Canaletto & Bellotto

This volume journeys into eighteenth-century Europe, tracing how two Venetian painters reshaped our idea of the modern city.  

Venetian painter Antonio Canaletto and his nephew Bernardo Bellotto used their richly detailed cityscapes to shape public understanding of the places they depicted. In this innovative study, Mateusz Mayer uses Canaletto and Bellotto’s work as a lens to examine how Venice became the stage for a resplendent republican tradition, London a vision of bourgeois pride, and Vienna a setting for imperial representation―characterizations that continue to shape how we see these cities today.

The volume vividly reveals how Canaletto and Bellotto used the latest optical instruments and analytical observation techniques to create fascinatingly lifelike depictions of urban architecture. At the same time, through theatrical staging, they transformed streets and squares into vibrant platforms for human society, populated by aristocrats and street vendors, courtly ceremony and everyday labor. Their paintings offer a wealth of narrative detail in which viewers are only too happy to lose themselves.