Dolo, on the Brenta; and Padua seen from the outskirts, with the Torre d’Ezzelino and the Basilica di Sant’Antonio

Pietro Bellotti was the younger brother of Bernardo Bellotto, and like him used the name by which their maternal uncle, Antonio Canal, Canaletto was known. The researches of Charles Beddington and Domenico Crivellari, published in the exhibition catalogue Pietro Bellotti, un altro Canaletto, Venice, Ca’ Rezzonico, 2013-4, have clarified a sustained, if at times itinerant, career that evidently began in the uncle’s workshop and took the artist by way of Genoa, Nantes, Paris and London to Toulouse. Many of Bellotti’s pictures were based on compositions by Canaletto, and of this pair one follows the latter’s etching, Le porte del Dolo (W.G. Constable, Canaletto, Oxford, 1962, etchings, no. 3), while the other was taken from the second of a set of six engravings by Fabio Berardi, Sei Villaggi Campestri (Constable, I, p. 619, no. 52.2), showing the outskirts of Padua with the Torre d’Ezzelino and the Basilica di Sant’Antonio in the distance, which was based in reverse on a drawing by Canaletto (Constable, no. 685). The view of Dolo is of particular interest as one of the few pictures Bellotti is known to have signed. Four signed capricci were published by Beddington in the 2013-4 exhibition catalogue (nos. 40-3).