Canaletto's nephew: a traveling exhibition of paintings by Bernardo Bellotto, whose 18th-century views document Italian cities and many northern European capitals, revealed an artist who, according to the author, surpassed his more famous uncle on all counts

The heart wishes to be moved and the understanding flattered, but the eye wishes to be deceived.

--Christian Ludwig von Hagedorn

Great Italian art thrived well into the late 18th century, although less in its homeland than as an outpouring of talent across Europe. Notable examples from all fields are easy to cite. The composers Domenico Scarlatti and Luigi Boccherini did their best work in Spain. Members of the Galli-Bibbiena family, influential stage designers, were active in Germany. Lorenzo da Ponte wrote libretti for Mozart's operas in Vienna; another Venetian, Giambattista Tiepolo, magnificently decorated the Residenz at Wurzburg. The Roman architect Gaetano Chiaveri drew up plans for the wonderful Hofkirche at Dresden. The diffusion of their work, and that of innumerable others, confirmed a long-standing appetite for Italian artistic forms in European courts.

For collectors on the Grand Tour, desire was also whetted by Giovanni Paolo Pannini in Rome and Antonio Canaletto (1697-1768) in Venice, painters of the architectural glories of Italian civilization. The urbanism of Northern dynasts was stimulated by this Mediterranean heritage, transmitted through the genre of Italian view (veduta) painting. To restore a memory of the Eternal City was de rigueur for princes eager to impose imperial designs on their own capitals. But, if we look forward, the late flowering of vedute also anticipated those mammoth painted panoramas of cities (as well as battles and landscapes) housed in rotundas, an early form of mass media in the 19th century. Though Canaletto's art satisfied the taste of the ancien regime, it foretold, in addition, the pleasure bourgeois publics would take in the representation of their expanding city skylines. With dazzling showmanship, Canaletto also counterpointed the topographic view with the mode of the capriccio, in which he juxtaposed locales separated from each other in time and space almost as easily with his brush as we do digitally in the computer. He matched his record of material life in settecento Italy by his fantasy reflections on its past.

Canaletto has always been given his due. But what about that other artist trained in his studio, a figure of incomparably lesser fame, who nevertheless surpassed him on all fronts--his nephew?

Bernardo Bellotto (1722-1780) brought representation of cityscapes into an equivocal zone. Like his kinsman, he practiced his art with the aid of the portable camera obscura, but his preternatural acuity and immaculate form carried his work to the edge of hallucination. Starting in a warm Venetian key, his palette developed a chillier, Northern spectrum, at times resembling that of the Romantic visionary Caspar David Friedrich. Bellotto describes minutiae at long distance with an exactness graspable by the mind, but unavailable to the eye. The light that etches the Fortress of Konigstein (1756) has a crystalline, almost eerie insistence, more familiar to us in the landscapes that Alfred Hitchcock visualized for Vertigo.

In Bellotto's Architectural Capriccio with a Portrait of Voivod Franciszek Salezy Potocki (ca. 1762-65), a bearded vendor in a peaked cap looks piercingly at the viewer. He's a sympathetically treated "barbarian" at the gate of a classical palace courtyard, where Bernini's Apollo and Daphne crowns a spouting fountain. After a precocious phase in Italy, the artist departed in 1747 to Saxony, Bavaria, Austria and Poland, never to return to his native land. From these distant realms, his references to the south appear incongruous; or is it that the north looks unreal?

Though Bellotto had a busy and successful career in Eastern European cities, he did not enjoy high artistic status in the West. There, his celebrated uncle reaped so many rewards that Bellotto often styled himself Canaletto, to play up the family connection. (1) Confusion based on a trademarked name has for too long obscured--at least in America--the worth of a distinctive artist. "Bellotto and the Capitals of Europe," his first U.S. retrospective, at Houston's Museum of Fine Arts, went far towards clarifying it.

The show was appropriately titled, for it concentrated on Bellotto's vedute that document the growth of absolutist courts east of the Rhine. Palace complexes, royal parks, pavilions and church steeples, some old but others newly completed or still being built, are featured on the horizon. The patisserie of their gracious facades belies the savagery with which rulers grabbed territories from each other in the Seven Years War (1756-63). One such king, the musical Frederick the Great, bombarded Dresden, forcing Bellotto, a court painter there, to flee to Munich and Vienna. When the artist returned to his destroyed home and studio, he painted the wreck of the once tall Kreuzkirche, brick by fallen brick, with the same unnerving clarity with which TV showed the ruins of the World Trade Center. In neither case can one speak of a "view," given the prettiness that word implies. Bellotto was a servant of the high and very mighty; but if his art bears witness to a monumental urbanism, it keeps its distance from its pretensions. It was his business to depict palaces and royal chapels, but he did not hesitate to show them without majesty--under scaffolds or being repaired.