Stephen Fry on Canaletto's 'Venice, the Bucintoro at the Molo on Ascension Day'

Stephen, thank you so, so much for coming. It's a great honour and privilege for us to have you here, also with this wonderful masterpiece. When you walked in and saw this for the first time, tell us what your instinctive reaction was. Well, gobsmacked at the sight of so much colour and life and drama. When you're at a distance, this is like, oh my God, am I going to have to do this jigsaw? Look at the detail. And then you come in and, oh my goodness, it's so full of colour, which you expect from a Venetian painting, but the reds pop out in a very unusual way. And my eyes draw not to the great barge, the boccianturo, I think it's called, but to these, I can only think of them as a bit like film extras or stage chorus who are in the foreground here, just doing Venetian things, you know, preparing their gondolas. And of course, in a very Venetian way, the gentlemen, not the gondoliers, seem to be all masked. And I'm not sure, would that coincide with this Ascension Day festival? Not quite. So this, as you very astutely point out, is indeed the Feast of the Ascension, which is 40 days after Easter. Yes, so it's May. It's May, as opposed to February, when the carnival is really at its height. So Canaletto is manipulating the stories and intricacies of Venice to suit the scene. And you're even more astute, Stephen, to notice what Canaletto has done. You described this frontage almost as like a stage. And that's, I think, exactly what his intention was. He was, as you may well know, a scenery designer. And you really get the impression here, as you've just pointed out, that he's manipulated the angle of the Riva della Schiavone here to create this artificial stage. Yes. And behind, we see perhaps the greatest scenery backdrop of all. It's worthy of Cecil B. DeMille, isn't it? The great Hollywood epics, this incredible barge. I mean, the gold, and the closer you get to it, you see it's kind of almost barnacled with gold. It's encrusted. And my understanding of this festival is that every Ascension day, the doge would leave his palace and would get on this barge and go out. And he would throw a kind of ring into the water to marry the sea, the sposalizia della mare, the marriage of the sea, to symbolize the great maritime power that Venice was and its relationship with the ocean, which was profound and entirely dependent on water. What's so interesting to me is that it's surprising how many stately homes in Britain will have a Canaletto. And then you come across a masterpiece like this, and you realize, of course, that what's going on is so interesting in a political and a cultural way because it's an advertisement as well, isn't it? It's just the beginning of when Northern Europe is beginning to get more prosperous. It's stopped having wars. And the aristocrats are going on their grand tours. And Venice is reaching the end of its power as an imperial maritime power. And what it has left, which we British can relate to, is a memory of empire and a kind of series of images and rituals and pageants that still make us feel rather grand. And the English, of course, were his greatest patrons. When he painted this in 1754, he's been in England nearly a decade. He actually moved to England in 46. And I feel a real sense of nostalgia for home in this painting. He's been painting London. He's been painting Annex. He's been painting all these other places around the country. And here's a sort of expression of his love for his homeland. I really feel that. And it's all the things you don't get in Britain, the color, the brightness, that sort of wonderful sense of fiesta. Absolutely. But he used camera obscura. He used camera obscura, we believe, exactly. So, and some people think he actually traced the image onto the canvas. Is it cheating? Don't think so. I don't think so. He's a great believer, isn't he? Exactly, there you go. And then, of course, by moving himself into the Blaccino, he allows himself to paint these great monuments of Venice at an angle that befits their grandeur. Now, just one last thing I want to talk about was the technique. We can see the paving slab coming through the patrician here. Yes. Now, that brings me to point out the fact that we know, as a result of that, how Canaletto built the painting up. So he started with the sky and the water. Then he applied the architecture. To give himself a vanishing point. There you go. Using the camera obscura. Yeah. And then finally put in the boats and what we call the starfish, the figures. And so we can now see coming through the edge of the key coming through there. Yes, you can. Just shows how he built up the painting from back to front. Great. That's very clever. I'm used to thinking of Canaletto like technical drawings, but this has got so much theatricality to it, like a Hollywood epic of the golden age. I was just blown over. And the scale is so extraordinary too. You can't prepare for that by looking at pictures online, can you?