In 1747 the Venetian painter Bernardo Bellotto came to Dresden, attracted by an annual salary of a very respectable 1,750 thalers, which the Saxon Elector Friedrich August III paid him.
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He obviously invested these well: A Dresden insurance inventory from 1762, after the destruction of his house in the Seven Years' War, lists damage worth no less than fifty thousand thalers, including 515 books and several printing presses for his easily salable etchings, as well as a very valuable Meißner Service as a gift from his patron, the Saxon Prime Minister Heinrich Graf von Brühl, for whom he made many of his paintings a second time.
But Bellotto's initially purely material lure to Dresden soon turned into real enthusiasm for the residence capital of his employer,
Stefan Trinks
Editor in the Feuilleton.
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Instead of the meandering canals and mostly dark alleys, just a big river;
instead of the magnificent Renaissance palaces on the Rialto, a heap of medieval hovels and here and there a handsome baroque palace in between.
But the artist, who, like his uncle Antonio Canal, was called Canaletto (“little canal”) in the Venetian manner, like the Renaissance painter Jacopo Robusti from the lagoon city had been renamed Tintoretto “dyer” two hundred years earlier, Venetianized the Saxon capital: In his pictures, Bellotto transformed Dresden into a vibrant Mediterranean city.
And just as the painted souvenir capriccios Piranesis in Rome and Canaletto’s vedutas in Venice, which tourists liked to buy on the Grand Tour, soon superimposed the original images in their heads back home,
The big show celebrating the 300th birthday of the painting city bewitcher in the Old Masters Gallery in Dresden is therefore rightly called “Bernardo Bellotto – Magic of the Real”.
In fact, he hardly idealized anymore, quite unlike his uncle with his always tidy and beautified views of Venice.
Rather, he teaches the Saxons to see their structural and behavioral idiosyncrasies with Mediterranean eyes.
His gaze also sees dirty laundry
When Bellotto painted the “Schiffvorstadt in Pirna” around 1753, after a brief glimpse across a reflecting bay of the Elbe, the eye first saw the wall.
From the middle of the picture, crooked medieval half-timbered houses with boarded upper floors and holey roofs stand lopsidedly.
The castle high up on the rock can only be seen in a tiny section on the left side of the picture.
The tributary of the Elbe in the foreground is so shallow that the water only comes just above the hooves of the drinking cows.
But while it's laundry day on the shore and three people have erected an adventurous wooden construction to dry the cloths, you notice a yellowish-brown sheet on the poles.
This should not only be clean,
but to be pure?
The strange drying rack is surmounted by the spinning fingers of a dead willow tree, through which Bellotto directs the gaze to the shacks on the other side of the bay.
There, the second culprit – next to the cattle in the water – can be identified: a toilet bay window, from which traces of dirt running down the wall make it clear why in this part of the Elbe the laundry and the washed never turn white as a flower, similar to what is often the case in Venice to this day trustworthy water flows in the canals and pipes.
Likewise, on the monumental "Altmarkt in Dresden seen from Seegasse", which was created two years earlier, the Frauenkirche, which can only be seen in part, or the unmissable crowd on this lively market day, which only consists of pointillist dabbed heads in orange, consists of green, yellow and red.
Rather, one primarily looks at the sedan chair carriers lounging in the shade ahead, who have parked their chaises and are waiting for customers.
These eighteenth-century taxi drivers look just as desolate as their modern-day counterparts, and the mutton offered for sale in the left foreground looks just as disheveled as two well-dressed gentlemen are discussing its sale.