Turin, the Royal Palace from the West

Painted in 1745 during Bellotto's journey through Piedmont before his departure for Dresden, this view of Turin's Royal Palace from the west belongs to the period when the young painter was applying his veduta technique to the major cities and courts of northern Italy in search of aristocratic and royal patronage. Turin, capital of the Kingdom of Sardinia under Charles Emmanuel III, possessed a magnificent baroque royal palace and the broad, planned streets of a carefully designed royal capital. The Galleria Sabauda, established by the Savoy dynasty as their dynastic art collection, holds this canvas as a record of royal Turin at the moment of Bellotto's visit. This work preceded Bellotto's great Dresden series by a year and shows his veduta style immediately before its mature consolidation under the Saxon court's demanding commissions.

The canvas shows Bellotto's precise treatment of Turin's planned baroque streetscape, with the royal palace providing a monumental focal point at the composition's centre. The wide, ordered street approaching the palace is rendered in measured perspective, its pavement and facades establishing the city's geometric grandeur. The Piedmontese light — warmer than Bellotto's subsequent northern European atmospheres — gives the scene a golden quality similar to his early Venetian and Roman works.