Giuseppe Canella

Giuseppe Canella (Jul 28, 1788 - Sep 11, 1847), also referred to as Giuseppe Canella the Elder, was an Italian painter. Guiseppe Canella was the son of architect Giovanni Canella, whom Giuseppe assisted in theatrical design. He traveled in Spain and later in France, where he stayed from 1823 to 1833. He divided his time between Fontainbleau and Paris. Canella exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1826 and 1827. He then returned to Italy in 1833 and based himself out of Milan. Late in his life, he became a professor at the Venice Academy. He gained a reputation as a fine painter of precisely rendered landscapes and urban views. The artist's work is exhibited in Paris and the Brera in Milan. Canella's son, also Giuseppe (1837-1913), became an accomplished artist of landscapes and urban view.

Initially trained by his father Giovanni, an architect, fresco painter and set designer, Giuseppe Canella started out producing stage sets and decorating stately homes in Verona and Mantua. His brother, Carlo Canella, was also a painter. It may have been under the influence of Pietro Ronzoni, a landscape painter of international renown active in Verona, that he took up landscape painting. The first views were not produced until 1815, after a short stay in Venice. After making his debut at the Fine Art Exposition at the Brera Academy of 1818, he made a long journey through Spain, the Netherlands and France for study purposes.

The set of 13 landscapes shown at the Expositions at the Brera in 1831 proved a great success with the public and critics alike, not least due to the fame achieved in Paris with works exhibited in the Salons, commissions from Louis Philippe of Orleans and the award of a gold medal in 1830. He returned to Milan in 1832 and devoted his energies to urban views characterised by an interest in the events of contemporary life and an atmospheric form of portrayal in evident competition with Giovanni Migliara. Landscape came to predominate as from 1835 with subjects drawn from the Lombard countryside and lakes. The focus on poor and humble aspects of life formed part of the artist’s fundamental naturalism and coincided with a moralistic approach derived from the novelist Alessandro Manzoni. Crucial importance attaches in the artist’s mature period to his trip to Rome and Naples in 1838–39.

Canella’s use of cold, unnatural light, probably traceable to the 17th-century Dutch painting models the artist had assimilated during his extensive European travels undertaken from 1819 to 1832. This criticism should be considered in the light of the rivalry that existed between this artist who instigated the renewal of the perspective view through his particular sensibility to atmospheric and luministic values.

Among his pupils or painters influenced by Canela were Felice Giuseppe Vertua, Constantino Prinetti, and Giovanni Renica. His son, Giuseppe Canella the Younger (Venice, 1837 - Padoa, 1913), was also a painter.

Works:
Views of Paris and the Boulevards.
Cathedral of Milan.
Harbor at Honfleur.
Basilica of Santa Croce, Florence .
New Street in Venice .
View of a Village—moonlight
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