Veduta di Pirna dal castello di Sonnenstein - Bernardo Bellotto

When Soviet forces withdrew from Warsaw in 1945, leaving behind a city reduced almost entirely to rubble, Polish rebuilding committees used eighteenth-century paintings as architectural blueprints. The paintings were by Bernardo Bellotto, a Venetian court artist who had died sixty-five years earlier; his Warsaw views were precise enough to guide the reconstruction of street facades, arcades, and building heights. No other vedutista has earned an afterlife like it.

Born in Venice in 1721, Bellotto was the nephew of Giovanni Antonio Canal on his mother's side and trained in his uncle's studio from early adolescence. By his mid-teens he was a registered member of the Venetian painters' guild. His early work so closely followed Canaletto's manner that he occasionally signed canvases "Canaletto" himself, a habit that has tangled attribution ever since. He left Venice in 1746 for a long Italian tour before heading north; in 1747, aged twenty-six, he accepted an invitation to Dresden from Frederick-Augustus II, Elector of Saxony, who paid him twenty thalers a year as court painter.

The Dresden commissions produced some of his finest work: The Moat of the Zwinger (1749-53, 133 x 235 cm, Gemaldegalerie) and a series of Neumarkt views including the Frauenkirche, in which extreme diagonal compositions amplify the spatial depth of the city's Baroque squares. Empress Maria Theresa summoned him to Vienna in 1758, where he painted View from the Belvedere (1759-60, Kunsthistorisches Museum); in 1767 he moved to Warsaw, entering the service of Stanislaw II of Poland and beginning the topographical documentation that would outlast the city itself.

His palette runs consistently cooler and crisper than Canaletto's; he paid more attention to cloud formations, deep shadows, and foliage, and packed his views with more figure groups. Where Canaletto often revisited the same standpoints, Bellotto almost always sought new vantage points. Scholars read his documentary precision as a function of his market: not Venice's tourist trade but the royal courts of Europe, patrons who wanted their capitals recorded with near-surveyor exactitude.