Backwater Relief

Venice in the 18th Century was supposed to be Europe's No. I good-time town. Actually it was a dirty, provincial, poverty-stricken backwater whose magnificent buildings, heirlooms of a great past, looked down once a year on a second-rate carnival. The rest of the year Venetian amusements were penny-pinching, snuff-taking, gambling and adultery for the 40 ruling families. Venice's maritime power and the Mediterranean's role as the world's central sea had been ended by the discovery of the Cape of Good Hope route to the Orient. A declining 17th Century Venice could not defend outlying possessions. Despoiled 18th Century Venice survived on the remnants of its great traders' fortunes, and the city slowly, deliberately died, as Austria's Vienna dies today. In this cemetery of old magnificence, half a dozen men supplied the only signs of first-rate life: Casanova the rake, Goldoni the playwright and Painters Tiepolo, Canaletto, Francesco Guardi and Pietro Longhi. Last week Manhattan's Knoedler Galleries put on a show of the Venetian painters who made Venice's twilight tolerable.

On three great canvases Canaletto showed Venice of the fine buildings, clear, speckled sunlight, gondolas, nobles in skirted coats, poor fishermen, dogs, but no filth. Pietro Longhi charmingly showed the noble nonentities at home, drinking coffee, playing cards and Blind-Man's-Buff, attending a noblewoman who has faked a swoon. Francesco Guardi picks out with an astonishingly sparkling and impressionistic use of light the lagoons of Venice. Of Tiepolo, greatest of them all, last week's show included but two examples, the better a slick, overdramatic Crucifixion.

Manhattan critics found in this collection no profundity but considerable charm, gaiety and first-class brushwork.

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