Bernardo Bellotto and the Capitals of Europe

Traditionally speaking (and thanks to such well-known scholars as Michael Levey and Francis Haskell), names and phenomena associated with Venetian art, such as vedutismo, have come quickly to mind in any summation of the major developments of eighteenth-century painting outside France and Britain. It is only natural for Venice and view painting to come in for some reassessment with so much attention being given in recent art-historical scholarship to the central artistic role played by Rome in Italy and Europe during the period, and with so much healthy growth occurring in the study of eighteenth-century art overall.

A recent exhibit that traveled to Venice and Houston, organized by a team of European and American scholars, provided an excellent opportunity to re-examine vedute painting generally and the career of one of its best-known exemplars, Bernardo Bellotto (1722-80). It also afforded the opportunity for some consideration of broader cultural and intellectual trends afoot in Europe during the period because of the international nature of Bellotto's career. The Venetian version of the exhibit was recently reviewed by Jeffrey Collins (ECS 35, no.1); the current review will focus on the Houston installation.

Bellotto, of course, was trained by his uncle, Antonio Canal (1697-1768), or "Canaletto" (and would come to be referred to as "Canaletto" himself in the later eighteenth century). He probably was at work in his uncle's shop by the mid-1730s before visiting Rome and Tuscany, at his uncle's urging, in 1742. He visited Milan in 1744. Bellotto left Venice in 1747 to undertake work for the Saxon court in Dresden; he would never return to Italy. During the Seven Years War, he traveled to Vienna and Munich (1759-61) and then returned to Saxony. By early 1767, Bellotto arrived at the Polish court in Warsaw, with the intent of moving on to St. Petersburg and the court of Catherine II. Later that same year, though, he decided to remain in Warsaw, where he became court painter to the King of Poland, Stanislaus II Augustus Poniatowski, for the last twelve years of his life. He would be buried in the Capuchin church on Miodowa Street in Warsaw in late 1780, having outlived six of his nine children and his two primary patrons in Dresden, Augustus III and the Saxon prime minister, Count Heinrich Brühl.

The exhibit (of 67 paintings in the Houston version) unfolds along this temporal and geographical account, through a roughly U-shaped sequence of ten galleries and alcoves on the handsome, capacious main floor of the Museum's recently built Audrey Jones Beck building. Early Venetian views made up the first room, followed by a larger room of various Italian views outside of Venice done during his Italian trips of the 1740s. The remaining eight rooms reflected in succession his later travels, with strong emphases on Dresden and Warsaw at the beginning and end of this stretch of rooms; in between the themes moved from his work in the Saxon countryside (with a focus in and around the village of Pirna, outside Dresden, where Bellotto had a home until it was bombed by the Prussians in 1760), to a brief look at his work in Vienna and Munich, and on to a sampling of his later capriccios (sometimes including portraits and, in one case, a biblical subject). The last gallery of works from Warsaw was particularly striking in display, with shiny regilded frames set against walls painted lemon-mousse yellow, in true "Stanislaus style" (echoing the appearance of the Senate antechamber of the Royal Palace in Warsaw that came to be known as the "Canaletto Room," where these works were first hung together).

The Houston version of the show was somewhat smaller than the Venetian version-67 works instead of 93-but in scanning the accompanying catalogue, one did not feel as though Houston viewers were being overly deprived. In some cases, multiple views of one motif in the Venetian venue were narrowed down at Houston (the Old Market in Dresden and the Zwinger were each seen in one work instead of two, for example); in other cases, views of some cities were narrowed in number (Verona, Turin, Vienna, Munich, views near Pirna). The variety of capriccios on view in Venice, done throughout Bellotto's career, was reduced in Houston to examples done later in the artist's career. Similarly, the modest number of allegorical works seen in Venice was much narrowed in Houston.

On the other hand, the lead curator for this American version of the show, Edgar Peters Bowron of the hosting institution, was able to replace some of the held-back works (several from smaller European collections in locations like Turin and Dessau) with works from private collections, American museums, and from a few other European museums. This resourceful borrowing and paring also helped to lessen a bit the reliance on some of the larger, well-known collections of Bellotto in Dresden and St. Petersburg. Furthermore, Bowron was able to add works in Houston not in the exhibit catalogue-works that deepened one's appreciation, particularly, of Bellotto's early Italian work up through the mid-1740s. The show began in Houston, in fact, with the work that now seems to bear the unofficial title of "Earliest Attributed Work by Bellotto (so far)." A small work of The Grand Canal from the "Ca'da Mosto South to the Rialto, Venice (private collection; no. 1 in the Houston list of works) is dated to ca. 1738--40-when the artist was in his late teens. Charles Beddington discussed the work in a symposium at Houston held early in the exhibit's run. He noted that while the work displays some problems-with perspective, figures, the placement on boats on the water rather than in it-Beddington also argued that the work shows clear differences from that of his uncle: thicker paint and a greater range of effects in paint handling, along with a harder, less atmospheric, more wintry quality of light. Earlier scholars like W.G. Constable and J.G. Links were very reluctant to attribute anything from the Canaletto shop during these years to the younger artist, but increasingly, Bellotto scholars are isolating these qualities in more and more works of the 1730s and 40s, although the problem of isolating out the Bellottos from the uncle's production is complicated by commercial factors, especially during the period of 1737-40, according to Beddington. By 1740 (age 18!), Bellotto was selling under his own name-albeit at considerably reduced rates than those of his uncle. (Apparently, the market value has by now become fairly equal between Canaletto and his nephew.)

After 1740, Beddington suggests that the differences in works between the two masters were subtle "when Bellotto wanted them to be." If there is one thing the exhibit makes clear, it is that Bellotto was extremely capable of significant modifications in personal style from work to work. While this may have been more apparent in the Venice incarnation of the show, where there were more examples of multiple versions of the same subject on view, it is still easy to appreciate in the Houston installation-especially in comparing some of his large views of Saxon subjects with smaller versions painted during his second swing through Dresden in the early 1760s. The smaller, later versions display a richer, more deeply saturated color sense. They do not look like the larger, more typical works of the artist, where light and crisp linearity make the surfaces look drier and less jewel-like. It may be that such works were done by his son Lorenzo, but Bellotto's authorship seems more plausible for a variety of reasons-after the death of Augustus III and Brühl within a month of each other in 1763, the painter now had to rely more on support by court members, as the cultural politics of Dresden were changing quickly around him-academic theory and neo-classicism were emergent and eventually led to Bellotto's departure from Germany for good, in search of more steady work and patronage. Creating smaller versions of his earlier Augustan machines of the 1750s for private nonroyal patrons represents a natural economic strategy for the artist in a time of financial straits. Moreover, punching up the saturation of color in a much smaller work is a common strategy for painters that allows for the translation of grand compositional rhythms and accents from much larger to smaller works-where the intervals between points of emphasis in a given pictorial structure are measured more in inches than in feet. Color contrast replaces expansive spatial intervals as the primary means of compositional focus and emphasis in this strategy of scalar translation.

In general, Bellotto scholarship is making it more and more clear that the artist's approach was quite intellectualized. From very early on, his pictorial interpretation of the space and format for urbanscapes was distinctive and devised with artistic goals in mind as much as mimetic ones-his approach was not nearly as formulaic or imitative as once thought. The reason one gets so thrown off, I think, is well articulated in the Collins review of the Venice show: Canaletto's works are convincing, but Bellotto's works seem to display an empirical authenticity that, of course, would be highly prized during the Enlightenment---a "grandiloquent reticence," as Collins quite aptly describes it. The constructedness of this supposedly "empirical" reticence is actually a little "disconcerting" to fathom; more and more Bellotto works are being explained as copies after his uncle or other vedutisti, or as works painted long after the artist's actual presence before the motif. By intensifying both the vacuum-tube-like, "airless" quality of the atmosphere, and the contrast of light and dark to a level of geometrical crispness, Bellotto was able to establish a pictorial equivalency to the on-the-spot experience of atmosphere and light in a real urban space; the translation is so seamless that we are lulled into believing that his works are essentially the faithful records of empirical experience.

It also seems increasingly the case that Bellotto's "constructedness" was strongly driven by art-historical traditions and the aesthetics of display. Dresden curator Gregor Weber noted in the Houston symposium (and in his catalogue essay) that Bellotto's tendencies in employing perspective, scale, format, and the fall of light in the pictorial configuring of urban forms echo in many cases the work of earlier Dutch Baroque artists like Jan van der Heyden, Jan van Goyen, and Gerrit Berckheyde-artists represented in the Dresden Picture Gallery or in prints after the works of these painters by such artists as Joseph Wagner. Weber has discovered as well that Bellotto borrowed whole groups of animals and peasant staffage from the works of the Dutch genre painter Nicolaes Berchem (made popular in settecento Italy by the engravings of artists like Francesco Zuccarelli). Such bricolage also extended to his use of the camera obscura to record the contours of individual structures, which he would then overlay in aggregative fashion within his compositions; he seems not to have used the device to delineate the overall perspectival scheme of a work. He seemed to understand that blind adherence to perspectival principles would not necessarily make a work more convincing to the eye-artistic judgment overrode scientific and empirical exactitude in his work. His interest in works similar to his by earlier artists may have derived from his curiosity to learn how his artistic forbears reconciled such artistic-perceptual quandaries themselves.

In terms of display, it appears that Bellotto's tendency to paint pairs of complementary views of Dresden was done with some forethought about how they would eventually be displayed. (His Dresden works, in fact, were not permanently installed until 1834, at which time they were seen in more nationalistic terms.) Each pair represents two obliquely intersecting views, incorporating the same set of landmarks (e.g., cat. nos. 39 and 43, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Dresden). While there are no surviving inventories explaining how the works were to be hung, Weber suggests now that such pairs, with their complementarily oblique perspectives, would have been intended to flank bilaterally the central axis of the wall on which they were displayed, with more iconic, straight-on, single views of the city's sights occupying a wall's central axis. The extent to which these perspectival specifics were stipulated as part of the artist's commission would be interesting to know, although there are pre-Dresden examples of such complementary pairs of views (e.g., his views of the twin towns of Canonica and Vaprio, done during his trip to Milan in 1744 [cat. nos. 29 and 30; private collection, Milan]).

A final theme to address is the change in Bellotto's work from normative view painting to something akin to a sort of Cecil De Mille-like "genre-vision," particularly evident in his late Warsaw works installed in the exhibit's last room; some of these works literally contain casts of thousands. (Christopher Johns has noted that perhaps Bellotto saw Altdorfer's famous, sweeping opus of 1529, Battle of Alexander and Darius on the Issus [Munich, Alte Pinakothek] during his stay in Munich.) This evolution in emphasis-from buildings having primacy to becoming more like grand urban stage sets that enfold the contrapuntal rhythms of urban life-presents interesting fodder for the dix-huitiÈmiste to consider. On one hand, it seems as though Bellotto may be exemplifying the role of Enlightenment artist as visualizer of societal and economic utility and progressiveness, as if he were the Claude-Joseph Vernet of central Europe. Enhancing this view is the knowledge that his Polish royal patron, for example, was deeply involved with the shaping and management of the visual propaganda generated on his behalf (and for which he paid handsomely); Bellotto's Saxon patrons may have been as well. On the other hand, Bellotto would have learned early that festival scenes with lots of local color sold well for his uncle, and that many of the Dutch artists he apparently admired were distinctive genre artists.

Complicating matters further is Bellotto's choice of the little town of Pirna for so many of the rural scenes he painted for Augustus III. The second half of the Houston show contains eight different canvases done in and around Pirna; overall the artist painted eleven canvases of the town itself, and eventually painted 23 smaller copies of those canvases for court patrons. Bellotto apparently had free choice of a Saxon village as his primary subject; Augustus only visited the village once-and that was only after Bellotto started painting it. By Enlightenment standards of progress and utility, there was nothing particularly noteworthy about the village, according to Werner Schmidt in the Houston symposium. Schmidt himself actually has long lived in Pirna, yet professes to have no clear insights into why this village was chosen and not another. (Bellotto had a house there, as noted earlier, but it is not clear if the purchase came before or after he started painting there.) Schmidt feels that Bellotto chose Pirna for picturesque reasons-the inter-relationship of town, topography, and the path of the Elbe at that particular location. Schmidt also notes that the treatment of townsfolk in these views seems equally artistic in an Arcadian sense more than empirical; the inspiration here of earlier Dutch genre works again seems relevant. There is no sign of heavy labor in these works, even though the town was known for its limestone, which was marketed and shipped from Pirna to locations all over Europe. Schmidt also noted that there is never any upstream towing shown on the Elbe in the artist's works-there always seems to be just enough wind to move the river boats against the current. In addition, a major road connecting Dresden and Prague passed through the town, but there never seems to be much traffic shown on it (or on the river, for that matter). Seven of the eleven views were painted at sunset, while Bellotto's Dresden views were usually painted in the middle of the day. For Schmidt, the elegiac and even utopian mood of the Pirna works is unmistakable. Bellotto painted many palaces and castles for all his royal patrons, but these works do not "fit" in any sort of propagandistic sense. Bellotto seems to have enjoyed some degree of artistic license as he got older; the range of subjects (and the blurring of genres) seems to become more pronounced and personal. For example, his Architectural Capriccio with Christ Driving the Money Changers from the Temple of ca. 1765--66 (cat. no. 84; Warsaw, Royal Castle) clearly must have had significant personal and professional meaning for the artist, and seems to indicate that his Polish royal patron did not try to dictate the content of all of Bellotto's work there. The Houston show gave the viewer much to chew on in this regard over the last few rooms, but a greater selection of capriccios and allegories from the post-1760 period would have made the show that much more interesting. A selection of drawings and etchings by the artist would also have been welcome, but on the other hand the relatively compact size of the show made it more inviting than daunting to walk through, and the accompanying catalogue covers over these "deficiencies" more than adequately (at least conceptually if not visually). The catalogue is filled with expert entries and essays, full bibliography, a biographical register of the artist's life, and even a family tree. The color plates and full-page details are plentiful and very useful. The international organizing committee responsible for the show (including many of the names already mentioned, plus other catalogue contributors such as Bozena Anna Kowalczyk and Andrzej Rottermund) are to be commended. There is a great deal of literature on Bellotto already, but the exhibit overall leaves one excited about how much there is still to learn about an artist we already thought we knew.