Bernardo Bellotto
(Canaletto II)
1879 - 1961
Bernardo Bellotto was Italian Rococo painter, also known as Canaletto II. He was an urban landscape painter or vedutist, and printmaker in etching.
Bellotto was born in Venice, to the parents Lorenzo Antonio Bellotto and Fiorenza Canal, sister of then famous Canaletto. Bellotto studied in his uncle's workshop, imitated his style, and sometimes also used the latter's illustrious name, thus signing as Bernardo Canaletto. Bellotto's work is often confounded with those of his celebrated uncle, Canaletto.
"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 color." His style was characterized by elaborate representation of architectural or natural vistas, as well as the specific quality of each place's lighting. Like his uncle and many other Venetian masters of vedute, he used the camera obscura in order to achieve the superior precision of his urban views.
In 1742 he moved to Rome where he produced vedute of that city. In 1744 and 1745 he traveled northern Italy, again depicting vedutes of each city. Among others, he worked for Charles Emmanuel III of Savoy.
From 1747 to 1758 he moved to Dresden, following an invitation of King August III of Poland. He created various paintings of the cities Dresden and Pirna and their surroundings. Today, these paintings preserve a memory of Dresden's former beauty, which was destroyed in the bombing during World War II.
His international reputation grew, and in 1758 he followed an invitation by the Empress Maria Theresa to Vienna, where he painted views of the city's monuments. Thereafter he worked in Munich and then Dresden, again. While working in St Petersburg, he accepted the invitation of the King of Poland, Stanislaw August Poniatowski to become his court painter. Here remained for the rest of his life as court painter to King Stanislaw August, for whom he painted numerous views of the Polish capital and its environs for the Royal Castle in Warsaw. His paintings of Warsaw were used for rebuilding the city after its near complete destruction in World War II.
He died in Warsaw in 1780.
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