Bernardo Bellotto, The Fortress of Königstein: Courtyard with the Magdalenenburg, ca. 1756-58, oil on canvas, 48.3 x 78.7 cm, National Gallery of Art, Washington.
Bernardo Bellotto, Dresden from the Right Bank of the Elbe below the Augustus Bridge, c. 1750, oil on canvas, 51.5 x 84 cm, National Gallery of Ireland.
“Dresden is viewed in morning sunlight, with the Augustus bridge and recently completed Catholic Court Church by the Italian architect Gaetano Chiavari, which partly conceals the old Castle of the Electors. Beyond is the Brühl Terrace and the dome of the Lutheran Church of Our Lady. Bellotto is meticulous in showing details of even the minor buildings.”
Bernardo Bellotto, The Market Square at Pirna, c. 1753-54, oil on canvas, 47 x 78.7cm, Private Collection.
Bernardo Bellotto, The Fortress of Königstein, c. 1756-58, oil on canvas, 133 x 235.7 cm, National Gallery of Art, Washington.
“Nephew and pupil of the celebrated Venetian view painter Canaletto, Bernardo Bellotto began by depicting various locations in Venice in the precisely topographical style of his uncle. As he traveled throughout Italy, however, Bellotto gradually developed a distinctive and increasingly poetic manner of his own. The turning point in the artist's career came in 1747, when Augustus III, elector of Saxony and king of Poland, invited him to Dresden, where he became court painter. Though accurate enough to have served centuries later in the post-World War II reconstruction of the city, Bellotto's varied and imaginatively conceived views of Dresden transcend the limits of topography. When Prussian troops captured the Saxon capital in the autumn of 1756, Bellotto moved on to work for the courts of Vienna and of Munich, where his vedute (view paintings) became even more artistically complex. The influence of Ruisdael and other seventeenth-century Dutch landscapists played a crucial role in forming Bellotto's mature concept of landscape. After attempting unsuccessfully to resurrect his career in Dresden (his munificent patron had died), Bellotto ended by working for Augustus' successor in Warsaw, the last great European center he recorded and ennobled through his art.
Although Bellotto was primarily a painter of the urban scene, his Fortress of Königstein is one of five large canvases, commissioned by Augustus III in the spring of 1756 but never delivered, depicting the renovated medieval fortress in the countryside near Dresden. The other canvases in the series, of identical size and format, consist of images of both the interior and the exterior of the castle, viewed from a closer vantage point than that adopted for the Gallery's painting. All five paintings were probably imported into England during the artist's lifetime, and they remained there until this painting was acquired by the Gallery in 1993. The two exterior views were together in the collection of the earl of Derby at Knowsley House, Lancashire, until 2017 when one of them was acquired by the National Gallery, London. The other two views, taken from inside the castle walls, belong to the City Art Gallery, Manchester. The castle of Königstein, almost unchanged in appearance today, sits atop a mountain rising precipitously from the Elbe River valley. Exploiting the picturesque quality of the site, Bellotto invested the Gallery's picture with a sense of drama and monumentality rarely found in eighteenth-century view painting. Bellotto's panorama effectively contrasts the imposing mass of the fortress, perched on a rocky precipice, with the broad expanse of cloud-filled sky and with the bucolic scene of rustic peasants and their animals, picked out in the foreground by the flickering light. The middle ground is occupied by forests, fields, and pathways leading to the castle at the apex of the mountain. In Bellotto's interpretation, Königstein castle becomes an awesome—and ironic—symbol of his patron's might at the very moment of his defeat.”
from Italian Paintings of the 17th and 18th Centuries Catalogue: “The paint has been applied with fluent brushwork and the handling reveals considerable variety in touch and application. In many places in the landscape and fortress the paint has been applied with strong brushstrokes, employing fairly thick paint to vary thickness and texture. The deliberate use of a fairly dry brush to create texture is particularly evident in the fortress. The upperright edge of the escarpment was originally placed 4 cm to the right of its present location; indications of this change are faintly visible. In contrast, the sky has been painted more loosely and rapidly, the broad, sweeping strokes imparting a sense of active weather, light, and movement. The thinner application of paint in the sky has permitted the red ground to show through, although in certain areas the aging of the paint, previous varnish removals, and abrasion have revealed more of the red ground than was originally intended. [...] Bellotto's boldly contrived design hinges upon the equilibrium between the fortress on its rock massif and the towering expanse of the sky on the left; the interplay between the broad, distant vista stretching to the horizon and the wealth of detail in the complex of fields and paths; and, at the extreme edges of the composition, the equipoise between the Lilienstein, a prominent rock formation, and, on the right, the curving road leading to the castle. The fortress occupies the apex of a bold triangle; cold, remote, and forbidding, it is set off by its sheer height and weight from the staffage in the foreground below. The human figures and animals, representatives of everyday life, temper the heroic mood of the painting and create an idyllic and pastoral atmosphere. Their presence mitigates the dominance of the fortress, which appears to exist in a realm of eternal repose where time and change are unknown. Whether or not Bellotto intended these rustic figures to give the landscape allegorical or symbolic meaning, their importance is underscored by the fact that they are larger in scale and far more closely integrated into the landscape than in almost any of the artist's other vedute.”
Bernardo Bellotto, Capriccio with a River and Bridge, ca. 1745, oil on canvas, 48.5 x 73 cm, Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid.
“The present painting dates to Bellotto’s early period and is an example of the type of ideal landscape generally described as a Capriccio. In works of this type artists brought together real buildings from different places, changing their location and placing them next to other imaginary ones against a landscape background. In his early works Bellotto’s style was notably close to that of Canaletto. [...] Despite the evident stylistic debt to Canaletto, the painting reveals features typical of Bellotto’s own style such as the detailed description of each of the individual elements and the way they are combined to give a sense of reality to the overall view. The differences with Canaletto also extend to the use of pronounced contrasts between the areas in shadow and those illuminated by the sun. In addition, the figures are taller and less precisely painted, the chromatic range is cooler and the brushstroke more heavily charged.“
Bernardo Bellotto, View of Verona with the Ponte delle Navi, ca. 1745-47, oil on canvas, 133.3 x 234.8 cm, Private Collection.
