Antonio Visentini

In the 1730s, if you lived in London or Vienna and wanted to know what Venice looked like, you probably learned it from Antonio Visentini. He was a Venetian architect and engraver who took the painted views of Canaletto, the great recorder of the city's canals, and turned them into printed plates.

The project was organised by Joseph Smith, the British consul in Venice and Canaletto's main dealer, who wanted a book to sell the painter to collectors abroad. Visentini engraved 38 of the views, published in 1735 as the 'Prospectus Magni Canalis Venetiarum'. Bound and portable, it carried Canaletto's Venice across Europe and helped make him the souvenir painter of the Grand Tour.

Visentini was more than a copyist. He taught perspective at the Venetian Academy, wrote treatises on it, and worked as an architect, redesigning the Grand Canal facade of Consul Smith's own palace. He kept drawing and engraving into old age, and died in Venice in 1782, aged 93.