Venice Reimagined

The Resurgence of View Painting in Venice after the Fall of the Serenissima between 1797 and 1866

Book cover: Venice Reimagined

Extent: 224 pages

Publisher: Wiley-VCH

Subjects: Art & Art History, Italian Studies

Series: In the Shadow of the Lion of St. Mark

Language: English

Hardback (Published)

(October 2026)

ISBN: 9781915487711

9.49 x 9.49 inches

Price: $157.00

This book explores how nineteenth-century Venetian viewscapes deviated from those of Antonio Canaletto and Francesco Guardi of the preceding one hundred years.


This book is the first comprehensive study of Venetian viewscapes painted between 1797, when the Republic of Venice fell to Napoleon’s armies, and 1866, the date of the city’s annexation into the new Kingdom of Italy. By examining the works of an international array of artists—nearly sixty men and one woman—from Venice and Europe, the U.S. and South America, and studying their art against Venetian political history of the period, I open a vivid panorama onto the artistic response to one of the world’s unique cities during foreign occupation, an era of national uprisings and the Industrial Revolution. Departing from Canaletto’s and Guardi’s viewscapes of the previous century, those of the nineteenth century yield many surprises. Some artists like Richard Bonington depicted old sites but from novel vantage points; Ippolito Caffi and others portrayed neighborhoods never before considered; watercolors of anonymous bridges and small corners of the city by James Holland and William Callow attracted collectors as did their oil paintings of famous monuments; and a number of foreign painters such as Peter Christian Skovgaard and Edward William Cooke ventured into the remote Venetian lagoon to capture its loneliness. Lastly, the advent of the railroad and the invention of photography reshaped the genre after mid-century. Yet despite the popularity through most of the period of what I call depictive views, they began to disappear after c.1870. Questioning why they were replaced by pictorially novel and affectively charged images concludes my book’s account of the view tradition in nineteenth-century Venice.