Building

Building is a subject in art. The gallery holds 156 works in this subject in art, including works by Titian, Chinese Qing Dynasty and Thomas Chambers.

The depiction of buildings is among the oldest impulses in art, but the edifice rose from a backdrop to a subject in its own right only gradually. Roman painters at Pompeii and Herculaneum already conjured colonnades, temples and stage-like facades on villa walls around 50 BC, using an intuitive—if not yet mathematically consistent—perspective in which receding lines clustered near the center rather than meeting at a single vanishing point. That problem was solved in early-fifteenth-century Florence, where Filippo Brunelleschi is credited with demonstrating one-point linear perspective around 1413. The technique turned architecture into the ideal vehicle for the new science of space, nowhere more purely than in the three Renaissance panels known as The Ideal City (at Urbino, Baltimore and Berlin), whose serene, unpeopled piazzas are constructed entirely around a single vanishing point.

From this foundation two enduring traditions emerged. The veduta, or topographical "view," was a detailed and largely factual record of a real place; its roots lay with Flemish artists working in Italy, such as Paul Bril (1554–1626), before it flowered in eighteenth-century Venice. Its counterpart, the capriccio, assembled real and imagined buildings, classical ruins and monuments into fantastical, decorative combinations—an architectural fiction practiced by Giovanni Paolo Panini and, in his invented views, by Canaletto himself.

The defining masters of the building-as-subject are the vedutisti. Canaletto (Giovanni Antonio Canal, 1697–1768) painted luminous, meticulously plotted views of Venice, Rome and London, prizing compositional harmony over strict geographic accuracy and reportedly tracing contours with an optical camera. His nephew Bernardo Bellotto carried the manner to Dresden and Warsaw, while Francesco Guardi dissolved Venetian stone into shimmering, atmospheric brushwork. North of the Alps, Johannes Vermeer produced in his View of Delft (c. 1660–61) what many regard as the most memorable cityscape in Western art, subtly rearranging the real skyline for dramatic effect.

The genre's legacy runs straight into modern painting. The Impressionists inherited the architectural motif but bent it to light and weather rather than topographic precision—Alfred Sisley's The Bridge at Villeneuve-la-Garenne (1872), held in this collection, treats a structure as an armature for reflection and air. Buildings likewise frame narrative and sacred painting, supplying the stage for works such as Juan de Flandes's The Temptation of Christ, and they anchor American luminist views like Thomas Chambers's harbor scenes, confirming the edifice as one of art's most adaptable subjects.