Self-portraits as a painter?

Statements? Selfie?

In Canaletto's work almost never we see people drawing or painting, and beside the architecture of the city he always animated his compositions with the kind of people / situations he saw or was familiar with.

In Canaletto's work almost never we see people drawing or painting, and beside the architecture of the city he always animated his compositions with the kind of people / situations he saw or was familiar with.

After all he was used to spend time on location to draw/get the material for his paintings, and he reported the reality he was seeing, and made up his own too, at the point that a phantasy jump was taken very much as reality.

And painters, persons drawing, were not part of the environment he was relating to.

Canaletto was inventing and doing by memory his artworks for sure, but he also collected life as it was happening directly on location.

So very rarely we see in his paintings "unusual guests": we see workers, fishermen, priests, tourists going around and appreciating the town, poor people begging or selling stuff (very often chicken, I would say from the size of the cages) on the public street, everyday market.

Somebody drawing at this point was surely an uncommon person, there weren't probably many, and anyway, that was competition.

I have very carefully visually scanned all the more than 800 high quality images (paintings, drawings, etchings) I have available, which are recognizedly been made by Canaletto, in search of somebody drawing or painting in the crowd, and I just came out with a few, the ones you see here on the right.

At this point if we see somebody drawing or painting in one of his works, it could be inferred he wanted to do sort of a self portrait, to represent himself.

A self-representation as a statement (like in the Arch of Constantine image) or very likely a memory: in fact the drawing subjects I found always show a young man, even in the 1755 drawing kid that you may find at the top of the page.

Was he using a Camera Obscura too to record the people? It could have been a useful tool here, maybe.

But what we can infer from the way he drew / painted people and street situations, that he might have been quite fast in getting the atmosphere and putting it on paper, or later on the canvas, would the Camera Obscura help?

But maybe it could have helped in framing the situations, so he could feel them and draw them fast and right, sort of a telephoto lens in phtography, that zooms on things and separates them from the rest.

The Camera Obscura in the Museo Correr is provided with what seems to be a short telephoto lens.

Considering the "normal" lens in a "normal camera" is the 50 mm as it is considered in regular 35mm portable cameras, and this value is so radicated to be still used to define lenses with digital cameras nowadays.

What I evaluated considering focal distance, size of the final view etc., and a comparison I found about a regular camera photo and the Camera Obscura equal, the focal lenght can be considered as being around 80mm.

And there we have a short telephoto Camera Obscura to go peek in the details of the surrounding world.