Francesco Guardi Francesco Guardi is considered to be one Venice's foremost eighteenth-century painters and was certainly the most outstanding member of a dynasty of artists. His father Domenico (1678-1716), who came from Trent, had served his apprenticeship in Vienna after 1690, before settling in Venice in the early eighteenth century. After Domenico's death in 1716, it was Gian Antonio Guardi (1698-1760) who took charge of the family studio, specialising in "the painting of history". Naturally, Francesco's early work is linked to that of his elder brother, whose work reveals great virtuosity in his depiction of figures and the aesthetics of the rococo style. At that time, Francesco - who had no formal training - was responsible for painting backgrounds, clothes and accessories, a role that was imposed by the established hierarchy involving the head of the studio and the apprentices. Following Gian Antonio's death in 1760, Francesco became the head of the studio and was finally able to devote his efforts to painting vedute (highly detailed views of specific locations). His contemporaries considered this genre to be of secondary importance, but it was popular among foreign clients, a factor that contributed to its success. The capricci (idealised landscapes) also afforded greater freedom of expression, allowing him to integrate figures and landscape and adopt a new approach that was full of movement of creative brilliance. For differing reasons, the influences of Michele Marieschi (1696-1743), Marco Ricci (1676-1729) and Canaletto (1697-1768) are seen as decisive in Guardi's work, which was governed, as was once said, by "pure pictorial instinct". However, Guardi had to wait until 1784 before he was accepted into the Academia. His son Giacomo (1764-1835) is attributed with later works whose brushstrokes are more mechanical and compositions are more rigid, the result of the fashionable taste for the Neo-Classical. It is difficult to establish either an accurate chronology or a positive identification for all the works attributed to Guardi, which total over one thousand paintings. "Guardi is the man of fleeting time, of forms that come together and disintegrate…" Marcel Brion Topics: Capriccio Francesco Guardi Francesco Guardi's drawings The Republic of Venice - From splendour to decline Francesco Guardi's paintings in the Calouste Gulbenkian Collection