Bernardo Bellotto

The Hofkirche in Dresden with the Augustian palace and bridge

Oil on canvas, 134 x 231 cm.

Turin, Pinacoteca Giovanni e Marella Agnelli

A sunny day in Dresden in the middle of the eighteenth century; everyday life passed quietly and peacefully. Ordinary people, nobles and middle-class walked on the bridge over the Elbe or made conversation in the palace square. Maybe they were curious about the ongoing construction of the new Hofkirche, the Catholic Church wanted by the Regnant August III of Poland. The unexpected arrival of the royal coach accompanied by the Guards on horsebacks immediately caused interest from the most devoted. At once they greeted with respect, lowering their heads or waving with a handkerchief. The author of this vision is the Venetian painter Bernardo Bellotto. He was the son of Fiorenza Canal, sister of the famous Canaletto. Being trained at his uncles’ workshop the young artist immediately proved his ability so convincingly that Canaletto invited him to Rome in order to finish his training there; however, a normal practice for Venetian prospectus painters. In 1744, he was in Lombardy while the following year he was found in Turin where Carlo Emanuelle III duke of Savoy and king of Sardinia gave him the task to make two important prospectuses: one with the Royal Place and another with the old bridge over the Po. Today, both are kept at the Galleria Sabauda. In these works, the artist shows an autonomous language almost already emancipated from the language of the famous master. In doing so, he shares the vision of the illuminated ground and continues filtering the reality into the prospectus of keen geometrical precision generating a precisely descriptive realism, clear and immovable atmosphere.  Almost stiffly, he separates a great deal in the refined gold dust that envelops the prospectus made by Canaletto. When Bellotto left Venice together with his wife, his little son and his loyal servant in 1747 to move to Dresden, “he did so with the spirit of one who leaves his native country for ever.” (Rizzi 1995). According to the handed down information, the relationship between he and his uncle may not have been the best. A contemporary recalled Canaletto as “desirous and greedy”. It is therefore predictable that he envied the position given to his mature nephew. The nephew on his side was often described as melancholic, almost depressive. In a letter sent by a colleague, his wife, Giuseppe Rosa is described, “with eyes filled with tears only desiring to know if the husband had passed his melancholy”. The two of them never met again. The message from Dresden while Canaletto was occupied in England should have been a good occasion for Bellotto to certify his own artistic personality. Nevertheless, he continued to make use of the nickname “Canaletto” in Saxony, in the beginning with the approval of the master-uncle.
In 1747, Bellotto came to Dresden, a cosmopolitan town that supported art and therefore attracted many artists. The Italian presence was considerable. Among the first were the architect Gaetano Chiaveri, the sculptor Lorenzo Matielli, the painters Pietro Rotari, Stefano Torelli and Felicita Sartori from Fruili, already a pupil of Rosalba Carriera in Venice. The Saxons in these years were realizing in Dresden exactly those works in the Rosalbian style that afterwards formed the basis for knowing her activities. The Italian presence wasn’t a coincidence even though “the Italianisation of Dresden in defiance of the subsequent nickname «Florence to the Elbe» created by Herder, Dresden was first and foremost connected to Venice. In Dresden, they were well informed about the Venetian «myth» favoured by August II the Strong and even more by his hedonistic son August III who had stayed there as heir presumptive. [...] Out of an artistic predilection towards all Venetian (“the reason why Giannantonio Pellegrini had been fresco-painting two of Zwingers pavilions and why August III, an energetic collector of the works by Rosalba Carriera, possessed one hundred and forty works”) they were dedicated a big and luminous hall (Rizzi 1995). Moreover in Dresden lived by coincidence the mother of the cosmopolitan Venetian Giacomo Casanova, a well-known actress.
Bellotto, sent fore to paint some prospectus of the renovated Saxon town, obtained, just after his arrival, the highest salary that August III had ever granted any artist. Supposedly this acknowledgment was given him thanks to the support from the prime minister count Heinrich Brühl, as well a keen collector. “The artist given such a high salary must have felt obliged to deliver the count a series with the same prospectus as he had delivered to the king, a sign of recognition for the grant. “In this way, one also understood the low price (incidentally never paid) agreed upon for each picture.” (Kozakiewicz 1972). For-- that reason; Bellotto, at his first stay in Dresden, just after finishing a prospectus to August III, immediately was pressed by the almighty prime minister to repeat it in the same size. The prime minister, it is said, was a victim of the collector antagonism between the two inseparable men of the government. But the connoisseur hardly tolerated a pure repetition and Bellotto has obviously differentiated the two versions. If the royal one is characterized by a scale modulated in shades of grey-brown, the one for Brühl is characterized by a chromatic scale more animated based on a dominating red-blue (Kozakiewicz 1972). This variant, supposedly suggested by the very same minister, was not a random solution carried out to please the powerful minister but was repeated by the artist in the following prospectus at Pirna and several years after in the one from Warsaw. The work in consideration, kept at Pinacoteca Agnelli in Turin, makes out a part of the series that Bellotto made for the count Brühl between 1747 and 1755. Disengaged from Canaletto’s atmospheric research, the painter hesitates in the perspective characterization of the prospectus and gives it a grandiose structure indeed panoramic. It is “extending from the raised Giardini Brühl at the Virgins bastion – the present Brühlsche Terrasse – in direction of the Palace square and the Augustian Bridge” (Weber 2001). The visual angle has been studied carefully to give it extension and profundity. The light staging, mastered masterly, is activated in the represented scene. Maintaining the prime layer in shadow, the painter directs the sight towards the entrance of the coach scene, the focus of the whole composition. The cold glassy light clearly defines the light colours from the dark ones and generates an atmosphere immovable, crystalline, which also stiffen and neutralize the galloping horses’ violent audacity.  In brief, he triumphs a clear vision where the remarkable panoramic impression impart to the prospectus an authentic monumentality. “Thanks to the arranged structure in the composition, the harmony in the colouristic and light-dark effects, as well as the profound poetry, the objectively elements appears like reality in our world, full of every day life and at the same time the elements seams pushed back in an invariable out of time, in another sphere of eternal peace” (Kozakiewicz 1972). Finely, it is noted how the analytic drawing precision in his painting withdraws from the exuberant rococo, turning toward an unaffected classicism in a certain way already 19th century in lines and outline.  
 

Daniele D'Anza
 

Bibliography:
F. Pedrocco, scheda in Pinacoteca Giovanni e Marella Agnelli al Lingotto, Ginevra-Milano 2002, p. 48
A. Rizzi, Bernardo Bellotto. Dresda Vienna Monaco (1747-1766), Venezia 1995, p. 38
E. Camesasca, L’opera completa di Bernardo Bellotto, Milano 1974, n. 82
S. Kozakiewicz, Bernardo Bellotto, Milano 1972, I, p. 85, 100-102, 107. II, p. 122
Bernardo Bellotto genannt Canaletto, catalogo della mostra, Wien 1965, pp. 17, 100  
Bernardo Bellotto genannt Canaletto in Dresden und Warschau, catalogo della mostra, Dresden 1963, pp. 22, 79
E. Sindona – F. Russoli, Galleria della pittura europea, Milano 1961, p. 156
G. Frabetti, Milano: Mostra del Settecento veneziano, in “Emporium”, CXXI, n. 726, 1955
Mostra del Settecento veneziano, catalogo della mostra, Milano 1955, p. 19
Exhibition of Works by the Old Masters, and by Deceased Masters of the British School, Winter Exhibition, London 1894, n. 107
 

The managers offer many thanks to Pinacoteca Giovanni e Marella Agnelli who have provided the pictures and the permission to an online publication of the works.