Eyewitnes Views: Making History in Eighteenth-Century Europe
Canaletto, Giovanni Paolo Panini, Francesco Guardi, Bernardo Bellotto, Huber Robert, Luca Carlevarijs - these celebrated view painters are best known for their evocative canveses depicting the canals of Venice, the ruins of Rome, and other topographical marvels. Many of their most splendid paintings, however, record important contemporary events. Such documentary views stand out by virtue of their extraordinary artistic quality, vibrant atmosphere, and historical interest. Imbued with drama and often comissioned by or for rulers, princes, and ambassadors as records of significant occassions in which they participated, these paintings motivated the greatest artists of the era to produce their most exceptional work.
This richly illustrated volume provides the first-ever comprehensive study - in any language - of this type of view painting. In examining the paintings alongside the historical events depicted in them Peter Bjorn Keber carefully reconstructs the meaning and context these paintings possessed for the artists who produced them and the patrons who commissioned them, as well as for their contemporary viewers.
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