View of the Rialto Bridge and the Palazzo dei Camerlenghi with the festive entry of the Patriarch Antonio Correr in 1737
Michiel Giovanni Marieschi (Venice 1696 – Venice 1743)
Category
Art / Oil paintings
Date
1737 (signed)
Materials
Oil on canvas
Measurements
1540 x 2410 x 130 mm; 54 kg (Weight)
Order this imageCollection
Osterley Park and House, London
NT 771297
Summary
Oil painting on canvas, View of the Rialto Bridge and the Palazzo dei Camerlenghi with the festive entry of the Patriarch Antonio by Michiel Giovanni Marieschi (Venice 1696 – Venice 1743), 1737. A landscape painting showing an accurate portrayal of the Rialto Bridge in Venice, with a stylised image of the Grand Canal around it including a Venetian Gothic palazzo; in the bottom left a cargo barge is loaded with barrels; three highly decorated barges pass along the canal and under the bridge, with other water traffic going about its business. Marieschi was a younger and shorter-lived contemporary of Canaletto, who published a much-copied set of sixteen engraved views of Venice in 1741, and painted in a bolder, more highly-coloured manner. This picture, which is rare in being signed, and almost uniquely datable, is one of his masterpieces.
Provenance
It was commissioned and paid for in 1737, by his chief patron, the voracious collector and retired German commander in the service of the Venetian Republic, Field-Marshal Count Matthias von der Schulenburg,1661-1747. After its inclusion in a posthumous sale of some of his pictures at Christie's in 1775, it disappeared from view for almost two centuries; given by Lady Mildred Fitzgerald who was the wife of Sir Maurice FitzGerald, the son of Amelia, Henry Louis Bischoffsheim's daughter, and who bequeathed this and other pictures to the National Trust in 1957 with a life interest to his widow. The decorations of Bischoffhem's sumptuously appointed London residence, Bute House in South Audley Street, included the Tiepolo ceiling painting now in the National Gallery
Marks and inscriptions
Signed on a barrel, bottom mid-left, in imitation of a merchant's mark + MMF/XIII
Makers and roles
Michiel Giovanni Marieschi (Venice 1696 – Venice 1743), artist
Exhibition history
Eyewitness Views: Making History in the Capitals of Eighteenth-Century Europe, The Getty, Los Angeles, California, 2017 - 2018 Eyewitness Views: Making History in the Capitals of Eighteenth-Century Europe, Minneapolis Institute of Art, United States , 2017 - 2018 Eyewitness Views: Making History in the Capitals of Eighteenth-Century Europe, Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, 2017 - 2018 Souvenirs of the Grand Tour, Wildenstein, London, 1982, no.33
References
Eyewitness Views: Making History in eighteenth-century Europe. Peter Bjorn Kerber. For an exhibition at The Getty Center, LA, May 9-July 30 2017; Minneapolis Institute of Art, September 10-December 31 2017, Cleveland Museum of Art, February 25-May 20 2018, pp. 181-184