Bernardo Bellotto

In 1741, Archduchess Maria Theresa of Austria commissioned an intimate new theater close to her Viennese palace. Here Bernardo Bellotto depicts a production on its stage and includes the composer, Joseph Starzer, seated at the harpsichord, and the director of the Imperial Theater, Count Giacomo Durazzo, standing in the box at right. On stage is the balletic production of The Generous Turk-the story of a Turk who released a prisoner to her lover-which was staged in honor of the

visit of the Turkish envoy to the Austrian court. Although it was a court theater, its productions were open to any paying person of any class, which encouraged the type of social mixing (and people watching) that we associate with festivals. Bellotto gives a sense for the social atmosphere by showing his spectators facing outward and conversing. Engaging in the spirit of theater and festival, he also plays provocatively with the layered worlds of fantasy and reality in the layered

perspectival scene.