Alte Pinakothek

Ah! My Canalettos! This one is Piazzetta und Riva Degli Schiavoni in Venedig, but I think Canaletto (and/or his students) may have painted this many times, possibly from several perspectives. Or maybe this is the painting of the Piazzetta and it happens to be in Munich. I wonder which is more likely, probably the former. I found it hanging at the Alte Pinakothek when I went on my museum tour on Tuesday (Wednesday I was mainly at the conference, working on a paper review, then gave my 1 min fast forward presentation, and today, Thursday, I gave my 15 min talk—incidentally, a couple of people came up and spoke with me about the work, and I made contact with a fellow who is doing something similar, so another eye tracking contact!).

Another Canaletto, this is Riva Degli Schiavoni vom Ausgang des Canal Grande aus Gesehen, which I'm guessing means River Degli Schiavoni (?) with exit of Grande Canal...but what's "aus Gesehen"? Anyway, it's one with the dog taking a dump, which I focused on here, but unfortunately this, like many of my photos, is quite blurry. Corey takes better art gallery pics than I do. Anyway, there were only a couple of Canalettos, there were many more Rubens (I think the one at right is a Rubens—I have other shots that I know are Rubens but they're not sharp). Lots of rather voluptuous people in various harrowing scenes. Lot of heaven and hell type of stuff. Really good though.

Besides the vedutisti I also like the work of the Dutch masters, particularly for their realistic depictions, like Van Dyck's portrait of Georg Petel here. The eyes are really well done. And I'm also starting to really like Brouwer as he seemed to have particularly enjoyed depicting "common" scenes like this fiddler in some kind of tavern. There were several others depicting various bars, drunkards, and even fights (there was one of a card cheater being discovered in an "action scene" with the card table in the middle of falling over, etc.). I think I've discovered a good strategy for art galleries: skip right past all the Madonna and Child pics and head straight for the good stuff!