City images in the eighteenth century: Canaletto and Bellotto paint Venice, London, and Vienna

Giovanni Antonio Canal, called Canaletto, and his nephew Bernardo Bellotto used their richly detailed cityscapes to shape public understanding of the places they depicted. Mateusz Mayer vividly describes how Venice became the stage for a resplendent republican tradition, London a vision of bourgeois pride, and Vienna a setting for imperial representation characterisations that continue to shape how we see these cities today.

In a journey back to eighteenth-century Europe, this volume lucidly reveals how the two painters Canaletto and Bellotto used the latest optical instruments and analytical observation to create a fascinatingly lifelike image of urban architecture. At the same time, through theatrical staging, they transformed streets and squares into vibrant platforms for human society, populated by aristocrats and street vendors, courtly ceremony and everyday labour. Their pictures offer a wealth of narrative detail in which viewers are only too happy to lose themselves.