Pietro Bellotti

At 16, Pietro Bellotti paid his older brother 120 ducats to teach him view painting. The brother was Bernardo Bellotto, who had learned the trade from their uncle Antonio Canal, the famous Canaletto. Pietro stayed in that workshop for about a year, left, and spent most of the rest of his life on the move.

He was in Genoa by 1746. After that the record finds him in Nantes, Paris, Besançon and Lille, with time in England, and he settled his family in Toulouse, where he took part in the city's royal academy. Like his brother, he carried the family nickname abroad and signed some of his pictures Bellotti dit Canaletti, Bellotti called Canaletto. Much of his work was capriccios, invented views in which ruins, obelisks and tombs from different places stand together on one piece of ground.

He died in France, probably around 1805. In December 2013 the Ca' Rezzonico, the Venetian museum of 18th-century art, opened an exhibition of his work under the title Another Canaletto.