Lorenzo Bellotto

Bio

Lorenzo Bellotto, Bernardo Bellotto’s only son and only identified studio assistant, was three years old when his parents left Italy for Dresden. A hand which seems to be that of Lorenzo is evident in replicas of Bernardo’s views of Vienna and Munich, suggesting that he accompanied his father on the latter’s two year stay in Vienna, c.1759 – early 1761, and subsequent months in Munich. In 1764 he ‘was acting as his father’s assistant in painting for the court’ and in the following two years he helped his father deliver lectures at the Dresden academy of Fine Arts. Although twelve pictures by Lorenzo are recorded in the collection of the Count Palatine of Zweibrücken, only one painting signed by him alone is known, a Capriccio of a Palace Courtyard of 1765 in the Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts which is probably the work exhibited at the Dresden Academy in 1766. After the transfer of the Bellotto family to Warsaw in January 1767, Lorenzo contributed to Bernardo’s decorations in the Ujazdów Palace and to the series of views of Rome. He died in Warsaw on (or shortly before) 20 October 1770, at the age of twenty-six.