‘Capriccio with the Campidoglio’ artwork by Bernardo Bellotto, an Italian landscape painter. He was the student and nephew of the renowned Giovanni Antonio Canal, whose cityscape style he interpreted and created his own. Bellotto has created numerous landscape paintings while he was in Italy and also in Warsaw where he had spent rest of his life till death. ‘Capriccio of the Capitol’ describes the city of Rome in realism technique. This work is a capriccio meaning the mix of here, the Capitol of Rome along with archaeological ruins in the foreground. Through this art, the painter tries to blend the city with its grandeur past, an artist creates a fantastical city with real buildings by incorporating important architectural elements.
Bellotto ‘s artwork is often seen as darker and colder; this painting is an accurate example of the same. The painting particularly includes a glimpse of the Capitoline Hill (Campidoglio) from the foot of the Cordonata staircase, it also includes the Church of Santa Maria in Aracoeli. At the top of the stairs stands the marble statue of Castor, while the Palazzo Nuovo (seen at an angle) and a partial view of the Palazzo Senatorio look out onto the square.
Bellotto's "Capriccio with the Campidoglio" depicts a deliberate collision between invention and documentation.Through this painting he takes the viewer through the crumbling madeup ruins he painted and then lifts the curtains and one sees the real Rome through Michelangelo's grand stairway up to the capitoline Hill and the old church beside it.He painted this when he was young in 1742, still the careful precise he had learned from his uncle.It is less of a picture more of a feeling of longing as is seen through this painting.Scholars have placed this painting within the capriccio architettonico tradition that Panini and earliers roman painters like Codazzi had established like mixing real monuments with invented ones.
