VENICE ASTRAL PROJECTION CLINIC

Amazement, Reality, Enigma. Pietro and the Painting of 17th Century in Venice at Gallerie dell’Accademia di Venezia | By Naima El-Baz | ★ ★ ★

19.09.25 - 18.01.26

23 September 2025

Visitors to Venice's Gallerie dell'Accademia are usually drawn there by the big names: the Carpaccios, Bellinis, and Titians, the enormous Veroneses, the Canalettos, Tiepolos, and Guardis. Here you can enjoy all of the city's joys and pageantry. Three centuries of quicksilver brushwork and shimmering, opalescent light, not to mention the occasional heaving bodice, are neatly contained in one location. There are other pieces here, of course, but they all have a worldly, fleshly aspect. Bosch's apocalyptic visions, obtained by Domenico Grimani in the early 16th century, evoke a sense of overindulgence.

However, a temporary exhibition occupying the space currently presents a different story. It concentrates on the work of Pietro Bellotti, a Lake Garda artist who spent the majority of his career in Venice before dying in poverty and obscurity in 1700. His life coincided with the beginning of what is widely regarded as the Republic's decline: it was impoverished and depopulated following the plague of 1630-31; its sea power was rivalled, if not surpassed, by the Turks; its reputation for astute diplomacy was fading; and its lucrative reinvention as the Las Vegas of early modern Europe was still decades away. Perhaps the Venetians needed a dose of unvarnished realism, and Bellotti made it his business to offer them with just that.

The exhibition, which includes works by Bellotti as well as those by peers and contemporaries, depicts an artist trained in the highly lifelike manner popularized by northern Italian artists such as Moroni and Caravaggio at the turn of the 17th century. Bellotti's figures are frequently elderly, dressed in allegorical attire, and presented primarily as studies in expression and character. Scuffed garments and wrinkled skin are depicted in meticulous detail; lighting is warm and often candlelight, but sparse 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 introduced a sombre chiaroscuro to Venice, only for paolismo - a skillful pastiche of Paolo Veronese and other purveyors of cinquecento sweetness and light - to take hold in the 1730s. Emotionally and artistically, we are far removed from the earthy delights of the carnival or the ridotto here. Bellotti's paintings have an emotional impact similar to Rembrandt's and Lucian Freud's portraits, despite his tight control over paint application. Bellotti's most famous painting, The Fate of Lachesis (1654), as well as The Old Singer (c. 1680-90) and other paintings, depict elderly individuals fighting, or at least glowering, against the passing of the light.

The show's curators are eager to highlight the occult imagery that appears frequently in Bellotti's work, but they stop short of implying that the artist himself may have followed the left-hand route. The fact that alternate versions of multiple subjects are displayed simultaneously may magnify this impact, but it is also an effective method of encouraging close and methodical examination of the images. However, from Lachesis with her bobbin and 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' shipmates into animals, it is clear that a certain amount of hocus-pocus was popular in the marketplace at the time. Of course, such unconventional interests have attracted to the nobility at various moments in history, most notably during the doldrums of the late 17th century, which fell between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment period. Bellotti was ready to reach adulthood when Christina of Sweden abandoned Descartes in a corridor to be welcomed into the True Faith.

The impression of mysterious fates and alchemical activity in these images appears to be mostly an atmospheric ploy, secondary to their vivid, pitiless reveal of the simple fate that Time, a fiercer adversary than the blackest sorcerer, has planned for us. Regardless, their proto-Gothic sensibility appears at odds with the Venice around them, both within the Accademia, whose walls are lined with bravura displays of luminous, voluptuous exuberance, and beyond it, where tourists file through narrow streets yammering excitedly, phone in one hand and five-euro Select Spritz To Go in the other. Rather, it looks ahead to the Venice of Browning, Whistler, and even Ruskin, whose forensic studies of Venetian churches and palazzos treat both ornament and decay with the same piercing yet accommodating gaze. The film adaptation of Daphne Du Maurier's tale 'Don't Look Now' (1971) by Nicolas Roeg depicts an elderly blind psychic claiming to converse with a bereaved couple's deceased kid. Bellotti may have had some fun with that.