Image: Canaletto: The Bacino di San Marco on Ascension Day, c1733-4 (oil on canvas).
Veduta: Ship-Swarm*
Canaletto outruns, outshines the bronze horse:
A swarm of ships drift in from the lagoon’s polluted source
With forcolas and felzes, sweeps and prows of steel,
The imagined buoyancy of gondola keels,
With waste and woodcuts, lyrical wax of Airbnb reviews,
With traders on the Rialto and sinners in St Mark’s,
Noontide regattas, sandbanks parted like a fault-line through,
And with slow procession, the spill of watermarks.
Image: Canaletto: The Entrance to the Grand Canal, Venice, c. 1730 (oil on canvas).
By the sun’s sleepy light, masons grind away at stone
May muddies each little canal to a jade halftone
Those worker bees of nail and hammer
Keep the basin from assuming its full glamour;
See pigeons dive for breadcrumbs as if in exile
Their wings a blur, lily-white and seraphic
As a final bong echoes from the Accademia’s campanile,
Cobbled squares awash with mid-morning traffic.
Image: Canaletto, The Stonemason’s Yard, c. 1725 (oil-on-canvas).
In a crush of jet-lag and group selfies
Tourists cross the drawbridge for the annual festivities,
Slowly, steadily drunk on saltwater fumes
And jostling for a canal-view from hotel rooms:
Cruise ships, swollen by graph and camera obscura,
Buffed and white, hulking and idle,
And rasping vaporetti, clammy oak bricola,
Sinking in waters too rough to be tidal.
Image: Canaletto, View of the Entrance to the Venetian Arsenal c. 1732 (oil-on-canvas).
There's an easel abandoned on the Ducale pier
There’s sea-surf flecking the rim of my beer
Leisurely surge, white-cap gush
Smears the canvas at the flick of a brush
And Dutch flags and rusty steeples
Change positions at Canaletto’s hand,
They stand quietly above the river of people
Above the ship-swarm, and even beyond.
Copywright Daniel Wade, 2019.
*In February 2019, the National Gallery of Ireland held an exhibition showcasing the Venetian riverscapes of the great 18th-century master Giovanni Antonio Canal, popularly known as Canaletto. I write this piece as a tribute to his work, borrowing the rhyme and rhythmical structure of Joni Mitchell’s classic song ‘The Jungle Line’.