From December 2013 to April 2014, Ca’ Rezzonico, the Museum of Eighteenth-Century Venice, held a temporary exhibition dedicated to Pietro Bellotti (1725-1805?), Bernardo Bellotto’s brother and Canaletto’s nephew. The exhibition was the first in the initiative Archives of Landscape Paintings, a series of exhibitions dedicated to minor figures of the of the eighteenth-century Venetian artistic circle. The exhibition was curated by Charles Beddington, Alberto Craievich and Domenico Crivellari. It presented forty-three view paintings grouped into three sections, the first entirely dedicated to Venice, the second to other Italian and European cities, and the last displaying European cities and capricci. A catalogue of the exhibition was published by Scripta, but unfortunately only in Italian.
Pietro Bellotti was born in Venice in 1725. Though his name is not mentioned in any literary sources or in the traditional repertoire of Venetian painters, his kinship cannot but be taken into consideration when analysing his artistic career. Bellotti started working in his brother Bernardo’s workshop at the age of sixteen and paid him the sum of 120 ducats to be trained in view painting, an art which Grand Tourists in particular appreciated, encouraging painters to draw the views that they liked most, taking them home as souvenirs of their travels. Bellotti’s relationship with his brother was probably not a good one, as a year after his arrival as an apprentice he left Bernardo’s workshop and started travelling around Italy and Europe. In 1746 he was in Genoa where he met his wife-to-be. They moved to Toulouse where Bellotti settled his family, but he nevertheless kept on travelling through France, visiting Nantes, Lille and Paris, where his name was mentioned in an advertisement in 1755 in association with the name Canaletto (see Rachel Spence’s Financial Times review of the 2011 exhibition on Bernardo Bellotto in Conegliano). Pietro, like his brother Bernardo, signed some of his paintings ‘Bellotti dit Canaletti’. In the 1760s and 70s he was in England. He died in France around the year 1805.
View paintings became tremendously popular in the eighteenth century as ostensibly objective documents of places and historical events. This new way of perceiving the landscape, keeping human presence in the background and giving prominence to architectural and natural elements, was promoted by local clients but also by foreign visitors, Grand Tourists, as well as those who were unable to afford to undertake the Grand Tour but nonetheless wanted to purchase an impression of the sights. Rome and Venice were among the preferred cities for view paintings, and enlightened tourists selected the view that they liked most, often accompanying the pictures with their own personal annotations and sketches. View painters employed the camera ottica as a tool to reproduce the view in detail. The function of the camera ottica was similar to the camera obscura: light came into the tool from a small hole and the image of the view was projected onto the opposite surface. This image, which at first appeared upside down and blurred, could be perfected with lenses and mirrors, projected onto grease-proof paper or ground glass and then traced onto paper by the painter. Though the camera ottica often distorted colours and shapes, it was an indispensable tool as far as the rationality of view paintings as documentary images was concerned, allowing the artist to accurately capture his subject and thereby fulfill the demands of his clientele. A model of a camera ottica was on display in another exhibition being shown concurrently with the Bellotti exhibition, Around Monet: The Landscape from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century, held at the Basilica Palladiana in Vicenza, in a section dedicated to the eighteenth-century view painting (see the catalogue by Goldin Marco, Le Linee D’Ombra, 2013). A keen entrepreneur, Bellotti built himself a device based on similar principles to the camera ottica, but which functioned more like a combination of a back-lit lantern with a peep-box, inside which one could glimpse a reproduction of Bellotti’s view paintings, enhanced by the back-lighting to give the alternate impressions of day and night. Versions of such devices were also known as the pantascopio or mondo nuovo, but Bellotti, perhaps conscious of his international audience, called his l’Optique. He used it to show his views of Italian and European cities at travelling fairs and markets, thus letting people travel to a foreign country for the price of a few coins. At Ca’ Rezzonico, on the second floor, there is a fresco by Giandomenico Tiepolo representing a group of Venetian people busy admiring a similar ‘magic box’. What is both innovative and telling in Tiepolo’s fresco is that the people represented in it are so captured by the invention that they turn their backs on and ignore the visitors to the space.
View painting traditionally includes two currents: the rational and architectural current, which corresponds to the new ideas promoted by the Enlightenment, and the ‘picturesque’ current, the so-called capricci, which present imaginary landscapes with ruins and architectural follies, creating a decadent atmosphere. Bellotti exemplifies both trends, as the paintings exhibited at Ca’ Rezzonico demonstrate.
Ca’ Rezzonico has hosted the Museum of Eighteenth-Century Venice since 1936. The ground and first floor of the building were built in the years 1649-82 and the second floor was added in 1750. Both the furniture and the frescos in the palazzo date back to the eighteenth century. Visitors who arrive at Ca’ Rezzonico by vaporetto cannot but notice the magnificent façade facing the Canal Grande while they cross the wooden bridge which connects the wharf with the entrance to the palace. If you arrive on foot, the land entrance is as worthy as the one from the canal, with a wide wooden door opening onto a patio and facing a sumptuous staircase that leads you directly to the first floor. Once you have climbed the stairs, you enter a breathtaking, magnificent ballroom with trompe-l’oeil frescos dedicated to Roman and Greek deities and to mythological narratives; a sumptuous welcome.
The exhibition began to the right of the ballroom, where a small entrance leads the visitors into the Nuptial Allegory Room. The fresco on the ceiling by Tiepolo represents the marriage of Ludovico Rezzonico and Caterina Savorgnan, which united two great Venetian families. On the walls, which are covered with red brocade, was to be found the first instalment of Bellotti’s paintings, dedicated to Venice. Small pedestals provided the basic information about each painting (name, date, medium) both in Italian and in English and each room was furnished with an introductory sheet on the theme of the room, in four languages (Italian, English, French and Spanish). The paintings in this room showed how Bellotti was indebted to Canaletto; Bellotti probably copied some of his uncle’s original paintings. Some of the few Canalettos that remain in Venice can be seen on the second floor of Ca’ Rezzonico, but they were not on display in the exhibition proper for comparison with Bellotti’s work. Nevertheless, Bellotti’s paintings in the first room of the exhibition also demonstrate his original and distinguished aesthetic and technique. Figures become more marginal, buildings more important. Bellotti gives more predominance to the sky, the clouds are more defined and the colours that he uses are warmer than those in Canaletto’s views. The emphasis on black for rendering shadow in architectural features is replaced by lighter brownish tones, and thick impasto highlights typical of Canaletto are rejected in favour of a more subtle application of paint. In these pictures, we notice Bellotti’s characteristic preference for suffused lighting, as in The Molo, looking West, and, by extension, for specific moments of the day, especially sunrise and sunset, which he renders with rosy and reddish clouds and sky (as in Venice: The Molo, looking West, with the Doge’s Palace or in Florence: The Arno and the Ponte S. Trinità). Bellotti captures the way in which the dust particles and mist typical of the city of Venice appear to blur the contours of the buildings. Canaletto’s influence, by contrast, can be seen in The Campo SS. Apostoli from across the Rio SS. Apostoli, in which the light is more brilliant and the contours of the buildings are neatly defined.
Two paintings of the Salute church that were on display show the particular zooming technique permitted by the camera ottica, in which one painting is the zoomed-in representation of the other. As a famous Venetian landmark, La Salute was one of the most frequently represented churches in this room. There was only one picture which did not portray a urban setting, Le porte del Dolo, a painting which depicts a rural setting with a dam, probably on the Brenta River. The dam forms a small pool around which peasants are portrayed going about their daily activities. The suffusive light coming from the left of the scene lights up the buildings’ wooden windowpanes and stone and brick walls.
The second room of the exhibition, in what is normally the Pastels Room of Ca’ Rezzonico, welcomed the visitor with its turquoise brocade, which made for a striking juxtaposition with the light blue and suffused tones of the cities pictured by Bellotti. The room hosted a collection of view paintings of various Italian and European cities. In order to give continuity to the exhibition, the first two paintings portrayed Venice, then the display moved to Rome and Florence and other European cities, following the path of Bellotti’s own travels. Here there was also the first and only example of an interior view, The Interior of a Renaissance-Style Protestant Church, in which the perspective is not central but taken from the left aisle of the church where the light comes in, lending compositional importance to otherwise minor elements of the church architecture. The paintings in this room were smaller than the paintings in the first room of the exhibition, with the exception of one, which portrayed a rural landscape with The Bridge over the Mugnone at the Badia Fiesolana, the countryside near Florence. This is an example of a rural capriccio, in which the emphasis is on nature rather than architecture. Milan: The Colonnade of S. Lorenzo was the first example in the exhibition of an architectural capriccio, in which a Greek colonnade is inserted into an urban setting with the medieval door of the city and the river in the background. Attention is also drawn to the foreground where a woman is depicted begging for money. In this picture’s rendering of the sunrise we again find Bellotti’s now signature use of light. Finally, An Imaginary Mediterranean Coast with a Shipwreck in a Storm reveals something of a pre-Romantic aesthetic in Bellotti’s painting.
The exhibition finished in the Tapestries Room, with further views of European cities and capricci from later in Bellotti’s career. Entering the room, on the right, one could not but be impressed by a wondrous mirror, on either side of which were two small views, one of Vienna and one of Amsterdam. The paintings in this room encouraged visitors to experience two different kinds of travel: moving around European cities and their warm red skies, but also entering into the imaginary, decadent reality of Bellotti’s capricci. In the views of European cities, visitors might have noticed how Bellotti’s style had changed, the contours of buildings increasingly blurred in the fading light of the sunset, as in Vienna: The Graben. The transition from view painting to capriccio is summed up in Lisbon: The Church of St Nicholas, after the Earthquake of 1st November 1755, a documentation of the damage reaped by the natural disaster, but embellished by artistic licence, such as the vegetation encroaching on what would have still been relatively fresh ruins at the time of painting. In the capricci, Bellotti mixes architectural elements derived from various cities and archaeological sites – often including obelisks, pyramids and sarcophagi, as in his two Capricci of Classical Ruins – to the extent that it is almost impossible to identify their origin.
The exhibition ended there, but visitors could continue their visit through the other rooms of the first floor and then move to the second floor of the palazzo, where they could admire the permanent collection, including Tiepolo’s frescos, views by Canaletto, and Pietro Longhi’s scenes of daily Venetian life in the eighteenth century, all of which complement the exhibition in different ways. Bellotti’s work was integrated perfectly within the eighteenth-century atmosphere that visitors can experience at Ca’ Rezzonico.
Pietro Bellotti. Another Canaletto was at Ca’ Rezzonico, Venice, from 7 December 2013 to 28 April 2014.
The exhibition was accompanied by the catalogue Pietro Bellotti. Un altro Canaletto (Scripta edizioni, 2013).