In Lucca, an exhibition traces Bernardo Bellotto's journey through Tuscany with never-before-seen discoveries

From October 12, 2019 to January 6, 2020, the Ragghianti Foundation in Lucca is hosting in its exhibition venue the exhibition Bernardo Bellotto 1740. Journey to Tuscany, dedicated to Bernardo Bellotto (Venice, 1722 - Warsaw, 1780) and his journey to Tuscany. The exhibition, essentially a research review, presents itself as a unique opportunity to admire some extremely valuable and rare works never seen together, including the most important painting in history having as its subject the city of Lucca, Bellotto’s masterpiece, and five of his drawings, also with a Lucca subject, extraordinarily loaned by the British Library.

The exhibition, curated by Bożena Anna Kowalczyk and realized with the support of the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Lucca and thanks to the support of Banco BPM as main partner, aims to illustrate Bernardo Bellotto’s journey to Tuscany, one of the most fascinating themes of 18th-century Vedutism. Indeed, the artist received his training in the studio of Canaletto (Bellotto’s uncle) when the latter was at the height of his fame, in the late 1730s. Bellotto absorbed his uncle’s models and compositional techniques with such a capacity for emulation that even his contemporaries were fooled. The master’s legacy underlies all his work, but as soon as the young Bellotto began to travel outside Venice (and his stay in Tuscany constitutes the first and fundamental one in this regard) he developed his own expressive style in an original way, accentuating perspective rigor and realism of representation. Recent archival studies, conducted precisely on the occasion of the exhibition, have made it possible to date this trip by Bellotto to 1740, two years earlier than previously believed, thus highlighting its importance as a manifesto of the precocity of the artist, then 18 years old. The rediscovered documentation also allows us to see him as the pioneer of view painting in Florence and Lucca, serving the Tuscan aristocracy.

“A competition of bold and brilliant ideas,” Bożena Anna Kowalczyk explains, “lies at the origin of Bellotto’s trip to Florence in 1740. The first, and fundamental, is the one concocted by Marquis Andrea Gerini (1692-1766) with the Venetian connoisseur and antiquarian Anton Maria Zanetti di Girolamo (1680-1767), his friend and adviser, to give life to Florentine Vedutism. The second is to endow the nascent eighteenth-century Florentine vedutismo with the Enlightenment modernity of Canaletto, inviting his nephew and pupil Bernardo Bellotto to Florence as a master of perspective and painting technique, recognizing, though very young, his genius.”

Thefocus of the exhibition is the core of views of Lucca, with the painting depicting Piazza San Martino coming from the York City Art Gallery and the five drawings of different places around the cathedral and the church of Santa Maria Forisportam exceptionally granted by the British Library. This group of works, which have never been exhibited together (the drawings, pasted in an early 19th-century album formerly owned by King George III of England, and later by George IV, will be detached for the first time) provides an extraordinary documentation of the city of Lucca in the 18th century.

“The five drawings of Lucca and the painting Piazza San Martino with the Cathedral in the York Museum,” says the curator, “constitute the only known documentation of Bellotto’s trip to the Tuscan city. The close stylistic and technical proximity of the Lucca painting to the two similarly sized views of Florence, rare for the artist, L’Arno al Tiratoio with the Ponte Vecchio and L’Arno dalla Vaga Loggia, with San Frediano in Cestello, from a private collection (which are confirmed to have been commissioned by Gerini, thus executed in thesummer of 1740), indicates a slightly later date of the trip, in September or October of that year; Piazza San Martino with the cathedral also takes up, perfecting it, the perspective and luministic composition of Piazza della Signoria, Florence, in 1741 recorded in the collection of Riccardi, a close friend of Gerini. What is certain is that Bellotto in Lucca worked as a privileged, innovative, avant-garde young painter, depicting the cathedral and its structure, at the center of the city’s curtis aeclesiae and, seeking four different viewpoints, moving freely among the rooms of the archbishopric, even climbing to the roof, accessing the piano nobile of the Palazzo Bernardi and looking out the window of the church of San Giuseppe. The only painting executed, Piazza San Martino with the cathedral, remains in a Lucca collection until at least the early nineteenth century (to appear only at the end of the century in England), admired and copied by local artists, the only emblematic view of eighteenth-century Lucca.”

The painting of Lucca thus turns out to be the only view painted in the city: perspective-wise it is reminiscent of the works of his uncle Canaletto, but it varies in the cut of the composition, the vividness of the touch, the figures with elongated shadows from the sharp outlines, the sky with fluffy clouds. This is an absolute masterpiece, the official commissioner of which is unknown to date.Bożena Anna Kowalczyk therefore hopes that, thanks to the exhibition, some private archives may provide new data to fully shed light on this affair. Bellotto’s relationship with Tuscany is also an affective one: his brother Michele is an important printer who later moves from Florence to the service of the bishopric in Arezzo; his youngest, Pietro, travels with Bernardo and is a promising painter; his mother Fiorenza, sister of Canaletto, also moves to Arezzo.

Also presented in the exhibition alongside the works on the subject of Lucca are some of the known views of Florence made by Bellotto during and following his visit to Tuscany, such as Piazza della Signoria, Florence, and The Arno from the Ponte Vecchio to Santa Trinità and the Carraia, both from 1740, from the Szépmúvészeti Múzeum in Budapest; The Arno to the Ponte Vecchio, Florence and The Arno to the Ponte alla Carraia, Florence, both 1743-1744, on loan from the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; and the pen-and-ink drawing Architectural Capriccio with an Equestrian Monument, 1764, from the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, documenting Bellotto’s visit to Livorno. The autonomy gained on this first trip outside his hometown is the basis for future developments in Bellotto’s career, on his return to Venice as well as on his travels to Rome and northern Italy, and later, starting in 1747, to central Europe. Also on display are other magnificent paintings by Luca Carlevarijs, another vedutista among the early Venetian painters collected by the noble merchant Stefano Conti (1654 - 1739), by Giuseppe Zocchi (1717 - 1767), a painter of the Gerini household whose exhibited is the portrait of Gerini and Zanetti, and some anonymous but talented artists who, in Lucca, executed copies of the exceptional view of Piazza San Martino created by Bellotto, testifying to the impact that the fundamental presence of this work had in the city. Another important artifact is the optical chamber in wood, glass and mirror used by Canaletto and on loan from the Correr Museum in Venice.

Bellotto’s trip was sponsored by the Venetian connoisseur and antiquarian Anton Maria Zanetti di Girolamo, who was in close contact with leading Tuscan collectors. Bellotto also had the opportunity to see in Lucca four magnificent views of Venice by his uncle Canaletto, commissioned in 1725 by Stefano Conti. This dense network of artistic relationships, which ensured the young painter’s success, is illustrated in the exhibition by a series of original documents from the period: books, letters, and receipts for payment for commissions for works, from the State Library of Lucca. To have a contemporary look at Bellotto’s famous painting of Piazza San Martino, two young photographers selected thanks to the collaboration with the Photolux Festival of Lucca (November 16-December 8, 2019) were called upon: the German Jakob Ganstmeier (Munich, 1990) and the Italian Jacopo Valentini (Modena, 1990), hosted “in residence” during the summer at the Fondazione Ragghianti. At the end of the exhibition’s itinerary are their works, created in the same places that Bellotto saw in 1740.

The layout of the exhibition, with a room in shades of Prussian blue in which to admire Bellotto’s splendid work and drawings from the British Library, is signed by noted Venetian architect Daniela Ferretti. Accompanying the exhibition is a catalog published by Silvana Editoriale and Edizioni Fondazione Ragghianti Studi sull’arte, edited by Bożena Anna Kowalczyk, with essays on the artist and his production in Tuscany, new and unpublished historical and archival research carried out for this exhibition, as well as the results of the most innovative analyses concerning the technique and processes used by Bellotto in the creation of his paintings and drawings, compared here for the first time.

Pictured: Bernardo Bellotto, Piazza San Martino in Lucca (1740; oil on canvas; York, York City Art Gallery)

In Lucca, an exhibition traces Bernardo Bellotto's journey through Tuscany with never-before-seen discoveries

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