A previously unknown and unpublished painting by Bernardo Bellotto sold for 520,000 euros at Dorotheum's Old Masters auction on 21 October, landing within its 400,000 to 600,000 euro estimate. The sale took place at the Palais Dorotheum in Vienna as part of the house's Classic Week, running 20 to 22 October.

The Karlskirche, Vienna depicts the imposing baroque church in the Austrian capital, an oil on canvas measuring 48.8 by 79.5 centimetres that surfaced recently in an Austrian private collection. After examination of the original, the attribution was endorsed by specialist Bozena Anna Kowalczyk, and Dorotheum describes it as a significant addition to the artist's body of work and the prototype for other versions of the same subject, some attributed to Bellotto's son and assistant Lorenzo.

Bellotto, the nephew and pupil of Antonio Canal known as Canaletto, introduced the Venetian tradition of veduta painting to the capitals of Central Europe. He arrived in Vienna in the late 1750s and produced a celebrated series of city views commissioned by Empress Maria Theresa, works that continue to shape how the Habsburg imperial capital is pictured. The Karlskirche itself, designed by Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach and completed in 1739, was built to mark the end of the last great outbreak of the plague.

The discovery was one of the high points of an Old Masters sale whose highlights also included a study of a head newly attributed to Il Perugino and newly found works by Paolo Veronese. Dorotheum's Classic Week continued with a 19th-century paintings auction on 22 October spanning Biedermeier to atmospheric Impressionism.