2022 US Trip – Day 7 (Virginia Museum of Fine Arts – Grand Canal: The Rialto Bridge from the South by Canaletto)

This will have to be the last post about individual artworks in the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts or I’ll never catch up on this American trip blog. But, I do like to note Canaletto paintings and so I can’t miss this one out. It was painted in either the late 1720s or the early 1730s using the camera ottica technique which allowed a projection of the image to be used as a basis for the artwork. I very much like the detail in these paintings, they’re near photo realism as far as I’m concerned and the quality of them shines through. The artworks are also so accurate that they can be used to measure climate change over the centuries.

This artwork and around 80 others, are on loan from the Jordan and Thomas A. Saunders III Collection, although I don’t know how long they’ll be here for. A very similar artwork by Canaletto was for auction a few months ago, with an estimated price of $3 to $5 million, slightly beyond my art purchasing budget (which to be fair is zero).