The Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice are pleased to announce the exhibition Wonder, reality, enigma. Pietro Bellotti and the painting of the seventeenth century in Venice, which will take place from September 19th, 2025 to January 18th, 2026. Curated by Francesco Ceretti, Michele Nicolaci, and Filippo Piazza, the exhibition introduces the Brescian painter, active in Venice for most of his career, Pietro Bellotti (1625-1700), still relatively unknown but undeniably fascinating, and places him within the extraordinary artistic context of Venetian painting in the seventeenth century.

The exhibition tells the story of the birth and development, in mid-seventeenth-century Venice, of a new way of interpreting themes and subjects typical of the Baroque imagination, where the preference for unusual iconographies is combined with a keen observation of reality, creating a fascinating blend of "wonder" and "reality". Both of these elements characterize Bellotti's work and emerge in two important paintings attributed to him, recently acquired by the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice: the so-called Self-portrait as an Allegory of Wonder, a sort of eccentric presentation of the painter in the Venetian painting scene, and Peasants Outdoors, a prototype of "realistic painting" and a masterpiece of genre painting, which serves as a bridge to the famous production of the Milanese artist Giacomo Ceruti at the beginning of the eighteenth century. The latter canvas, in particular, has long been the subject of a complex debate regarding attribution, to which the exhibition aims to provide a significant contribution, also based on the results of recent restoration work.