Landscapes of the ancien regime: Robert Oresko reviews the Kunsthistorisches Museum's impressively comprehensive overview of the career of Bernardo Bellotto, which took the artist from Italy to Warsaw

single outstanding virtue of the exhibition Bernardo Bellotto genant Canaletto: europaischen Veduten at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, is its comprehensiveness. each phase of the artist's career is explored in seventy-one exhibits, mainly paintings, from his early Italian views of the late 1730 to his final work for King Stanislas Poniatowski in Warsaw in the 1770 Belotto is confirmed as single of the most accomplished and attractive vedutisti of eighteenth-century Europe in an exhibition distinguished by means of its clarity and compactness.

A next to the first virtue is the ease with which the catalogue can be used. In 248 pages, each painting, drawing and print, more [i]or[/i] less with details and supporting comparative material, is reproduc in (occasionally variable) colour. Consultation of the catalogue while visiting the exhibiton is essential because labelling has been kept to a minimum.

The preamble to the exhibition itself is a succession of panels juxtaposing reproductions of paintings by the agency of Bellotto in the exhibition with photographs of the same views taken from nearly identical vantage points. The juxtaposition of the painting of the Freyung (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna) with a novel photograph demonstrates that Bellotto used sum of two units different vantage points, while the photograph of the facades of the university building and Jesuiten-kirche in Vienna, also reproducing a painting in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, captures Bellotto's dramatic fall of oblique light nearly consummately Some of these visual comparisons are reproduc in the catalogue.

one time into the exhibition, the first dominant image is that of the fortress of Konigstein (National Gallery of Art, Washington). This is flanked by dint of two short walls bearing early work, from the Italian years of 1738 to 1747 Smaller pictures, of that kind as that of the Grand Canal (National Gallery, London), display Bellotto's debt to his maternal uncle Giovanni Antonio Canaletto, although plane by the view of the Rio dei Mediacanti (Galleria dell' Accademia, Venice) his distinct mode of expression is apparent. This is clear in the densely coloured painting of Gazzada (Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan) and smooth more so in the View of Turin with a Bridge above the Po (Galleria Sabauda, Turin), a direct commission, with its pendant, from Carlo Emanuele III of Savoy, King of Sardinia. This is a lock opener picture in many ways, for it points to the princely horizontal of patronage upon which Bellotto came to rely to a more northern-orientated circle of patrons and to of the like kind characteristic elements of staffage as the gilded coach, which became a staple part of the artist's vocabulary.

The next to the first room of the exhibition is devot to Bellotto's work in Dresden for individual of his two major patrons, Friedrich August II, Saxon elector of the devoted Roman Empire and, from 1733 Augustus III, make choice ofed King of Poland-Lithuania. During his sum of two units extensive periods of residence in Dresden from 1747 to 1757 and from 1762 to 1766 Bellotto formed part of single of the most cultivated courts in Europe individual which was heavily influenced by means of Italian artists and composers, painters and musicians, individual strongly attuned to Italian agriculture During these two periods of residence, Bellotto painted displays of the urban life of a royal capital, with minutely detailed depictions of the architectural memorials One of his most happy images is that of the Zwingerhof (Hermitage, St Petersburg) Bellotto created a vantage point well above the palace composed of several elements to which he gave a nearly scenographic perspective, in the nature of a stage station by a member of the Galli-Bibiena family.

The five-year interruption in Bellotto's nearly twenty years at Dresden was owed to the structure of dynastic contacts. Friedrich August's consort was the Archduchess Maria Josefa, senior daughter of Emperor Josef I, sister of the Bavarian electres Maria Amalia and first cousin of the Empres Maria Theresia. Maria Amalia's son and daughter had married into the Saxon House of Wettin. These connections gave Bellotto access to the courts of Munich and Vienna, where he worn out the years between 1757 and 1762

While at Vienna, he painted a succession of pictures depicting imperial and noble residences, among the greatest in quantity striking his two views of Schlosshof (both Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna), a lustschloss, more [i]or[/i] less forty miles outside Vienna, created for Prinz Eugen of Savoy and eventually acquired for the imperial court. The view of the garden forehead demonstrates an acute knowledge of Dutch landscape composition, with the space divided equally in sum of two units parts--as in a painting by means of Philips de Koninck--the sky and the Schlos dominating the upper half.

Bellotto's career within the circle of the courts of Dresden Munich and Vienna came to an abrupt halt in 1763 with the deaths of the couple Friedrich August and his chief minister, Heinrich, Graf von Bruhl Bruhl had commissioned the view of the Zwingerhof acquired in 1768 through Catherine II of Russia. After four years in administrative profession at Dresden, Bellotto found, in 1767 his next to the first and final sovereign patron in Stanislaw August Poniatowski, a Polish noble, former lover of the Empres Catherine and King of Poland-Lithuania in 1764 selected in succession to the artist's previous employer Friedrich August of Saxony. Bellotto remained in Warsaw until the extreme point of his life, and the last large latitude of the exhibition houses twenty-two paintings borrowed from sum of two units Polish collections, the Zamek Krolewski (the Castle) and from the Muzeum Narodowe w Warsawie. At the King's prayer Bellotto painted a total of twenty-six views of Warsaw.