Tiepolo, Canaletto star in Moscow Italian-art showcase

(ANSA) - Rome, July 25 - An 18th-century Canaletto painting with Venice's Grand Canal and its swarming of gondolas and street vendors is on the poster showcasing a long summer of Italian art in the Russian capital. The exhibit focuses on works by such 18th-century Venetian masters as Giambattista Tiepolo, Canaletto and Francesco Lazzaro Guardi and will run through October 14.
    The prestigious Pushkin museum takes visitors on a journey through a school of painting that in the Renaissance era had already birthed such painters as Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese and which in the 18th century flourished once more and brought Venice to the forefront of European artistic life. The curators - Giovanni Carlo Federico Villa, honorary director of the Musei Civici di Vicenza and Vittoria Markova, head curator of the museum's collection of Italian paintings - have brought together pomp, decorative taste, myths and landscapes in the selections showcased at the Pushkin Museum.
    For the first time there will be 57 works together in one place that are well known at the international level: 23 from the Museo Civico in Vicenza, 25 from the Pushkin Museum and 9 from Gallerie d'Italia - Palazzo Leoni Montanari.
    The exhibit marks a new step in cultural relations between Russia and Italy that, according to the Russian Museum of Figurative Arts, "will lead to a new level of collaboration with Italian museums". A July 20 preview was held at the Italian embassy in Moscow of 'Aeneas In Flight', still wearing his helmet and with the elderly Anchises wrapped around his neck by Giandomenico Tiepolo (Aeneas, Anchises and Ascanius), son of the famous Giambattista.
    Organized by MondoMostre and eagerly awaited in Venice, where the show will be held at Palazzo Chiericati starting from October 30, after Moscow, the exhibition starts from Giambattista Tiepolo, the most well-known Italian painter of the 18th century.
    He was also the last painter to represent the Baroque period and was in some way the most authentic representative of the spirit of Venice and the era.
    The works range from the 'Immaculate Conception' to 'Time Unveiling Truth' and 'The Death of Didon'. The feast of movement and colors is also seen in the works by Giambattista Pittoni. Landscape paintings and "views" of Venice - with its markets, monuments, canals and squares - had meanwhile become in vogue, with Canaletto the star of the genre who took inspiration from Luca Carlevarijs.
    Francesco Guardi instead mixed fantasy and reality in his paintings, while daily life in the city was depicted by Pietro Longhi. photo: Canaletto, The Return of the Bucintoro to Dock In Front of Doge's Palace