Bernardo Bellotto, born in Venice on the 20 May 1722, is one of the greatest protagonists of the European artistic life of the XVIII century.  Nephew and pupil of Antonio Canal, known as Canaletto (Venice 1697-1768), he learned to paint views at the age of sixteen, becoming the alter ego of his master and uncle. When he was just eighteen years old, surpassing the skills of his master, commissions from the most relevant Italian courts, brought him  to Florence, Lucca, Rome, Milan, Turin and Verona. He definitively left Venice in 1747 , invited to Dresden at  the court of Augustus III, king of Poland, elector of  Saxony.  During the Seven Years War, the first European war, Bellotto  took refuge in Königstein, Wien and Munich, to serve the respective monarchies: the empress of the Austro-Hungarian empire, Maria Theresa of Austria, and the king Maximilian Joseph III. The beauty of  European capitals are immortalized in its monumental paintings, now exposed in  the main museums around the world.
Bellotto  loved to portray not only landscapes, he  was furthermore attracted by the everyday life in such detail ,  that he left not only masterpieces of Art, but also precious narrative  documents of those times. Obsessed by finding the right point of  view with his "camera obscura", he was a sort of film director ante-litteram. We discover  the narrative power of his paintings, giving a voice to the secret  world of  the many characters of his paintings, like in a Tolstoy tale.
Following his journey through Europe, we also explore the most important European architectural and artistic heritage memorialized in his paintings and we find out that many places didn't change at all: the Zwinger Palace in Dresden, the Belevedere and Schonbrunn Palaces in Austria, the places portrayed in Venice, Rome, Florence  and Munich. The last stop of his endless European trip, was Warsaw, where he arrived in the winter of 1767, after the destruction of Dresden. The meeting with the last Polish king Stanislaw August Poniatowski, enlightened patron of foreign artists, will enhance him to stay in Warsaw until his death on November 1780. Bellotto, as court painter, observes  the last years of Polish  history, praising  the beauty of nature and landscapes and documenting the Baroque Warsaw with a series of twenty-two extraordinary views of the city and four of Wilanów, Poland's national treasures  conserved In the Royal Castle and  in the National Museum of Warsaw. Those paintings have a dramatic history: brought to Russia by Tsar Nicholas I,  carried back in 1922, miraculously saved during the  fire of the Royal Castle in September 1939,  the paintings were stolen  by the German  Gestapo in 1940 and returned  only in 1945, just in time to help  for the reconstruction  of  the cities of  Warsaw and Dresden, completely destroyed during WWII.
 

On May 2022, the anniversary of the 300 years of the birth of Bellotto, is a great opportunity to rediscover him on the background of European history and artistic heritage, of which he was a precious witness.  We will use  the best photographic technology to explore the paintings, revealing details otherwise difficult to perceive. We will give voice to many of his highly defined characters who populate his paintings highlighting the   narrative power of his paintings, visual stories of those times.
Scientific curator will be  Bozena Anna Kowalczyk, one of the major international scholars of  Bellotto and Canaletto.