CANELLA, Giuseppe

Italian painter, part of a family of artists. The head of the family, Giovanni Canella (1750-1847) was a fairly important architect who worked in a ClassicalGLOSSARYRelating to the culture of ancient Greece and Rome (classical Antiquity). The classical world played a profoundly important role in the Renaissance, with Italian scholars, writers, and artists seeing their own period as the rebirth (the "renaissance") of classical values after the Middle Ages. The classical world was considered the golden age for the arts, literature, philosophy, and politics. Concepts of the classical, however, changed greatly from one period to the next. Roman literature provided the starting point in the 14th century, scholars patiently finding, editing and translating a wide range of texts. In the 15th century Greek literature, philosophy and art - together with the close study of the remains of Roman buildings and sculptures-expanded the concept of the classical and ensured it remained a vital source of ideas and inspiration. style. He enrolled his two sons in the Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia to study the style of painting that was most fashionable at the time. For his younger son, Carlo Canella (1800-1880), the time spent in Venice was short and from there he was off to study with Giovanni Migliara at the Accademia di Brera in Milan. For Giuseppe, on the other hand, the years spent in Venice became a way to compare his work to that of Venetian masters from the 1700s. He chose to insert himself into an imaginary line that started with Guardi and continued on to Bison and Tranquillo Orsi. His landscapes tend to be a lyrical note jotted from reality in opposition to the exact reproductions inspired by Canaletto's work as interpreted by Vincenzo Chilone and his school, the most famous in Venice in the early 1800's.

Canella's work was mostly bought by foreigners. By 1833 the artist had already lived in Madrid and Paris, where he was honoured by receiving a gold medal from Louis Phillippe, a great admirer and a collector of his work. From Paris he went to Fontainebleau, not far from Barbizon where, in 1830, a group of painters known as the Barbizon SchoolGLOSSARYA group of naturalist landscape painters who worked in the vicinity of Barbizon, a village on the outskirts of the Forest of Fontainebleu, southeast of Paris, in the 1840s and 1850s. Théodore Rousseau (French, 1812-1867) was the founder of the group. Other members of the group were Jean-Baptist Corot (French, 1796-1875), Narcisse Diaz de la Pena (French, 1807-1876), Constant Troyon (French, 1810-1865), Jules Dupré (French, 1811-1889), Jean-François Millet (French, 1814-1875), and Charles-François Daubigny (French, 1817-1878). Their approach constituted an art movement which eventually led to both Realism and Impressionism. Daubigny was the first of the plein air painters. began to produce works that renewed landscape painting in France and in all of Europe. At the 1824 SalonGLOSSARYIn the French language of the 18th and 19th centuries it designated an actual exhibition space, as well as the academic art exhibitions staged in the Salon d'Apollon of the Louvre since 1667. From 1737, the exhibitions took place biennially and, after the French Revolution, annually in the Salon Carré of the Louvre in Paris. Towards the end of the 19th century the official Salon jury was dissolved in order to make way for a committee of state-approved artists, i.e. former Salon members, who created the highly influential Société des Artistes Français. he saw and was strongly influenced by masterpieces by John Constable. Three years later he was again strongly influenced, this time by Corot's painting The Bridge at Narni today in the Louvre.

By the time he came back to Italy in 1832 he was an avant-garde artist both in Milan and in Florence.