Architectural Fantasy

Visentini spent much of his life recording other people's buildings. He engraved Canaletto's Venetian views for the English collector Joseph Smith, and he taught perspective at the Venetian academy. So it is worth knowing that this grand structure never existed. It is a capriccio, an architectural fantasy, columns and arches and staircases assembled into a building no one ever commissioned or climbed. Painted around 1771, when Visentini was in his eighties, it lets a man who knew exactly how real architecture was measured and drawn simply invent one instead. The pleasure of it, for him and for the 18th-century Venetians who collected these things, was precisely that the eye reads it as solid and possible while knowing none of it stands anywhere.