Francesco Tironi

(Venice circa 1745–1797)
The Canal Grande, Venice, looking east towards the Bacino di San Marco; and
The Rialto Bridge, Venice,
oil on canvas, each 36.5 x 84 cm, framed, a pair (2)

Provenance:
sale, Sotheby’s, London, 13 February 1985, lot 119 (as Venetian School, 18th Century);
with Salamon Gallery, Milan;
Private European collection

The elongated horizontal format of the present compositions emphasises the broad sweep of the lagoon: in one painting, the island of San Giorgio Maggiore rises behind the busy traffic of gondolas and bragozzi, while in the other the Bacino di San Marco opens towards the Salute, its monumental silhouette captured with clarity. Figures are rendered with swift, fluid touches, enlivening the serene architecture with scenes of everyday life.

Francesco Tironi remains a somewhat elusive figure despite sustained attention from modern scholarship. Research by Dario Succi (Francesco Tironi ultimo vedutista del Settecento veneziano, 2004) and Lino Moretti (Canaletto. Venezia e i suoi splendori, 2008) has clarified his activity and placed him among the last professional vedutisti before the fall of the Republic in 1797, in the very year of his death. Already recognised by Hermann Voss in 1927 as a distinct personality within the tradition of Canaletto and Guardi, Tironi is appreciated today as a painter who combined the exactitude of architectural drawing with a gentle lyricism, often tinged with a vein of nostalgia. His collaboration with Antonio Sandi on the series of twenty-four engravings of the Porti e isole di Venezia further attests to his role in documenting the city and its territories at a moment when their image was acquiring the aura of a vanishing world.

In these works, the Grandeur of Venice is presented less as bustling theatre than as a space of memory: clear, serene, and touched by a sentiment that anticipates the neoclassical taste of painters such as Carlo Grubacs in the early nineteenth century. The pair of paintings stands as an eloquent testimony to Tironi’s artistic position, at the close of the Venetian vedutista tradition, bridging the legacy of Canaletto with the emerging sensibility of a new age.

Stylistically, the present pair can be placed around the late 1760s, when Tironi produced some of his most assured works.