Dresden From the Right Bank of the Elbe Below the Augustus Bridge

Bernardo Bellotto came to Dresden in 1747 as court painter to the Elector of Saxony, and he signed his work Canaletto, the name of his famous uncle, whose trade in topographical views he had inherited. This is the city he found, the dome of the Frauenkirche, the long Augustus Bridge over the Elbe, and on the left the Catholic court church still wrapped in scaffolding, unfinished. Bellotto worked with near-photographic exactness, probably tracing sections through a camera obscura. That precision gave the paintings an afterlife nobody foresaw. When Dresden was flattened by bombing in 1945, restorers used Bellotto's views as evidence for how the vanished buildings had actually looked.