Friedrich Nerly Lot n° 56

Frederick Nerly, View over the Bacino di San Marco in Venice. Oil on canvas. (Circa 1840). 75 x 106 cm. Signed in the foreground lower left "F. Nerly f.". Framed. With an expert opinion by Dr. Wolfram Morath-Vogel, Erfurt, dated April 2020. Friedrich Nerly had actually decided to return to Germany in 1835 after successful years in Rome. Via Genoa and Milan, where he had stayed longer in 1836, he came to Verona. From there he made a trip to Venice - not suspecting that he would never leave the lagoon city again. Moved by the beauty of the "Serenissima" with its famous palaces and churches, by the maze of small streets with stairs and bridges, it was above all the moonlit nights that had previously enchanted countless poets and to which Nerly also succumbed. According to Franz Meyer, Nerly's first biographer, his first painting in Venice depicted the Piazzetta with the famous St. Mark's Column in the moonlight, which he was immediately able to successfully sell to the Prussian crown prince. It became, as it were, the signet of his activity in Venice - no fewer than 36 versions are said to have existed. Nerly's move to Venice was a courageous step, because in contrast to Rome, where hundreds of German artists were based around 1830, Nerly remained almost the only German painter in Venice who also settled there permanently. Venice's heyday as a city of art had also come to an end with the end of the Ancien Régime in 1792, and the opportunities to make a living as a painter in Venice were much more difficult than in Rome, which Nerly repeatedly complained about. He had, however, quickly found his way into Venetian society when he became involved with the Venetian Agathe Alexandra Aginovitch, the adopted daughter of his patron Marchese Maruzzi, who, however, as a strict Catholic, cut off all support for Nerly, a Protestant from Erfurt, after the marriage. From then on, Nerly was forced to operate on the open market and set up shop in the Palazzo Pisani on Campo San Stefano, where he moved into the Léopold Roberts studio, which became a social hub of Venice, frequented by artists and Venice travelers alike. Still the most commercially tolerable motif, vedute of Venice continued to enjoy great popularity among tourists and art lovers from all over Europe and could look back on a long tradition. To paint Venice in the 19th century meant to always have the past century in mind as well, to think along with the marriage of the Venetian vedute of a Francesco Guardi, a Michele Marieschi, Canaletto or Bellotto - this is even more true for such a sophisticated view as the view over the Bacino di San Marco to Santa Maria della Salute. Standing on the Riva Cà di Dio, the view in Nerly's painting wanders across Palazzo Dandolo, now the Hotel Danieli, and the Doge's Palace to the Piazza di San Marco with the columns of Saints Marco and Todaro and the Biblioteca Marciana, while in the background the mighty backdrop of Santa Maria della Salute guards the entrance to the Grand Canal. Canaletto, in a view taken from a comparable vantage point, shows the basin of San Marco with the Doge's Palace on Ascension Day (London, National Gallery, inv. no. NG 4453) - the feast day special to Venice when the Doge threw a blessed ring into the water from the Bucintoro, the Doge's golden barque, symbolizing Venice's marriage to the sea. Canaletto describes the colorful and festive hustle and bustle of this day on the Grand Canal at length, tells of the splendor of Venice, how gondolas and golden parade boats surround the Bucintoro, passengers wear carnival costumes and on the balconies of the Doge's Palace crowd the spectators, while the buildings lining the Molo line up uniformly up to Santa Maria della Salute. What could Nerly, for whom the painting of vedute and architecture was a new experience in Venice, do to counter Canaletto's feast, or in other words, could he give new impulses to Venetian vedute painting or did he tie in directly with the Venetian Settecento? At first glance, the similarities outweigh the differences - both views are characterized by an attention to detail, which in Canaletto's work dissolves into a loosely painted application of color in the distance, while in Nerly's work, as is characteristic of the Romantic era, it remains precise into the distance. However, compared to Canaletto's protracted gaze, Nerly's entire pictorial arrangement seems more compressed, altogether more concentrated and condensed, also more fragmented. Nerly breaks up Canaletto's pictorial unity, the buildings rise up in his work and start to move, jumping back and forth, accentuated in color in the light of the setting sun.