Pietro Bellotti (Venice 1725-circa 1804 Toulouse?) Campo Santa Maria Formosa, Venice, oil on canvas, 29 x 47.5 cm, framed ÜBERLANGTEXT We are grateful to Dario Succi for suggesting the attribution of the present painting. Pietro Bellotti was the younger brother of Bernardo Bellotto and nephew of Giovanni Antonio Canal, called Canaletto. His grandfather was Bernardo Canal, who died in 1744 and with whom Pietro was very close. Born in Venice March 22, 1725, Bellotti carried out an apprenticeship in the workshop of Canaletto, under the guidance of his brother Bernardo. Through an agreement dated November 5, 1741, Bernardo Bellotto committed to teach the young Pietro art and to provide him a home; in exchange, Pietro contributed by giving his brother 120 ducats every year. The contract, which had a duration of two years, was interrupted in 1742 when Pietro decided to leave Bernardo’s home and thus to end his apprenticeship. In 1746, Pietro resided in Genoa and in 1748 he married Francoise Lacombe, with whom he had two daughters and a son. His son, André Pierre Laurent, became a painter of anatomies and portraits. From 1747 to 1750, from 1759 to 1761, and from 1772 to 1778, Bellotti resided in Toulouse; in 1762 he moved for a few years to London; in 1805 a catalogue of the Musée des Augustins of Toulouse mentioned him as ‘mort depuis peu de temps en France’: it is in fact likely that his death occurred in 1804. Many paintings by Bellotti were exhibited in various Salons of the Académie royale de peinture, sculpture et architecture de Toulouse. The most important Salon was the one that took place in 1765, in which the artist exhibited ‘twenty views in perspective’. Of this group, seventeen were identified by Robert Mesuret inside the Château de Merville, near Toulouse, as part of the collection of the Marquis of Beaumont where they are still located today (see R. Mesuret, Pietro Bellotti, un veneziano di Tolosa, in: Arte Veneta, 1952, pp. 171-72). The views show various European cities including Venice, Florence, Rome, Milan, Genoa, Malta, Marseille, Versailles and The Hague, all deriving from prints. Other paintings from the same series show the interiors of churches, a lake, a sea harbor at sunset and architectural capricci (see, J. Penent, J.-L. Augé, B. Brejon de Lavergnée (eds.), Les collectionneurs toulousains du XVIIIe siècle, Paris 2001, pp. 100-02). The exceptional series of the Château de Merville, which remained for centuries intact, made it possible for us to know the peculiar qualities of the style of the artist during his stay in France, characterised by a detailed and minute composition influenced by Canaletto and by a delicate chromaticism of French taste, of which rose skies and white elongated clouds are typical. The series of Merville was displayed in Italy in occasion of the exhibition Pietro Bellotti un altro Canaletto, held in Ca’ Rezzonico and the Museo del Settecento in Venice in the years 2013–2014. The present painting, datable around 1742, is a rare but important example of the first period of Bellotti’s artistic career, when he worked under the guidance of his brother Bernardo, from whom he acquired the cool tonalities, the accuracy with which the single elements are depicted, the confident shadowing and the quick small brush strokes. As often happens in Pietro Bellotti’s works, the present painting is based on a print: the etching by Antonio Visentini, which belongs to a series of 38 Venetian views deriving from Canaletto’s paintings, published for the first time in its entirety in 1742 (see D. Succi, La Serenissima nello specchio di rame, Castelfranco Veneto 2013, vol. I, p. 214, no. 36).