The Quality of Perspective in Canaletto’s Paintings of Piazza San Marco in Venice

Abstract

There are two types of perspective relevant to human vision, photographic and visual perspective. Photographic perspective results from projection of the three-dimensional world on two-dimensional surfaces such as canvases and retinae. Photographic perspective is widely applied in drawings and paintings to create an illusion of depth. Visual perspective is a property of the space that we, human beings, perceive through vision. Photographic perspective is two-dimensional, visual perspec- tive three-dimensional. Paintings of perspective scenes are interesting objects of study because both types of perspectives play a role in the creation of depth. A previous study showed that Canaletto and other vedutisti applied perspective related to visual space.Paintings of Piazza San Marco in Venice are analysed in the current study. These paintings are of particular interest because of the Piazza’s extraordinary geometry and the fact that Canaletto and his followers produced dozens of paintings from almost identical viewing positions. Buildings and patterns are directed to three horizontally separated vanishing points. Perspective is extremely veridical in a number of paintings. It is hard to imagine how such accuracy could have been obtained without the help of a camera. In other paintings the quality of perspective is poorer and perspective is completely wrong in number of paintings, suggesting that those paintings are not of Canaletto. People have been painted twice to four times too large on all the paintings. The large sizes suggest that people were added later, aiming to portray San Marco as a more intimate plaza than it is.