Giuseppe Canella

Bacino San Marco

Giuseppe Canella (Verona, July 28, 1788 - Florence, September 11, 1847) was an Italian vedute painter. Giuseppe Canella receives the first rudiments in art from his father Giovanni, architect, fresco painter and scenographer. He began by performing scenographies and decorations for aristocratic residences in Verona and Mantua. Probably influenced by Pietro Ronzoni, he turned to landscape painting, approaching the genre of veduta in 1815, after a brief stay in Venice. He exhibited at the fine arts of the Academy of Brera (1818) and undertook a trip to Spain, the Netherlands and France where he stayed until 1832, traveling between Paris, Fontainebleau, Normandy, Alsace and the country from Baden. In 1831, he sent thirteen landscapes to the exhibition of the Academy of Brera where he obtained a certain success both from the public and from the critics, also comforted by the notoriety achieved in Paris by his presence in various salons and the orders of Louis Philippe d'Orléans and the awarding of the gold medal (1830). In 1832, he returned to Milan and devoted himself to painting urban vedute characterized by an interest in the chronicle of contemporary life and an atmospheric rendering. From 1835, he focused on landscape painting with subjects inspired by the Lombard countryside and the lake environment. The journey between Rome and Naples (1838-1839) is of fundamental importance in his artistic orientation. His son, who bears the same first name Giuseppe (1837-1913), is also a painter of vedute, quadratura and urban landscapes.