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A capriccio of the Palazzo del Senatore, Rome oil on canvas 253/4 x 181/2 in. (65.4 x 47cm.) PROVENANCE Lord Ravensworth, Ravensworth Castle, Northumberland, England. Comm. Renato de Carolis (Italian Vice-Consul), Liverpool, England, until sold, Sotheby's, London, October 15, 1947, lot 151 (œ980 to Lambert), as 'a view of a courtyard in a Palace said to be the Villa Malcontenta, Venice'. with David Koetser, London, by 1948. with Arturo Grassi, New York, 1948, from whom purchased by the present owner. LITERATURE S. Kozakiewicz, Bernardo Bellotto, London, 1972, II, p.249, no.313, p. 248, illustrated. E. Camesasca, L'opera completa di Bellotto, Milan, 1974, no. 190A G.J.M. Weber, in the catalogue of the exhibition, Bernardo Bellotto and the Capitals of Europe, Venice, Museo Correr and Houston, the Museum of Fine Art, 10 February - 21 October 2002, p. 230 under no. 77, no. 1. EXHIBITION Louisville, the J.B. Speed Art Museum, A Gallery of XVIIIth Century Venetian Paintings, 1948, no. 1, illustrated. NOTES This is one of three autograph versions of a composition conceived as one of a pair of palatial capricci . The companion composition shows a free-standing flight of steps in a courtyard reminiscent of that of the Doge's Palace, Venice, but on an even larger scale with the Capitoline dioscuri surmounting the balustrade of the stair. These reminiscences of the Capitol at Rome are complemented in this capriccio, in which Bellotto liberally reinterprets the fa‡ade of the Palazzo del Senatore on the Campidoglio, Rome, completed in 1592 by Girolamo Rainaldi, who modified the design previously supplied by Michelangelo. Bellotto reduces the fa‡ade by two bays but enriches this with paired pilasters and engaged columns in place of the massive single elements of the prototype, and the arcade through which this is seen bears no relation to that of the adjacent palazzo, now the Museo Capitolino. Drawings for both compositions are at Darmstadt, Hessisches Landesmuseum, Graphische Sammlung, nos. AE 2179 and 2180 (Kozakiewicz, nos. 310 and 314). Two pairs of pictures survive in the princely collections for which these may well have been painted, at Worlitz and at Schwerin (Kozakiewicz, nos. 307 and 311, and 308 and 312, exhibited, Venice, Museo Correr and Houston, the Museum of Fine Arts, Bernardo Bellotto, 2001, nos. 80, 79, 78 and 77 respectively). Bellotto's compositions would clearly have been wholly to the taste of Leopold III Frederick, Duke of Anhalt Dessau, whose pioneering neo-Palladian palace of 1769-73 at Worlitz reveals his strong classical leanings and was the center of what was to become a park in the English taste of unparalleled ambition. The collection of the Grand Dukes of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, in which the pair now at Schwerin is recorded in 1836, with its strong representation of the Italianate Dutch masters of the seventeenth century, still offers a remarkable index of the taste of Bellotto's generation. The probable pendant to the present picture (Kozakiewicz, no. 309) was first recorded in a sale at Diemen, Berlin in 1933 and was in the collection of Dmitri Tziracopoulo at Berlin in 1939. The collection at Ravensworth seems to have been substantially formed by Sir Thomas Henry Liddell, 6th Bt. (1775-1855), heir of a substantial coal fortune, who succeeded in 1791, and was in 1821 elevated as Baron Ravensworth. Ravensworth Castle, begun to the design of John Nash and subsequently enlarged in about 1822 and in the 1840s was, with Ashridge and Fonthill one of the great neo-medieval houses of the early nineteenth century. Kozakiewicz suggests a date of 1762-66, when the artist was in Dresden, for the Tziracopoulo picture, as for the drawings and the Worlitz and Schwerin pairs: his dating for the present canvas is circa 1765. He regarded it as a 'replica... in Bellotto's own hand, with only minor variations from the other two paintings' : the most obvious of these variations is in the masonry of the arch above the twined columns. On the basis of photographs, Bozena Kowalczyk also considers this to be an autograph work 'di ottima qualita'. Weber, writing of the Schwerin picture in the 2001 exhibition catalogue (no. 77) noted that, in the paired compositions, 'Bellotto formulates his conception of the architectural capriccio' and comments on the subtlety with which the figures are used to emphasize the recession of the architectural space. In both compositions, brilliant use is made of internal architectural 'framing'. This represents a logical development from earlier topographical works such as the Arch of Titus (Kozakiewicz, no. 72) and reflects a preoccupation that is implied also in the work of Canaletto, in, for example the ex-Neave Capriccio, with reminiscences of the Scuola di San Marco (Constable, no. 467). Bellotto's fascination with palatial flights of steps and the way these could be used to establish pictorial depth are illustrated very clearly in closely contemporary overdoors at Dresden and Hamburg (Kozakiewicz, nos. 327 and 317). Kozakiewicz (1, p.139) stresses the 'academism' of the capricci, linking this to the artist's role as a member of the Academy at Dresden, and their 'theatricality'. They are certainly revealing of the changing intellectual mode - influenced at Dresden by Algarotti, by Winckelmann and others - and represent an early phase of what would subsequently be recognized as the neo-classical movement, a movement in which of course Worlitz and its landscape was a significant portent. Weber ( op. cit. ) rightly disregards the interpretation of the companion composition offered by A. Wandschneider (in the catalogue of the exhibition, Phantasie und Illusion, Paderborn and Oldenberg, 1990).