“Venice: Canaletto and His Rivals”, which just opened at Washington’s National Gallery of Art, has many of the finest paintings of a city with few rivals for the world's most beautiful.

If you've ever gone to Venice, or never gone to Venice, you must go to this exhibit.

Even if you’re not particularly interested in Venice, or "view paintings" ("vedute"), this exhibit is “an exercise in connoisseurship,” the show’s curator Charles Beddington told a press preview. “It’s an exploration of the presiding genius Canaletto, and an introduction to lesser-known but excellent painters.”

Very few of these paintings have ever been shown outside Italy. DC's National Gallery is the free exhibit's only US venue, through May 30. The National Gallery here and the National Gallery, London organized the show, which was seen first in London.

Venice in all its glory and opulence is depicted with extraordinary detail in 20 masterworks by Canaletto (“Little canal” real name Giovanni Antonio Canal), and 34 by his most important contemporaries. The rivals include Luca Carlevarijs, Michele Marieschi, Bernardo Bellotto, and Francesco Guardi.

Several of these rivals' versions of the same scenes are displayed, offering excellent opportunities to compare and contrast styles -- and to have total immersion into the sumptuousness and grandeur of the thousand-year-old Venetian Republic (“La Serenissima”).

Then again, some viewers may feel less than serene after seeing nine versions of "The View from the Bacino di San Marco" (inner harbor of St. Mark's), including five on Ascension Day, and three by Canaletto. 

Canaletto’s only real training was painting theater scenery, as an assistant to his father. By the 1730s, Canaletto tailored his Venetian paintings to “what the British tourist would have wanted to hang on his wall,” said Beddington, an independent scholar and art dealer in London. 

Venice, especially its Grand Canal, was a major stop along the “Grand Tour” of the continent, a rite of passage for every British upper-class gentleman’s education. The English poet Alexander Pope in 1742 termed “This Republic” of Venice “the most considerable in Europe". 

Canaletto’s agent Joseph Smith, an English banker who later became a British consul, “engaged Canaletto to work for many years at a very low price, & sold his works to the English at much higher rates,” according to 18thcentury British writer Horace Walpole.

Alas, when Canaletto died in 1768, the bachelor had been living in a small apartment with a single bed, and had a net worth of the equivalent of about $1,100 -- despite his phenomenal success.

But when Canaletto began his view paintings, he soon eclipsed his immediate predecessor and greatest early rival, Luca Carlevarijs.

Carlevarijs, who had been orphaned at age 6, did not publish his first Venetian views until age 40 – 103 engravings of the city.

Canaletto “had no qualms about using his rival’s composition and…was able to outclass an artist of more than twice his age,” according to Beddington.

Their styles differed widely, especially Canaletto’s effects of sunlight, cloud formations, and Venetians’ everyday lives. These made Carlevarijs’ work seem mechanical and archaic in comparison.

Michele Marieschi, also trained in theater scenery painting, was Canaletto’s chief rival. Marieschi’s early death shortly after his 32ndbirthday was probably “rather a relief to Canaletto, because Marieschi was showing every sign of being a major competitor. Had he lived, he would have become quite a potent force,” Beddington commented.

Marieschi painted more quickly than Canaletto did, and sold his works for about half the price Canaletto charged.

Canaletto gave figures character and individuality, while Marieschi often let a specialist in figure painting fill in those blanks. Marieschi used unexpected viewpoints and some distortions, like foreshortening the church of Santa Maria della Salute in “The Entrance to the Grand Canal, looking East, with Santa Maria della Salute”, making Canaletto’s painting of that view seem relatively staid. 

Bernardo Bellotto was Canaletto’s nephew and precocious pupil. Bellotto often imitated Canaletto’s style -- and occasionally even signed the famous uncle’s name to the paintings. Forgery and plagiarism in the nearly-noble family?

A major difference between Canaletto’s style and Bellotto’s, was the nephew’s awkward figures with vague faces, and boats seeming perched upon water, as well as Bellotto's darker light in contrast to Canaletto’s warm sunshine.

Francesco Guardi emerged as a rival during Canaletto’s final decade. Guardi had not turned to Venetian view paintings until he was in his mid-40s. He had the greatest stylistic differences with Canaletto, focusing on mood instead of Venice’s majestic palaces and churches, and on nature more than man-made works. Guardi foreshadowed the fragility of the city.

Indeed, only four years after Guardi's death, a millennium of the Most Serene Venetian Republic ended when Napoleon’s troops invaded in 1797. With this, Venetian view painting also ended.

“Venice represents, for the painters and for us, a true dream,” said Italy’s Ambassador to Washington, Giulio Terzi di Sant ‘Agata, “It’s a way of looking at the past to see the future.”

It coincides with Italy@150, a series of activities throughout the United States (soon "La Dolce DC", March 1-July 31), which celebrate the 150th anniversary of the unification of Italy.

In addition to the paintings, one of the world's oldest gondolas is docked at the exhibit's entrance.

Goethe, in “Italian Journeys”, wrote, “Reclining in my gondola, I suddenly felt myself ... a Lord of the Adriatic.”

You will too when you see this dream of an exhibition.

For more info: National Gallery of Art, www.nga.gov, on the National Mall at Constitution between 3rdand 7thStreets, NW, Washington, DC. This free exhibition is in the museum's East Wing, through May 30. Related events include lectures, concerts, and films. The exhibition catalogue by curator Charles Beddington makes a fine souvenir.