Canaletto

Bernardo Bellotto, alias 'Canaletto', an Italian who played a big part in reconstruction of Warsaw after WW2. He died in here in Warsaw in the year 1780.　

Wait a second...read that sentence again.　

How in the world can a person who died play a part in reconstruction of the city after the 2nd world war? 　

And who was this 'Canaletto'? It was Bernardo Francesco Paolo Ernesto Bellotto, a painter. I have seen several of his paintings and was amazed by the level of detail in them.

Photograph: Andrzej Ring, Lech Sandzewicz

August 1944　

It is August 1944 and the Polish resistance are in violent clashes with the Nazi forces that have occupied Warsaw. The resistance intend to liberate the city from what the Polish poet Czesław Miłosz has called the “dark, black and red world of Nazi occupation”.　　

During the Warsaw Uprising, the ill-equipped Polish resistance succeed in inflicting serious damage on their oppressors, with 20,000 Nazi troops left wounded or dead. But it is the civilian population that suffers the greatest losses, with 150,000 people killed in air strikes and in fighting across the city.　　

In retaliation, the Nazis raze the Polish capital to the ground. More than 85% of the city’s historic centre is reduced to ruins. Unlike in other European cities, where damage largely occurs during the fighting, Warsaw is systematically destroyed once the two months of conflict have ended, as an act of revenge by Hitler’s forces.

What follows is the story of how Varsovians (residents of Warsaw) reconstructed their city – in part from the cityscapes, or vedute, of the Venetian painter Bernardo Bellotto (1722-1780), often referred to as Canaletto after his more renowned uncle.

Bellotto, who was made court painter to the King of Poland in 1768, created beautiful and accurate paintings of Warsaw’s buildings and squares. It is testimony to the veracity of his work that almost 200 years later, those paintings were used to help transform the historic city centre from wreckage and rubble into what is now a Unesco World Heritage Site.

In the summer of 1947, the architect Hermann H Field led a small group of American designers to study the post-war reconstruction of Europe. They visited England, Czechoslovakia and Poland, where they surveyed Warsaw, Kraków, Katowice, Wrocław and Szczecin. Their photographs capture what has become a topos of post-war urban ruination: the exposed innards of buildings.　　
Archive footage from British Pathé shows the buildings in 1950 appearing to fall arbitrarily. Across much of the city, only basements, low walls and the occasional ground floor section of a building remain. The grass lined alleys bring to mind the ruins of Pompeii.

The Varsovians who had not escaped Warsaw lived among the devastation, and would often find corpses buried in the rubble. Early on it was suggested that the remains of the city should be left to memorialise the war, and the entire capital be relocated. 　　

Clouds of dust asphyxiated Warsaw’s inhabitants. According to the Polish writer Leopold Tyrmand: “One of the philosophers calculated that Varsovians inhaled four bricks each year at that time. One must love one’s city in order to rebuild it at the cost of one’s own breathing. It is perhaps for this reason that, from the battlefield of rubble and ruins, Warsaw became once more the old Warsaw, eternal Warsaw ... Varsovians brought it to life, filling its brick body with their own, hot breath.” From the start of the rebuild, the city’s own rubble was utilised in the reconstruction process, and original fragments of Old Town buildings were recovered.

“Rubble from the former ghetto district was used to produce new bricks for the modern quarter, while architectural details from demolished buildings in the Old Town were put on to the reconstructed facades,” explains Małgorzata Popiołek, an expert in heritage conservation at the Technical University of Berlin.　　

While much of this work was done by construction workers and specialised builders, Małgorzata says local people were required to help clear the vast amounts of debris. “The entire nation builds its capital” became the city’s rallying cry.

When the rubble that was to hand would not suffice, more material was imported from neighbouring ruined cities. And to ensure it was all put back in roughly the right place, Bellotto’s cityscapes were used as references for key locations. 　

Throughout history, the artist’s 22 street scenes have been hotly contested, and removed from Warsaw’s Royal Castle on numerous occasions. Napoleon’s officials took four canvases in 1807; Emperor Nicholas I of Russia seized the whole series in 1832; German authorities did the same in 1939.　　

By this time, Bellotto’s paintings were especially prized because so many of the works documenting Poland’s history had been blacklisted by the Nazis. (Their blacklist consisted of artworks they believed had to be destroyed in order to implement the “Germanisation” of Poland.)

Andrzej Ring, Lech Sandzewicz

When Warsaw was bombarded in September 1939, the Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs wrote of its concern for the safety of Bellotto’s paintings – but in fact, all 22 street scenes survived the war. Since 1984 they have been exhibited in the Royal Castle’s Canaletto room.　　

Bellotto’s paintings, along with the expertise of Polish architects, art historians and conservators, enabled the reconstruction of the Old Town to take place in an impressively short period of time. Most of the work was finished before 1955 – although additional construction continued into the 1980s, and the city is arguably still feeling the impacts of the second world war even now.
　 　
The contemporary city is not, however, an entirely accurate recreation of Bellotto’s images. For one, Bellotto used a camera obscura to trace pencil drawings of the architecture, which were then transferred on to the canvas and finished off with watercolours. The use of that optical device has led to some minor inaccuracies.　　

Warsaw now. The city places several of these 'cubes' showing the Canaletto painting of the particular place. 

　 　

Walking through Old Town today, Varsovians are keen to tell the difficult story of their city. Bellotto’s paintings are reproduced on boards to explain their crucial role in the rebuilding process, and the Visitants’ Church proudly advertises that its organ retains some of the original pipes that were once played by Frédéric Chopin. Everywhere you go there are evocations of Warsaw’s tempestuous past, and of its reconstruction.　　

For Warsaw’s reconstruction, though, it was the work of a single artist that provided the crucial blueprint. Without Bellotto’s accurate record of the city, Warsaw would surely look very different today.

What a story :)

Sources: Wikipedia, The Guardian.