Bellotto and Canaletto Exhibition: Wonder and Light

“Bellotto and Canaletto. Wonder and Light”, an exhibition curated by Bożena Anna Kowalczyk, brings more than one hundred works including paintings, drawings and engravings – a third of which have never been exhibited in Italy before – to the Gallerie d’Italia in Milan. The exhibition project is dedicated to the pictorial genius and creative intelligence of two leading artists of 18th-century Europe: Antonio Canal, known as ‘il Canaletto’, and his nephew Bernardo Bellotto, in fact, were able to transform Venetian Vedutismo from a peculiar genre to the avant-garde current that characterised that period. Starting from the idea of using technology and new multimedia means as an added value to understand and enjoy the work, ETT’s project includes the setting up of Room 10, the Historical Room and the installation of a multimedia totem.

Room 10A: a projection with mapping on a tripartite tent that exploits the architecture of the room and proposes a video consists of a succession of 5 paintings (displayed in the exhibition) that are animated: the 5 paintings represent 5 different locations portrayed by the two artists. Through animation, the painting comes to life with the movement of the boats, the trees, the characters in the foreground, the changing light on the landscape. Room 10B: the screening of the documentary ‘The Bookshop of Wonders’, a 10-episode series telling the story of the 2 artists and their journey through Europe. Completing the story on the artists’ Venetian culture and Vedutism is a multimedia experience with virtual reality content that allows visitors to enter inside some of the paintings thanks to suggestive animations that give visitors a new reading of the works. 4 Virtual Reality stations in front of which there is a niche graphed with a detail of the work in which the user will immerse himself.

The experience is conceived as an overlooking of a landscape that comes to life again (landscape-landscape, painting-landscape), creating an intimacy of the visitor with the work. Once the user wears the visor, he/she will see the niche again, which will be coloured and enlarged, reproducing the entire work embracing the user (at 180°). The work is also animated with light effects, movements of boats and carriages, trees and people in motion. The works selected for this experience represent Venice, Milan, Pirna (Warsaw) and London, testifying to the intense activity of the 2 artists not only in Venice but extended to the whole of Europe. ETT’s installation ends in the Saletta Storica, where a documentary on Canaletto and Bellotto’s use of the ‘Camera Oscura’ is broadcast on a monitor. Also by ETT is the touch totem – not related to the Bellotto and Canaletto exhibition, but to the Gallerie d’Italia and dedicated to the permanent and temporary exhibitions – which allows visitors to send an email from the Gd’I with an image and a caption and to share their experience on the main social networking platforms.