During a rapid passing by the Adige, around 1745, Bernardo Bellotto painted the works that best demonstrate his attainment of artistic maturity. With these canvases, Betlotto helped define the iconic view of Verona as a river city, within the context of eighteenth-century landscape painting, and left what are, without doubt, the most acutely observed and significant documents in the city's entire visual record. The View of Castelvecchio from the Regaste di San Zeno, which recently came to light and was acquired by the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Verona Vicenza Belluno e Ancona, testifies to a turning point in the artistic development of Canaletto's precocious nephew. It was painted, along with other images of the city, at the conclusion of Bellotto's years in Italy, and just before he began his travels among the capitals of Europe where he earned his greatest international fame. With its companion piece, a View of Castelvecchio from the Bank of San Lorenzo - now lost, and reproduced at the entrance to the exhibition - the painting documents the original Bellottian vision that unifies urban panoramas using complementary views of the same sites, in this case the dark mass of the Della Scala fortress and its unusual cranulated bridge.
At the time, although the city was an obligatory stop along the itineraries of the Grand Tour, within its own figurative culture Verona was still without an authentic genre of pictorial view in which an analytic knowledge of the urban environment was expressed; in fact, the typical paintings of the time relied on the well-worn decorative formulas of Arcadian landscapes. In any case, Verona's fortunate position, with its picturesque combination of hillsides and river passages, made it a natural attraction for many of the major eighteenth-century landscape painters.
A series of paintings, on public view here for the first time, shows how in Verona's case the phenomenon of vedutismo, or view painting, involved exclusively non-Veronese artists and clients, from Gaspar van Wittel to Luca Carievarijs, and Antonio loli to Giovambattista Cimaroli, reaching an apex, in fact, with Bellotto. All were charmed by the picturesque potential of the city with its broad, curving river. The presence of these artists reveals how the approach of the Veronese school, dominated by the Arcadian taste of the Porta workshop, remained for a long time in a radically opposite camp.
Along with these paintings, the exhibition offers the opportunity to admire two preparatory drawings for Bellotto's Veronese views, as well as a selection of famous etchings with crystalline panoramas of northern European capitals, which clinched the artist's fame as a great 11 portraitist of light."
Informations
"Bernardo Bellotto un ritorno a Verona. L'immagine della città nel Settecento"
Verona, Museo di Castelvecchio
june 29 2002
september 29 2002
Orari from martedì to sunday, 8.30 - 19.30
monday, 13.30 - 19.30
