View of Pirna with the Fortress of Sonnenstein
Bernardo Bellotto (Italian, 1721–1780)
c. 1760
- Medium
- Oil on canvas
- Classification
- Painting
- Dimensions
- 49.3 × 79.5 cm (19 3/8 × 31 1/4 in.)
- Culture
- Italy
- Museum
- Art Institute of Chicago, Painting and Sculpture of Europe
- Credit line
- Clyde M. Carr Fund
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Tweens profiles and older: its subjects are known and suit older children. How works are placed
View at the Art Institute of Chicago
About this work
Well trained by his uncle, Canaletto, Bernardo Bellotto quickly established his own reputation as a gifted view painter. By 1746 he was appointed court painter to the elector of Saxony in Dresden, who commissioned him to produce cityscapes. Bellotto was subsequently asked to create 11 large-scale paintings of the nearby town of Pirna; the present picture is a reduced but otherwise exact replica of one of those celebrated works. Exalted in Bellotto’s cold, crystalline light, the fortress of Sonnenstein presides over the scene from its hilltop. In the left foreground, townsfolk congregate at a small obelisk that bears the arms of Saxony.
Description © Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0
