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| Bernardo Bellotto Ruins of the Kreuzkirche, Dresden 1765 oil on canvas Kunsthaus, Zürich |
The Two Canalettos
Bernardo Bellotto was the nephew of Antonio Canal, called Canaletto, the painter of Venetian views. Having followed in his uncle's footstep, Bellotto is also sometimes called Canaletto. Antonio Canal ended his life in London, while Bernardo moved to Dresden and later to Warsaw, which he recorded toward the end of the 18th century in a celebrated series of landscapes.
Ruins
Ruins constituted a fundamental landscape motif in the 17th century, though they had already begun to appear in paintings two centuries earlier. At first they most often symbolized the collapse of paganism and of the Old Law under Judaism, both superseded by triumphant Christianity. Later, they evolved into an essential element of classicizing landscape art, as it attempted to reconstitute the values and appearance of the ancient world. This trend only accelerated with the discovery of Herculaneum and Pompei in the mid-18th century. Painters who then took to specializing in ruin-filled landscapes, such as Hubert Robert, became forerunners of Romantic melancholy.
Disasters of War
The ruin in the present painting concerns a current event: this church has only just collapsed. Ruins like this had begun to multiply due to the development of artillery. Churches were the urban structures most prominently exposed.
War was the scene of valor. It was a subject for painting, but mainly as a setting for bravery, almost always as embodied by leading officers. Certain artists had begun to represent the horrors of war: there was the printmaker Jacques Callot from the Duchy of Lorraine who, in this respect, prefigured Goya.
Most probably the Kreuzkirche had proven unable to withstand the battles that shook Dresden during the Seven Years' War (1756-1763). The painting was executed shortly afterward. The fall of the ancient church could at the same time be read as signaling the triumph of Protestantism.
Cross Section of a Church
The collapse of the old church is emblematic of the precariousness shared by man-made artifacts and by belief-systems in the Age of Enlightenment. The interior is laid bare, the equivalent of flaying as applied to a building. We peer at stairwells, at every intimate detail of the architectural body. Bellotto exposes the bowels, as the elder Brueghel does in the Tower of Babel, except that the latter is in process of construction, while Bellotto's church has endured apocalyptic annihilation. We observe individuals on the site asking themselves how to go about clearing this rubble. Roman ruins are venerable because antique, this being exactly the period when serious excavations were widely undertaken, with intent to discover and reconstruct. On the other hand, this modern ruin, however highly respected as a site of worship, must now give place to something more modern (even if the ruin is old enough to qualify as "antique" in its own right). The fragment we see that still stands reminds us of a gallows. Is this a curse sent down from Heaven? Has a voice spoken out of the thunder? The church has been transformed into a marker above the grave of an expiring era, an expiring world.
– translated and adapted from Le Musée imaginaire de Michel Butor: 105 œuvres décisives de la peinture occidentale (Paris: Flammarion, 2019)