Reviews: Fortress Romance

Bernardo Bellotto. More amateurish art appreciators may be asking ourselves: who? But the eighteenth-century Italian urban landscape painter, who was both student and nephew of the better-known Canaletto, is becoming a lot more familiar to the public thanks to an extraordinary new exhibition at the National Gallery. It consists of five of his paintings, all of the same location – Königstein Fortress in Saxony –, each from different angles and approaches. Five paintings may not seem like much to get excited about, but this exhibition provides a fascinating window into an underexplored artist, and an important moment of transition in the history of art.

Bellotto’s origins in Venice and the studio of his uncle Canaletto are clear in that use of light, but what sets him apart is his move north to Germany, Austria and Poland, where under a variety of patrons he applied his Venetian instincts to northern subject matter. The blend of northern and southern sensibilities gives air and light to dramatic, sometimes gothic scenes of the vast, heavily modernised hilltop fortress. In one painting the cool geometry of one the fortress’s buildings terminates in a mushroom-like mass of gloom of a roof, peppered with shadowed windows.

The muted sense of menace and awe of the genteel figures parading round the terrible mass of the fortress, always at risk of being absorbed by the naked rock beneath, seems to anticipate Romanticism and its love of the sublime and the Gothic. In Bernardo Bellotto we discover not just a brilliant artist, but a vital geographical and historic confluence, a living channel of culture.

The exhibit runs till the 31 October 2021 and entry is free. Details can be found at www.nationalgallery.org.uk/exhibitions/bellotto-the-koenigstein-views-reunited.