CANALETTO

The Painter of Venice

Giovanni Antonio Canal (1697–1768), universally known as Canaletto, was the great painter of eighteenth-century Venice. Few artists have become so closely identified with a single city. His luminous views of the Grand Canal, Piazza San Marco, the Doge’s Palace and the Venetian lagoon helped shape an image of Venice that remains familiar almost three centuries later.

Canaletto specialized in the veduta, a highly detailed city view combining architectural precision with careful observation of everyday life. His paintings are populated by gondolas, merchants, aristocrats and visitors moving through expansive skies, shimmering water and some of Europe’s most celebrated architecture. Although his views appear remarkably accurate, Canaletto was not simply recording the city. He frequently adjusted perspective, architecture and spatial relationships to create compositions that conveyed an idealized and particularly compelling vision of Venice.

Many of his most important clients were wealthy British travelers visiting Italy as part of the Grand Tour, the extended journey through Europe that became an essential element of aristocratic education during the eighteenth century. Canaletto’s Venetian views were highly desirable souvenirs: sophisticated paintings through which travelers could preserve and display their experience of the city after returning home. In this sense, his work occupies an important place not only in the history of landscape painting, but also in the history of tourism and the way destinations are transformed into images.

Discover A Regatta on the Grand Canal at the National Gallery ↗

Among Canaletto’s finest public masterpieces is A Regatta on the Grand Canal, painted around 1735 and now in the National Gallery, London. The painting captures one of Venice’s celebrated annual regattas, transforming the Grand Canal into a magnificent stage filled with gondolas, spectators, decorated boats and the elegant façades of the city. It exemplifies Canaletto’s remarkable ability to combine architectural precision with the animation of everyday life, while presenting Venice as a place of beauty, ceremony and spectacle. For the wealthy European travelers undertaking the Grand Tour, paintings such as this offered an idealized image of the city that could be admired and ultimately carried home.

A Record-Breaking Canaletto

Among Canaletto’s most celebrated compositions are his numerous views of the Grand Canal and the Basin of San Marco, in which architecture, water and the ceremonial life of Venice are brought together with remarkable precision.

One recurring subject was the Bucintoro, the magnificent state galley used by the Doge of Venice during the annual Feast of the Ascension. The ceremony celebrated Venice’s symbolic marriage with the sea and provided Canaletto with an ideal subject: the Doge’s Palace and surrounding architecture form the backdrop to an extraordinary spectacle of decorated boats, gondolas and crowds filling the lagoon.

One of the finest examples, Venice, the Return of the Bucintoro on Ascension Day, was painted around 1732. Originally owned by Sir Robert Walpole, Britain’s first prime minister, the painting subsequently hung at 10 Downing Street and has an exceptional British provenance. Its history also illustrates the close relationship between Canaletto and the British collectors who helped establish his international reputation.

On 1 July 2025, Venice, the Return of the Bucintoro on Ascension Day was offered at Christie’s London, where it sold for £31.935 million ($43.9 million), establishing a new world auction record for Canaletto.

The result confirms the enduring importance of Canaletto’s Venetian views. Paintings originally collected in the eighteenth century as sophisticated records of the Grand Tour are today recognized among the great achievements of European city-view painting. The record-setting work is particularly relevant to Banksy’s later engagement with Venice because it presents precisely the combination of architecture, spectacle, water and visitors through which the city has been represented and consumed for centuries.

Banksy at the Venice Biennale

In May 2019, during the opening week of the Venice Biennale, Banksy staged an unauthorized intervention beside one of the city’s canals. A man posing as a street artist installed a group of nine small, elaborately framed oil paintings on an easel and offered them for sale under the title Venice in Oil.

Individually, the paintings resemble the picturesque Venetian scenes still sold throughout the city: historic architecture, blue water, gondolas and fragments of an apparently idyllic urban landscape. Viewed together, however, the nine canvases form a single composition in which an enormous cruise ship passes through the lagoon, its vast white hull overwhelming the surrounding architecture and traditional boats.

The installation operated simultaneously as painting, street intervention and performance. Banksy had positioned himself unofficially alongside the Venice Biennale, one of the most prestigious events in international contemporary art, while adopting the modest appearance of a street vendor selling conventional tourist paintings. The intervention ended when local authorities asked the vendor to leave because he lacked the necessary permit.

Banksy and Canaletto’s Venice

Venice in Oil does not reproduce a particular painting by Canaletto. The relationship is broader and, in many ways, more interesting. Banksy appropriates the tradition of the Venetian veduta and the picturesque vision of Venice that Canaletto did so much to establish.

The nine small paintings initially promise the familiar Venice of historic façades, canals and gondolas. Their ornate frames and traditional medium reinforce the impression that these are conventional views intended for visitors. The cruise ship radically disrupts that expectation. Its scale overwhelms the cityscape, reducing the gondolas and historic architecture around it to secondary elements within the composition.

Banksy therefore uses the conventions of traditional Venetian painting to address the contemporary city. The idealized Venice preserved through centuries of paintings and tourist imagery is confronted by the physical infrastructure of modern mass tourism.

From the Grand Tour to Mass Tourism

The relationship with Canaletto becomes particularly relevant when considered through the history of tourism. Canaletto’s eighteenth-century patrons were themselves visitors, many of whom came to Venice as part of the Grand Tour and commissioned or purchased paintings through which they could take an image of the city home with them.

Banksy addresses the same desire to experience and possess Venice nearly three centuries later, but on a radically different scale. By 2019, Venice had become one of the world’s most intensely visited destinations, and the presence of enormous cruise ships in the historic lagoon had become a highly visible symbol of the pressures created by mass tourism.

The comparison is not simply between good tourism and bad tourism. Canaletto’s paintings demonstrate that Venice has long been shaped by the gaze and expectations of visitors. Banksy instead asks what happens when that relationship reaches an industrial scale, to the point where the mechanisms created to experience the city begin to dominate the city itself.

The cruise ship is particularly effective because of its visual disproportion. It does not merely bring tourists to Venice; within Banksy’s composition, it obscures the Venice they have travelled to see.

Venice in Oil

The title Venice in Oil adds another layer to the intervention. At its most literal, the phrase simply describes the works: they are paintings of Venice executed in oil. Yet the presence of the cruise ship introduces an inevitable second association with the fossil fuels required to power modern maritime travel and the environmental consequences associated with large-scale tourism.

Banksy’s use of oil painting is therefore particularly appropriate. Rather than rejecting the traditional medium associated with European art history, he uses it to construct an apparently conventional Venetian view before allowing contemporary reality to intrude upon it. The work retains the visual appeal of the historic city while questioning the conditions under which that beauty is now experienced and consumed.

Canaletto, Banksy and the Tourist Gaze

Canaletto and Banksy are separated by almost three centuries, and their intentions are fundamentally different. Nevertheless, their works meet around an enduring cultural phenomenon: Venice has long existed both as a physical city and as an image circulated among people who wish to experience it.

Canaletto played a major role in constructing that image for eighteenth-century Europe. His paintings transformed Venice into something that could be admired, collected and carried home, while establishing a visual vocabulary of canals, gondolas, palaces, light and spectacle that continues to shape perceptions of the city.

Banksy begins with that inherited visual tradition and introduces the realities of twenty-first-century tourism into it. In Venice in Oil, the picturesque Venetian view has not disappeared; it remains visible in fragments around the cruise ship. What has changed is the scale of the apparatus through which the city is visited and consumed.

Banksy’s connection to Canaletto therefore lies less in the appropriation of a particular masterpiece than in the reinterpretation of a tradition. Canaletto’s Venice provides the historical image; Banksy uses that image to examine what has happened to the city, and to tourism itself, in the centuries since it was created.