View of Turin from the Royal Gardens

Bernardo Bellotto, then about 23, spent the spring and summer of 1745 at the court of Charles Emmanuel III, king of Sardinia and duke of Savoy, and painted two views of Turin for him. They were his first commissions from a king. That year the king was at war, as Austria's ally in the long struggle over the Austrian succession, and in September French and Spanish troops defeated his army at Bassignana, in eastern Piedmont.

Here Bellotto looks at the city from the side of the royal gardens behind the palace. Their layout went back to a project sent from France in 1697 by André Le Nôtre, the designer of the gardens at Versailles, which swept away the old small flowerbeds in favour of two great embroidered parterres and a large round fountain. The companion view, of the old bridge over the Po, hangs beside it in Sala 47.