This Week in La Gazette Drouot : A portrait of the painter Pietro Bellotti that is as rare as it is stunning

Marco Boschini reserves a prominent place for Pietro Bellotti in La Carta del navegar pitoresco, a work written in Venetian: “C. Pietro Bellotti is a painter of fine caliber. He has in his mind certain principles of execution so swift, so alert, that he stays one step ahead of nature. If everyone applied to their studies the care he puts into transforming his colors into flesh, the world would see great wonders, and the paintings would soon speak for themselves.”

The work was published in 1660, the very year that Bellotti, then 35years old, was invited to France and came under the patronage of Cardinal Mazarin. Beneath the veneer of praise, Boschini touches on the painter’s secret: that ability to transform color into flesh, to the point of challenging nature’s monopoly on life. Even more striking is that Bellotti invented his figure of the Fate Lachesis at the very beginning of his career—the painting in Stuttgart is dated 1654. Reproduced and copied time and again, this image seems to have immediately established the foundations of a fascination that cannot be fully explained by its mere resemblance to Ribera.
 

To unravel this mystery, Boschini remains undoubtedly the most reliable guide: “The style of this talented man surpasses all the beauties of painting; his figures are nothing but delicacy: thus his name has been crowned with glory. In his work, he is the diligent artist; he is the observer of precision. He is a pure distillation of true substance; he is a vessel filled with an excellent balm. Whoever sees his works is left speechless, unsure whether they are feigned or real, for his style reveals living flesh.”

Nearly fourcenturies later, Boschini’s words have lost none of their accuracy. How better to describe the wonders of a brush that renders flesh so tangibly it seems you could touch it? Lachesis winds the thread of existence with profound serenity, while her own flesh bears the imprint of time, whose measure she regulates.