Bernardo Bellotto

"Bellotto's urban scenes have the same carefully drawn realism as his uncle's Venetian views but are marked by heavy shadows and are darker and colder in tone and colour."

View of Warsaw from the Praga bank, painted 1770.

Bernardo Bellotto (30 January 1720 – 17 October 1780) was an Italian urban landscape painter or vedutista, and printmaker in etching famous for his vedutes of European cities (Dresden, Vienna, Turin and Warsaw). He was the pupil and nephew of Canaletto and sometimes used the latter's illustrious name, signing himself as Bernardo Canaletto. Especially in Germany, paintings attributed to Canaletto may actually be by Bellotto rather than by his uncle; in Poland, they are by Bellotto, who is known there as "Canaletto".

Bellotto's style was characterized by elaborate representation of architectural and natural vistas, and by the specific quality of each place's lighting. It is plausible that Bellotto, and other Venetian masters of vedute, may have used the camera obscura in order to achieve superior precision of urban views.

Life

Bellotto was born in Venice, the son of Lorenzo Antonio Bellotto and Fiorenza Canal, sister of the famous Canaletto, and studied in his uncle's workshop.

In 1742 he moved to Rome, where he produced vedute of that city. In 1744 and 1745 he traveled northern Italy, again depicting vedute of each city. Among others, he worked for Charles Emmanuel III of Savoy.

From 1747 to 1758 he moved to Dresden, following an invitation from King August III of Poland. He created paintings of the cities Dresden and Pirna and their surroundings. Today these paintings preserve a memory of Dresden's former beauty, which was destroyed by bombing during World War II.

His international reputation grew, and in 1758 he accepted an invitation from Empress Maria Theresa to come to Vienna, where he painted views of the city's monuments. Thereafter he worked in Munich and then again in Dresden.

When King August III of Poland, also an Elector of Saxony, who usually lived in Dresden, died in 1763, Bellotto's work became less important in Dresden. As a consequence, he left Dresden to seek employment in St Petersburg at the court of Catherine II of Russia. On his way to St. Petersburg, however, Bellotto accepted an invitation in 1764 from Poland's newly elected King Stanisław August Poniatowski to become his court painter in Warsaw.

Here he remained some 16 years, for the rest of his life, as court painter to the King, for whom he painted numerous views of the Polish capital and its environs for the Royal Castle in Warsaw, complement of the great historical paintings commissioned by Poniatowski from Marcello Bacciarelli. His paintings of Warsaw, later relocated to Moscow and Leningrad, were restored to the Polish Communist Government and were used in rebuilding the city after its near-complete destruction by German and Russian troops during World War II.

Stanislaw Kostka Potocki,(1755 - 1821), Prime Minister of the so-called Duchy of Warsaw, (1807 -1813), a Napoleonic political concoction, extinguished through the Congress of Vienna between November 1814 and June 1815

Izabela Czartoryska, (1743 - 1835), the daughter of Jerzy Detloff Fleming and Antonina Czartoryska who married Adam Kazimierz Czartoryski, (1734 - 1823), supposed father of Polish statesman Adam Jerzy Czartoryski, (1770 - 1861), but presumed to be the son of the Russian ambassador to Poland, Nikolai Repnin

There are paintings by Bellotto also at the Czartoryski Museum , in Krakow, Poland (a museum founded by Izabela Czartoryska, (1743 - 1835), with paintings and works of art from her estate, Pulawy), and in Wilanów Palace, in the outskirts of Warsaw, founded around 1805 by Stanislaw Kostka Potocki, where a portrait of the above mentioned Izabela Czartoryska can be seen.

Bellotto died in Warsaw in 1780.

See also

• Canaletto
• Marcello Bacciarelli

References

• "Belotto [sic] Bernardo, zwany [known as] Canaletto", Encyklopedia Polski, p. 42.

• STEPHANE LOIRE, HANNA MALACHOWICZ, KRZYSTOF POMIAN, ANDRZEJ ROTTERMUND. "Bernardo Bellotto, Un pittore veneziano a Varsavia" . Book edited by Andrzej Rottermund, Director of the Royal Castle at Warszawa and Henry Loirette, Director of the Louvre Museum (Paris), from the Louvre Museum Exhibition of Bernardo Bellotto at the Warszawa Royal Castle from 7 October 2004 to 10th January 2005. 5 Continents Editions srl, Milano, (2004). ISBN 5 Continents Editions: 88-7439-139-0 . 134 pages with over 65 big size color photographs within.

• http://www.szlachta.org/

A very good Polish page on Polish Nobility families genealogies and thus tracking where to find portraits about them and where these portraits can be located.

• http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/bellotto_bernardo.html

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanis%C5%82aw_Kostka_Potocki

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Bernardo Bellotto, il Canaletto

• Biography and Gallery
• Bernardo Bellotto in the "A World History of Art"
• Gallery of Canaletto's paintings, in particular many views of Dresden and Warsaw
• Web Gallery of Art
• Bernardo Bellotto Desktop Wallpapers
• Bernardo Bellotto at Wikigallery.org