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Artist or Maker: Bernardo Bellotto (Venice 1721-1780 Warsaw)
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Literature: S. Kozakiewicz, Bernardo Bellotto, Recklinghausen, 1972, II, p. 510, no. Z497.
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Notes: From the collection of the Prince Batthyány-Strattmann (lot 229)
The present picture has been in the Batthyány-Strattmann family since the nineteenth century and possibly earlier. It hung at Schloss Körmend, the family's principal Hungarian residence since 1605 (see fig. 1), where the picture would have been displayed amongst a formidable collection of pictures and works of art, much of which was dispersed over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This included another Bellotto - a View of Dresden (quite possibly the original pendant to the present work), which has been lost without trace. At the end of the Second World War, the Batthyány-Strattmann family were forced to leave Schloss Kormend for Austria. A train was organised to transport the contents of the castle but was stopped at the Austro-Hungarian border and looted by soldiers. The present picture was saved but suffered extensive damage to the right side of the canvas (the exact cause of the damage is unknown). Approximately 15 cm. of the canvas on the right has been lost altogether, while a further 15cm., from the bell-tower of the Marienkirche, has endured substantial paint loss. The remaining part of the canvas (just over half of the original composition) is not unscathed, but has survived in remarkably good condition. The town hall in Pirna, the focus point of the market square, with its tower and Renaissance pediments is seen virtually in its entirety with the Rathaus alongside on the left.
The prime version of this view, widely considered one of the artist's most successful compositions, is the large format painting now in the Gemäldegalerie, Dresden, that formed part of a group of eleven views of Pirna painted by Bellotto between 1753 and 1756 for Augustus II, King of Poland and Elector of Saxony. Situated ten miles upstream on the Elbe from Dresden, and dominated by the vast Schloss Sonnenstein, the Saxon town of Pirna, with its mix of medieval and modern architecture, attracted Bellotto for the wealth of pictorial possibilities the town provided. He produced several smaller versions of the Pirna Market Square, including the pictures in the Pushkin Museum, Moscow; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Kaiser-Friedrich Museum, Berlin; and the picture recently sold at Christie's, New York, 24 January 2003, lot 163. Significantly, the present version differs from all the others (including the Dresden prototype) in the addition of an extra figure standing alongside the first column of the colonnade on the side of the town hall. It was considered autograph by Stefan Kozakiewicz on the basis of a photograph but nevertheless included in his monograph under 'attributed works', no doubt partly on account of its condition. The attribution was more recently been endorsed by Edgar Peters Bowron, (letter dated 2002). We are grateful to Bozena Anna Kowalczyk and Charles Beddington who have both inspected the picture in the original and confirmed the attribution.
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