Canaletto's paintings showed more than the tourist side of Venice

As you pass by the jet-black gondola outside and through the arched entrance to the National Gallery's new Canaletto show, there is a double challenge: Forget about Venice and forget about Canaletto's reputation.

"Venice: Canaletto and His Rivals" is the first major exhibition to feature paintings by the most successful of the 18th-century vedusti, or view painters, since the Gallery's 1995 "The Glory of Venice" exhibition. And Canaletto, with his meticulously rendered architectural details and rather sedate surfaces, wasn't exactly the star of a show that reveled in dimpled flesh, swirling fabric and ecstasies both religious and erotic. The current exhibition, which was first seen at London's National Gallery, helps make a stronger case both for Canaletto and his competitors, if only by eliminating all the delicious distraction offered by sexier artists such as Giambattista Tiepolo and Sebastiano Ricci.

But is it enough? The vedusti specialized in producing what were essentially high-end souvenirs, images of Venice manufactured mainly for English gentry who wanted to bring home a memento of their time in what was already a European tourist destination. The strength of their work was its precision of detail and likeness to life, both of which can be exhausting after a half-dozen images of the iconic campanile or the Byzantine splendor of St. Mark's Basilica. The virtues of Canaletto, his instant legibility and the consistent mood of sunny quiet that pervades even his busiest paintings, are also his greatest weaknesses.

If you allow the exhibition to be about Venice, and limit your pleasure to remarking on how much Canaletto's paintings really look like Venice, then it's game over very quickly. But you if can forget the tourist's mental image of Venice, Canaletto becomes a much more interesting artist, and this exhibition offers a feast for close observation and comparison.

Forgetting Venice isn't easy. Like the pyramids of Egypt and the Taj Mahal, Venice doesn't really exist apart from pictures of Venice. When the narrator of Henry James's novella, "The Aspern Papers," takes a gondola ride through 19th-century Venice, he rather snidely refers to the city outside his boat as "the bright Venetian picture." Not a place, just a picture. The word "bright" suggests that James is almost assuredly thinking not just of any picture of Venice, but of Canaletto's Venice.

Perhaps because they were so instrumental in Canaletto's career - and that influence wasn't entirely benign - the English have a particular love-hate relation with the painter. The art critic John Ruskin deplored the painter's "servile and mindless imitation," comparing his output to the mechanical reproduction of nature offered by the newly popular daguerreotype.

A century and a half later, critics weren't much warmer about Canaletto when this show (with several notable changes) debuted in London.

Yet seen side by side with other painters plying the same trade, Canaletto's power is easier to detect. And far from being merely a photographer working with paint and brush, he felt perfectly free to change reality when it suited him. When the campanile tower proved too tall to fit into a painting, he simply downsized it. And in works such as the "Piazza San Marco, looking South and West," painted around 1731, the artist does give us views both south and west, creating an impossible perspective. In what is probably the masterpiece of the exhibition, the large-scale view of the Bacino di San Marco (or inner harbor of the city), he rendered the spars and rigging of each boat with consummate precision, yet turned the church of San Giorgio Maggiore so viewers could see its magnificent front, designed by Andrea Palladio, face on.

These liberties weren't exclusive to Canaletto, and they are present in the oldest picture in the exhibition, Gaspar van Wittel's 1697 view of the campanile and Doge's palace, with the windows of the latter "corrected" for symmetry.

Venetian painters had included Venice as a subject for centuries, but it functioned mainly as a backdrop to images that record specific religious festivals or other events.

The painter generally credited with founding the 18th-century school of Venetian view painting, Luca Carlevarijs, gives people and architecture about equal billing, reveling in the life of the city, its major festivals and pageants, its urban bustle. But while full of people, they are not always full of life. Indeed, the same lady - dressed in pink, wearing a mask and holding a fan - appears in two Carlevarijs paintings, dropped in from a pattern book. Unfortunately, these paintings have been placed far from each other, on different floors of the exhibition.

In Canaletto's work, one generally gets fewer people and a lot more liveliness. He painted his own people - it wasn't uncommon for view painters to turn this task over to specialized subcontractors - and while they have the sometimes sketchy, provisional feel one would expect when figures are incidental to architectural interest, they convey all the essentials needed to animate the canvas: A sense of motion and musculature, and an existential reason for being present, other than as mere decoration. Even the people standing around in his "Piazza San Marco, looking South and West" give a powerful sense that the day is ending, the crowds heading home, the market over.