northern English collection in the nineteenth century as part of the considerable market for Venetian subjects among the industrial middle class who could afford paintings but not the Grand Tour itself.

Turner renders the imagined Venetian scene with atmospheric luminosity, using the capriccio format to arrange architecture and water for maximum atmospheric and compositional effect.