Visitors to the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice tend to be drawn there by the greatest hits: the Carpaccios, Bellinis and Titians, the football-pitch-sized Veroneses, the Canalettos, Tiepolos and Guardis. Here you can find all the pleasures and pageantry of the city – three centuries’ worth of quicksilver brushwork and shimmering, opalescent light, not to mention the odd heaving bodice – conveniently cloistered in one spot. There are other works here too, of course, but even these tend to have a certain worldly, fleshly quality – the apocalyptic visions of Hieronymus Bosch, acquired by Domenico Grimani in the early 16th century, have, I’ve always thought, the feeling of a wild party that has gone on too long.
At the moment, though, a temporary exhibition tells a different story. It focuses on the work of Pietro Bellotti, an artist from Lake Garda who spent most of his career in Venice, then died in obscurity and poverty in 1700. His life coincided with the beginning of what is generally considered the Republic’s decline: pauperised and depopulated after the plague of 1630–31; its sea power rivalled if not overtaken by the Turks; its reputation for canny diplomacy waning; its lucrative reinvention as the Las Vegas of early modern Europe still decades in the future. Perhaps a dose of unvarnished realism was just what the Venetians needed; certainly, that was what Bellotti made it his business to provide.
The exhibition, which includes works by Bellotti as well as some by peers and contemporaries, shows an artist schooled in the acutely naturalistic style practised by northern Italian artists such as Moroni and Caravaggio around the turn of the 17th century. Bellotti’s subjects are often advanced in age, equipped with a certain amount of allegorical paraphernalia but primarily offered up as studies in expression and character. Scuffed clothes and wrinkled skin are rendered in unflinching detail; lighting is warm and often candlelit, but sparing and directional. We find ourselves in a curious foreshadowing of a brief period in the early 18th century when artists such as Giovanni Battista Piazzetta, Federico Bencovich, Giulia Lama and, briefly, Tiepolo, brought a sombre chiaroscuro to Venice, only for paolismo – a skillful pastiche of Paolo Veronese and other purveyors of cinquecento sweetness and light – to gain sway in the 1730s.
Emotionally and artistically, we are a long way away from the earthly delights of the carnival or the ridotto here. Bellotti’s handling of paint may be relatively tightly controlled, but the emotional punch his pictures carry is more akin to that of the tronies of Rembrandt and his workshop – right down to an occasional weakness for gurning grotesques – or even, whizzing forward three centuries, that of Lucian Freud’s portraits. In perhaps Bellotti’s best-known painting, The Fate Lachesis (1654), as well as The Old Singer (c. 1680–90) and other works, we see elderly people, piercingly human in their fragility and their defiance, raging, or at least glowering, against the dying of the light.
The curators of the show are keen to highlight the dusting of occult imagery that recurs in Bellotti’s work, though they stop short of suggesting that the artist himself may have been a follower of the left-hand path. The fact that alternative versions of several subjects are presented together may amplify this effect, though it’s also a potent way of inviting close and systematic scrutiny of the pictures. But from Lachesis, with her bobbin and her thread, to Martina the fortune-teller (‘and poisoner’, some citations add), to a lovely print by Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione, nicknamed ‘Il Grechetto’, of Circe changing Odysseus’s shipmates into animals, it’s clear that a certain amount of hocus-pocus was popular in the marketplace at the time. Such heterodox interests have appealed to the nobility at various points in history, of course – especially, perhaps, during the doldrums of the later 17th century, midway between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. Bellotti was just about to come of age when Christina of Sweden left poor Descartes freezing in a corridor and headed south to be received into the True Faith.
It seems clear to me that the sense of obscure destinies and alchemical goings-on in these pictures is first and foremost an atmospheric device, secondary to their vivid, pitiless disclosure of the simple fate that Time, a fiercer adversary than the blackest magician, has in store for us. Be that as it may, their proto-Gothic sensibility seems at odds with the Venice around them – both within the Accademia, its walls lined with bravura displays of luminous, voluptuous exuberance, and beyond it, where tourists file through narrow streets yammering excitedly, phone in one hand, five-euro Select Spritz To Go in the other.
Rather, it looks forward to the Venice of Browning, of Whistler and even of Ruskin, whose forensic studies of Venetian churches and palazzos view both ornament and decay with the same sharp but accommodating eye. We might even find ourselves thinking of Daphne Du Maurier’s story ‘Don’t Look Now’ (1971), memorably adapted into a film by Nicolas Roeg, in which an elderly blind psychic claims to be able to communicate with a grieving couple’s dead child. Bellotti might have had some fun with that.
‘Amazement, Reality, Enigma: Pietro Bellotti and 17th-century in Venice’ is at the Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice, until 18 January 2026.