Bernardo Bellotto Venice 1722 - 1780 Warsaw

William Legge, 7th Earl of Dartmouth (1881-1958);
Thence by descent.

These two paintings show the main sights visible across the Bacino di San Marco from the Piazzetta, seen as if one is looking from its left corner out to the left and from its right corner out to the right, respectively. The ‘left’ half of the pair shows the Island of San Giorgio Maggiore, with its Benedictine monastery and celebrated church, which, along with that of the Redentore seen in the background of the pendant, is one of the greatest masterpieces of the hugely influential architect Andrea Palladio (1508-1580). Palladio did not receive his first ecclesiastical commission until he was in his fifties, when most of his villas in the Veneto and palaces in Vicenza were well behind him. While no secular building was ever constructed to his design in Venice, the majority of his monastic and church projects did come to fruition in the city where his I quattro libri dell’architettura was published in 1570 and where he settled in 1570/1. The foundation stone of the church of San Giorgio Maggiore was laid in March 1566 and the building was virtually complete by 1576, although the façade was not erected (apparently in fairly strict adherence to the architect’s model) until 1607-11. The Redentore, shown in the background of the pendant, beyond the mouth of the Giudecca Canal, was begun in 1577 and completed within fifteen years. the two churches’ façades of brilliant white Istrian stone, onto which are superimposed elements of classical porticoes, were unprecedented in Venice in their combination of Counter-Reformation simplicity and classical grandeur, made all the more striking by their waterside settings on and near the Bacino di San Marco. The most prominent building in the right-hand pendant is, however, the greatest Venetian church of the following century, that of Santa Maria della Salute, begun in 1631 to the designs of Baldassare Longhena, who was sometimes hailed as ‘il nuovo Palladio’. Flanking that in the centre of the composition is the Dogana da Mar, the customs house, built in 1677 to the designs of Giuseppe Benoni and the only civic building in Venice to have retained its original function through the centuries.

This pair of hitherto unrecorded paintings is datable to circa 1742 when Bellotto was working in the studio of his uncle, Canaletto.  Bellotto was an exceptionally precocious artist and was enroled in the Venetian Painters' Guild in 1738, when only sixteen years of age.  Within two years he seems to have been selling pictures under his own name.  Although these paintings may have been intended for sale as the work of Canaletto, the style is already distinct from that of the older artist.  The paint is more thickly applied, giving the paintings a richly textured surface and there is a greater use of black, in subtle gradations of tone in the forground shadows, the gondolas and the distant buildings.  Bellotto also uses a different formula for the depiction of water, with ripples in the form of extended and interlocking 'W' shapes. Moreover, the compositions do not follow works by his uncle.  Although Stefan Kozakiewicz, in his great monograph Bernardo Bellotto¹ accepted only six Venetian views as certainly by Bellotto, that number has been considerably augmented by the monographic exhibition held in Venice and Houston in 2001 and by studies such as C. Beddington² . Many of Bellotto’s earliest works are personalised versions of prototypes by his uncle. Indeed, the composition with the church of the Salute is not dissimilar to that of a painting by Canaletto in the Royal Collection, which Bellotto would have seen in that of Joseph Smith³. Here the viewpoints employed and the resultant character of the scene are, however, quite different. Of the several views by Canaletto focussing on San Giorgio Maggiore, most of which are paired with views of the Redentore, only one is earlier in date than these paintings, that in the Manchester City Art Gallery⁴.  The others all date from after the definitive parting of the two artists in 1746⁵.  The Island of San Giorgio Maggiore features prominently in a recently rediscovered painting by Bellotto, which includes the Dogana da Mar on the right⁶. Another early Bellotto view of the Dogana, Santa Maria della Salute and the Redentore from the Piazzetta, from a point further to the east, is in the Betty and David Koetser Collection at the Kunsthaus, Zürich. Bellotto’s pairing of these two views recalls most directly, however, his greatly amplified pair of views in similar, although far from identical directions, in the Mills Collection, Ringwood, Hampshire⁷.  Not only do the Mills pictures share this combination of views, which is unique to Bellotto, but they also show strong stylistic affinities and, despite their disparity of scale, must have been painted at a very similar date.

We are grateful to Charles Beddington for endorsing the attribution and for his help with this catalogue entry.

1. Recklinghausen and London, 1972

2. C. Beddington, ‘Bernardo Bellotto and his circle in Italy. Part I: not Canaletto but Bellotto’, The Burlington Magazine, CXLVI, No. 1219, October 2004, pp. 665-74

3. W.G. Constable, Canaletto: Giovanni Antonio Canal 1697-1768, London, 1962, and subsequent editions revised by J.G. Links, I, pl. 35; II, no. 153

4. J.G. links, A Supplement to W.G. Constable’s Canaletto: Giovanni Antonio Canal 1697-1768, London, 1998, p. 30, no. 301*, pl. 235

5. see C. Beddington, catalogue of the exhibition Canaletto in England: A Venetian Artist abroad 1746-1755, Yale center for British Art and Dulwich Picture Gallery, 2005-6, pp. 26 and 168-9

6. Beddington, op. cit., 2004, p. 672, fig. 23), and is based on a painting by Canaletto in the Royal Collection (Constable, op. cit., I, pl. 57; II, no. 299

7. Constable, op. cit., I, pl. 22; II, nos. 56 and 147; also pl. 195 in the 1976 and 1989 editions