Frederick Nerly, Basilica di Santi Maria e Donato... Lot 47

Frederick Nerly, Basilica di Santi Maria e Donato on the island of Murano. Oil on wove paper, mounted on strong cardboard. 1838. 67 x 47,4 cm. Monogrammed and dated lower right. Framed. //rg/63/4 After successful years in Rome, Friedrich Nerly had decided to return to Germany in 1835. Via Genoa and Milan, where he had stayed longer in 1836, he arrived in Verona. From there he made a trip to Venice - not suspecting that he would never leave the lagoon city again. Moved by the beauty of the "Serenissima" with its famous palaces and churches, by the maze of small streets with stairways and bridges, it was above all the moonlit nights that had previously enchanted countless poets and to which Nerly also succumbed. According to Franz Meyer, Nerly's first biographer, his first painting in Venice depicted the Piazzetta with the famous St. Mark's Column in the moonlight, which he was immediately able to successfully sell to the Prussian crown prince. It became the signet of his activity in Venice - no fewer than 36 versions are said to have existed. Business success was soon coupled with private happiness - he became involved with the Venetian Agathe Alexandra Aginovitch, the adopted daughter of his patron Marchese Maruzzi, who, as a devout Catholic, was not very pleased to hear that Nerly, who came from Erfurt, adhered to the Protestant creed. He withdrew all support and from then on Nerly was forced to accept commissions for paintings of whatever kind. Our painting, which shows the imposing chancel of the church of Santi Maria e Donato in Murano in the morning light, is probably one such commissioned work. It is one of the oldest churches in the lagoon at all, whose choir, designed in the 12th century as a two-story arcaded ambulatory, welcomed those arriving from Venice. Nerly has transferred the impressive, broadly positioned display wall into a narrow vertical format, thereby hardly allowing any space for the dynamic body of the church. The church is clamped in the frame, as it were, to lend additional dynamism to the vaulted choir - a similar effect applies to the campanile behind the church. Nerly captured the church on canvas with great graphic meticulousness and knowledge of the ornamental architectural forms; the painting is the first evidence of Nerly's interest in Romanesque and Gothic architecture in Venice, to which he would later devote himself repeatedly. It is the photographer's anticipated view - a little later the Venetian photographer Paolo Salviati was to photograph the church in the same detail, but it is more than mere architectural documentation; it is the atmospheric view of a morning, in which the warm morning light gently settles on the reddish brick, allowing it to radiate from itself clearly and transparently, and the individual architectural elements to come forward in shadow. And the way Nerly shapes the foreground, the boundary between land and water with its reflections in an open, virtuoso painting style, ties in directly with the oil sketches he made in Rome. With this mixture of faithful architectural documentation and atmospheric veduta, Nerly found great favor with the public in Venice early on. Extremely well-connected in the local society, his studio became a port of call for German and foreign princes, kings, and not least tourists in search of a souvenir from Venice - after all, Nerly was considered at the time to be the painter "through whose brush the present Venice has been most frequently and happily depicted" (Adolf Stahr: Herbstmonate in Oberitalien, Oldenburg 1860, p. 414). Peter Prange Taxation: differential taxation (VAT: Margin Scheme).