Bernardo Bellotto

Encyclopedia : B : BE : BER : Bernardo Bellotto

"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 colour." ([2004 Encyclopaedia Britannica])

Bernado Bellotto (January 30, 1720, Venice — October 17, 1780, Warsaw) was an Italian urban landscape painter or vedutista. He was the pupil and nephew of Canaletto, and sometimes also used the latter's illustrious name, thus signing as Bernado Canaletto - illegally according to some.

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 camera obscura in order to achieve superior precision of his urban views.

Bellotto's career was of strong international character. Traveling through Italy he visited Rome, Florence, Turin, Milan and Verona and created memorable images of each city. 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 Stanislaw Poniatowski to become his court painter. His paintings of Warsaw were used for rebuilding the city after its near complete destruction in World War II.

Reference

• [Biography and Gallery]

From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.