Lavish and passionate patrons of the arts, Dresden’s 18th-century rulers Augustus the Strong and Augustus III transformed the city from a provincial capital into a brilliant cultural center. They promoted the exquisite baroque architecture for which the city is known, established porcelain manufacture for the first time in the West and cultivated art and music: some of Strauss’s and Wagner’s grandest operas were given their first performances in Dresden. The sheer enthusiasm with which Augustus and his son selected each of the paintings in their collection is evident in the London show. “Masterpieces From Dresden” celebrates some wonderful artists, as their patrons did, without binding them to the kind of didactic, overarching theme that can strangle modern exhibits.
Instead the rulers’ wide-ranging interests produce an outstanding overview of Italian Renaissance and baroque German and Dutch works, plus smaller, but equally breathtaking selections of 17th- and 18th-century French and Spanish art. It is crammed with gems, like Andrea Mantegna’s “The Holy Family” and Rubens’s “Diana Returning From the Hunt,” as well as important works by Velazquez, Veronese, Van Dyck and Poussin. One of the exhibit’s highlights is a group of sweeping landscapes of Dresden by Bernardo Belotto, Canaletto’s precocious nephew, whose fine work deserves to be better known. These large-scale works combine delicate architectural detail with lively, personal narratives: a gentleman feeding swans by the Elbe, a puppy playing with a peasant woman.
But Belotto’s paintings are also testimony to the ravages Dresden has suffered since its 18th-century heyday. When an Allied bombing raid in 1945 killed tens of thousands of civilians and left most of Dresden in ruins, the Zwinger collection was saved, stored in disused mines in nearby villages. Afterward, Belotto’s work was used as a guide to help rebuild the devastated city, a process that continues today. As the gallery struggles to raise funds to recover from its latest catastrophe, this exhilarating show is a poignant reminder of how many times the city and its eclectic art collection have fished triumph from disaster.
