(Venice 1725 - circa 1815 Toulouse)
The Piazza San Marco, Venice, looking north towards the Torre dell’Orologio,
oil on canvas, 38 x 49 cm, framed

Provenance:
Private Collection, Italy

We are grateful to Charles Beddington for suggesting the attribution and for his help in cataloguing the present painting.

Pietro Bellotti was the nephew of Canaletto and younger brother of Bernardo Bellotto. His work was long overlooked, as he spent most of his relatively long career in France, but he has recently been granted a monographic exhibition in Venice (see C. Beddington/ D. Crivellari, Pietro Bellotti, un altro Canaletto, exhibition catalogue, Venice, 2013). He is presumed to have been an assistant in Canaletto’s studio and he probably accompanied his brother to Florence in 1740, as his name is inscribed on the back of one of Bernardo´s drawings of Lucca in the British Museum (see S. Kozakiewicz, Bernardo Bellotto, London and Recklinghausen, 1972, II, p. 47, no. 60). That he may have stayed on in Florence after Bernardo´s departure is suggested by a painting by Pietro of The Piazza San Marco, looking South, which has an inscription on the reverse recorded that it was painted by Antonio [sic] Canaletto in 1741 and was in the collection of the Marchese Gerini, who was Bernardo´s Florentine patron (see: C. Beddington, Bernardo Bellotto and his circle in Italy, Part 2: The Lyon Master and Pietro Bellotti, in: The Burlington Magazine, CXLVII, No. 1222, January 2005, p. 25, fig. 20; C. Beddington, op. cit., 2013, pp. 45-9, fig. 2). He subsequently became the only documented pupil of his elder brother during the latter’s years in Venice, undertaking on 5 November 1741 to pay Bernardo 120 ducats a year for board and training, an arrangement which was terminated on 25 July 1742.

We know now that, even before Canaletto’s departure for England in 1746 and Bellotto’s for Dresden in 1747, it was Pietro who began the family diaspora. He must have met his future wife, a French woman, in Genoa in circa 1745, as their first child was born in Toulouse in late 1746 or early 1747. The couple had returned to Genoa by about March 1748 and married there on 12 June. They subsequently left Italy definitively, and on 24 March 1749 the baptism of their second child took place in Toulouse. Even soon after his arrival in France, Bellotti began a peripatetic existence, with and without his family. In 1755 and 1756 he was working in Nantes, where he is again mentioned in 1768; he was in Besançon in 1761 and working in Lille in 1778-79. Several of the documents record him presenting a light show of transparencies painted with ‘the most beautiful views in Europe, such as Venice, Rome, Florence, Milan, Turin, London, Versailles, Strasbourg, several seaports and other depictions of ancient and modern architecture’. Of particular interest is a handbill issued in Paris in 1754/5 advertising this show by ‘Le Sieur Canalety, Peintre Venitien’. Pietro showed as little reticence as his brother in making full use of their uncle’s name and fame, and on the occasions when he signed paintings, he generally used the form ‘Bellotti d[it] Canalet[t]’.

Only two views signed on the front are known, one of The Lock at Dolo (see D. Succi, Pietro Bellotti: un altro ‘Canaletto’, in C. Beddington/ D. Crivellari (eds.), Da Canaletto a Zuccarelli: il paesaggio veneto del Settecento, exhibition catalogue, Villa Manin, Passariano, 2003, pp. 165-6, fig. 139), the other of The Castel S. Angelo and the Vatican with an inscription apparently identifying it as having been executed for a patron in Amsterdam (see op. cit., Venice 2013, p. 70, no. 34). The other signed works are capricci (see, for instance op. cit., p. 71, nos. 40-43). The Vatican view, and one of the pair of capricci are the only known dated works, all of 1771. A period of possibly several years in London between 1762 and 1767, without his family light show, produced two of his finest works, The Courtyard of the Royal Exchange, London (The Mercers’ Company, London) and Warwick Castle from the South (Yale Center for British Art, New Haven). Bellotti is last recorded with certainty in Toulouse in 1776, and his last decades are swathed in obscurity.

As with most of Bellotti’s views, the present composition relates to a print, in this case that by Henri Fletcher published by Joseph Baudin in London on 26 June 1739, after Canaletto’s painting in the Nelson-Atkins-Museum of Art, Kansas City (W. G. Constable, Canaletto: Giovanni Antonio Canal 1697-1768, London, 1962 [and subsequent editions revised by J. G. Links], I, pl. 19; II, no. 43). This might suggest that the present painting is datable after Bellotti’s arrival in England in circa 1762.