A title, Bella la vita a Venezia, plays on three narrative threads: Bella, both as an adjective and as the name of the artist, Gabriel Bella; la vita, because it is the everyday life of the city that takes center stage; Venezia, which through these images continues its centuries-old tradition of self-representation, propaganda, and the construction of the collective imagination. The entire collection of Gabriel Bella’s paintings takes center stage in a solo exhibition hosted by Fondazione Querini Stampalia from December 13, 2025, to April 12, 2026.
A body of work capable of celebrating Venetian magnificence and of narrating, through images, the political myth of the Serenissima. Not a random assembly, but a coherent iconographic project, probably developed in the 1780s.
Gabriel Bella (Venice, 1730–1799) worked in years on the threshold of the nineteenth century, with its new ways of capturing reality through photography. Yet even at the end of the eighteenth century, his gaze seems to speak the same language. Bella observes the city with photographic precision and sensitivity: framing, isolating, recording. He composes as if holding a lens that captures both movement and stillness, the crowd and the detail, the extraordinary and the ordinary.
He renders with accuracy the density and theatricality of Venetian life.His “apparent naivety,” almost cartoon-like, becomes an interpretive key: the popular vision of a society regulated by ceremonies, rituals, festivals, markets, and processions. His canvases are windows into eighteenth-century Venice: streets, small squares, bridges, and views that still speak to us with surprising familiarity. Returning this collection to the city means giving shape to part of its heart and visual memory, preserving a heritage that might have dissolved without the artist’s work. The Querini collection – around 70 paintings displayed alongside prints and volumes from the historic library holdings, as well as audiovisual materials, including selections from Istituto Luce and films on Casanova – thus constitutes an atlas of the “liturgy of wonder” through which the Serenissima built its myth for centuries.
