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by F. Scott Archer. In the same year he published the
album Vedute di Roma e dei contorni in fotografi a
(Photographic Views of Rome and Surroundings). He
also took many important photographs around Naples,
which show stupendous panoramas of the sea, Vesuvius
and the ruins at Pompeii.
The magazine L’Artista, published in Milan in 1859
by Luigi Sacchi, one of the foremost photographers
from the beginning, gives details of a grand enterprise
inwhich Caneva took part, a journey to India and China.
The “famous Caneva of Rome,” was the photographer
chosen by the silk fi rm of Castellani and Freschi to
participate in an expedition to seek new silkworms
untouched by disease. Of the pictures he took on this
expedition there remain only a few engravings taken
from the photographs, (G.B. Castellani, 1860), a salted
paper in the collection of Piero Becchetti at Rome, and
the relative calotype in the ICCD at Rome.
In 1864 Caneva was paid to revise the inventory
of the photograhic material in the studio of his friend
Tommaso Cuccioni, who had died a short time before.
Caneva himself died in the following year and is buried
in cemetery at Campo Verano.
His activities at Rome are bound up with those of
many other artists and photographers who frequented the
photographic circle that emerged at the Caffè Greco in
Via Condotti shortly before 1850, the so-called “Roman
School of Photography.” Other members were the sculp-
tor and medalist Frédéric Flachéron, Eugéne Costant
and, for a short time, the goldsmith Augusto Castellani
and Ludovico Tuminello. The earliest photographs of
the “Roman School” are those of Costant and Flachéron
datable to 1848, except for one view of the piazza Bocca
della Verità, which is signed and dated “G. Caneva
1847.” Thus Caneva has the merit of having taken the
fi rst calotype to attest the activity of this Roman circle,
which was very important for the diffusion of calotypes
in Italy. From the beginning he and other Roman friends
devoted themselves to taking photographs of the monu-
ments of Rome, using the knowledge they had acquired
in their studies of design and perspective. These views
reveal their confi dent mastery of the calotype technique,
after the method of Gustav Le Gray, their strict attention
to illumination, the relationship between light and shade,
and the correct angle for perspective. As well as these
pictures of the most important places in Rome, he took
photographs of events such as religious and popular
festivals, and scenes of everyday life. For the Vatican
he took important photographs of statues, of which
the most outstanding are those of the Laocoon and the
Torso of the Belvedere. He also took several views of
the Musei Capitolini, the Museo Albani and the Museo
Ludovisi at Rome. His views of the surroundings of
Rome and those taken at Tivoli are splendid. These exalt
different parts of the beauties of nature, such as trees,
ruins, rocks, peasants’ huts, and rivers, views that were
certainly in demand by many painters working in Rome.
From 1852 he systematically took photographs for art-
ists, using the calotype process precisely because it was
able to reproduce to whole range of lighting effects of
the countryside with delicate gradations of tone. His
studies of nature are the fi rst examples of the genre and
thus precede the later popularity of such views, which
spread throughout Europe. The extremely high quality
that he achieved is due to the use of very large apparatus
instead of the daguerreotype machines that he had at
the beginning of his career. The continuing refi nement
of expression, obtained through his increasing mastery
of the medium, and his continual updating of technical
equipment gave him at the height of his career results
of great originality, in which the determining role was
played by his own creative gifts and his previous train-CANEVA, GIACOMO
Caneva, Giacomo. Barefoot girl leaning
on basket with a doll.
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
© The J. Paul Getty Museum.