The idea of the Grand Tour was for the wealthy upper-class young European men (not women alas) to travel to the Continent, especially France and Italy, to experience classical art, culture and the "roots of Western Civilisation". Vedute (view paintings) were popular as representations of the Grand Tour - as souvenirs or an imagined fantasy as many of these paintings were not physically possible.
Seeing these two paintings at the Princely Treasures exhibition inspired me to look at my archives of photographs in Europe - my own mini Grand Tour (haha). It has been almost five years now. I've always wanted to finish writing about it...
Hopefully, I'll do so one day.
I selected some photographs that I took around the same setting as these paintings.
we all have our own Rome and Venice
Rome
Capriccio with the Most Important Architectural Monuments and Sculptures of Ancient Rome by Giovanni Paolo Pannini
Venice
The St Mark's Square in Venice looking West with the Campanile by Il Canaletto
“Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
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