Landscape with a Dead Tree 1741 - 1742

Bernardo Bellotto made this print called "Landscape with a Dead Tree" sometime in the mid-18th century. Bellotto was the nephew of the famous Venetian veduta painter Canaletto, and this print shares his uncle’s interest in topography, but Bellotto creates something more bleak. Italy in the 1700s was a patchwork of competing city-states, some controlled by foreign powers. Venice itself was in decline. In this print, the buildings are crumbling and the titular dead tree casts a pall over the scene. The figures in the foreground are small and insignificant, dwarfed by the architecture around them. Is this print a comment on the state of Italian society at the time? Perhaps Bellotto is using the landscape to reflect on the decay of the old order. Historians can consult a wide range of sources – letters, diaries, and economic data – to understand the social and political context in which Bellotto was working, allowing us to see how art interacts with the world around it.