View of Gazzada near Varese

Bernardo Bellotto was still in his early twenties when he painted this quiet stretch of hills near Varese, in the Lombardy countryside. He had trained in Venice under his uncle, the famous view-painter Canaletto, and had learned to render a place with almost map-like precision. Around 1744 he was traveling through northern Italy making views like this one, of no grand city, just a village, a road, and the light on the far mountains. Within a few years he would leave Italy for good, spending the rest of his life painting the capitals of Dresden, Vienna and Warsaw for their rulers. This modest Lombard hillside is among the last things he recorded before he went north.