The Vagabond Vedutista

Warsaw emerged from World War II with 85% of its buildings, including virtually all of its historic landmarks, in ruins. After clearing away the rub ble, architects, town planners and structural engineers decided that rather than build anew, they would try to restore the city's historic sections to their original appearance. The job has taken a long time. But the rebuilders have been cheered by the knowledge that their most valuable assistant is an artist who waited even longer for recognition. He is Bernardo Bellotto, a Venetian vedutista, or landscape painter, whose views of 18th century Warsaw are the most perfect record of the city to survive the war. And though Bellotto lived from 1720 to 1780, it was only this summer at a major exhibition of vedutisti in Venice that the Italian public at long last realized that Bellotto had been a painter of the first rank, worthy of being mentioned in the same breath with his more famous uncle, Canaletto.

Crystalline Visions. Bellotto learned his trade in his uncle's Venetian studio. Canaletto was then one of the most illustrious and successful artists in Europe, leader of the school whose detailed panoramas of Venetian fiestas and parades hung in castles and mansions from Italy to England. In his youth,Bel-lotto aped his uncle's style and signed his canvases "Bernardo Bellotto Canaletto," a quirk that has caused confusion among collectors ever since. But as he matured, he developed a colder, moodier, darker technique all his own.

After wandering to Dresden, Vienna and Munich, Bellotto settled in Warsaw in 1767. He spent the next decade recording 26 views of the city for King Stanislas Augustus of Poland. It was to Bellotto's crystalline and chillingly immobile visions of Warsaw's palaces, churches and streets, crowded with 18th century Poles of every class, that the city's postwar reconstructionists turned for aid in rebuilding dozens of bombed-out structures. "Bellotto's use of the camera obscura made him able to achieve complete precision of proportions," points out Ministry of Culture Engineer Henryk Wasowicz. "The technique yielded pictures as precise as any technical drawing."

A Vow Remembered. The results can be seen in the reconstructed Old Town district and along Krakowskie Przed-miescie, a popular promenade. Nowhere perhaps is the correspondence between art and life more striking than in the New Town Market Square (see color opposite). There stands the lovely baroque Church of the Nuns of the Holy Sacrament, completed in 1687 in fulfillment of a vow made by Queen Maria Kazimiera as her husband, King John Sobieski, rode into battle against the Turks (he won). In August 1944, during the Warsaw uprising against the Nazis, the entire church and its adjacent convent were leveled by bombs and artillery shells, burying 35 nuns, four priests, and 4,000 civilian rebels under the wreckage. Today, newly roofed with copper that sparkles in the sun's autumn rays, the church is at last receiving its final coat of paint.

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