View of Pirna with the Fortress of Sonnenstein
c. 1760
Medium
Oil on canvas
Dimensions
49.3 × 79.5 cm (19 3/8 × 31 1/4 in.)
Classification
oil on canvas
Department
Painting and Sculpture of Europe
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago
Accession Number
12895
Rights
Public Domain
About this artwork
Well trained by his uncle, Canaletto, Bernardo Bellotto quickly established his own reputation as a gifted view painter. By 1746 he was appointed court painter to the elector of Saxony in Dresden, who commissioned him to produce cityscapes. Bellotto was subsequently asked to create 11 large-scale paintings of the nearby town of Pirna; the present picture is a reduced but otherwise exact replica of one of those celebrated works. Exalted in Bellotto’s cold, crystalline light, the fortress of Sonne...
About the Artist
Bernardo Bellotto · 1722–1780
Bernardo Bellotto (1722–1780) was an Italian painter of exceptional gifts who carried the art of the veduta — the precisely observed topographical view — from Venice across the courts of northern Europe, leaving behind some of the most detailed and haunting urban panoramas in the history of Western painting. Born in Venice, he was the nephew and pupil of the great vedutista Giovanni Antonio Canal,...