Canaletto's Capricci: Lagoon, Antiquity, and Landscape Heritage

Canaletto's capricci, the result of fragmenting and re-composing disparate elements, exist at the intersection of antiquarianism, architecture, and tourism. This research seminar asks how imaginary landscape paintings illustrate developing ideas of landscape heritage at a time of urban development. Through the lens of environmental and media studies, eighteenth-century Venice emerges here as a vivid case study in the development of a modern conception of the urban environment as a repository of traces of lost natural and cultural history.

Camilla Pietrabissa is an adjunct professor of art history at Ca’ Foscari University in Venice and a specialist on landscape painting. She has a doctoral degree from the Courtauld Institute and has been a postdoctoral fellow at IUAV University (2020–23), the Getty Research Institute (2024), the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich (2021), and the Fondazione 1563 per l’Arte e la Cultura in Turin (2019–20). Her co-edited volume Landscape Drawing in Europe 1500-1800: The Experience of Place (Paul Holberton Pubishing), containing fourteen contributions on the history and theory of landscape drawing, is now in press.

Adriano Aymonino is Senior Lecturer and Director of the MA Art Market, Provenance and the History of Collecting, University of Buckingham. His publications include Drawn from the Antique (Sir John Soane’s Museum 2015), Enlightened Eclecticism (Yale University Press 2021), winner of the 2022 William MB Berger Prize for British Art History, and a revised and amplified edition of Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny's Taste and the Antique (3 vols, Brepols 2024).

Scientific Organization: Lise Meitner Group "Loss, and Conservation in Art History", Francesca Borgo