Pietro Bellotti Biography
Pietro Bellotti, born in Volciano di Salò in 1627, was a painter specializing in portraits.
According to historians he must have worked for Cardinal Mazarin, Cardinal Ottoboni (the future Pope Alexander VIII) and others. In Mantua, he worked for the Gonzaga family as "superintendent of the city and villa galleries". After traveling from court to court, he returned to Garda and died in poverty in Gargnano in 1700.
His main works include “La Parca Lachesi” from 1654 at the Stuttgart Museum (replica signed and dated 1684 at the Pinacoteca di Feltre), the self-portrait signed and dated 1658 at the Uffizi Gallery, where he is depicted with a cup in his hand and a cartouche with the inscription "Hinc Hilaritas"; “two heads of peasants” at the Pinacoteca of Bologna; “A Philosopher” in the Feltre Art Gallery; “A Head of an Old Man” at the Correr Museum; “A Girl with a Turban” in the Braunschweig Museum, etc. He also produced, commissioned by Doge Francesco Cornaro, a canvas with Margariti's “Taking of the Turkish Fort” for the Scrutinio room of the Doge's Palace in Venice.
Bellotti's best-known works are the heads of elderly people, characterized by a very detailed rendering of wrinkled and sick faces, for which he was influenced by caricatural painters from beyond the Alps, the so-called "peintres de la réalité" as well as by George de La Tour.
