_Pietro Longhi_ (Venetian: 1702-1762).
Pietro Longhi, who studied in Bologna, but afterwards settled
in his native Venice, was one of the four masters who made
a partial revival of Venetian painting in the eighteenth
century--the other three being Tiepolo (1692-1769, see 1192),
Canaletto (1697-1768, see 127), and Guardi (1712-1793, see
210). Longhi represented the Vanity Fair of Venice at his epoch
with fidelity and kindly feeling. He has been called "the
Italian Hogarth," but he is greatly inferior in every respect
to that painter. Moreover he was not a satirist like Hogarth,
and there is more truth in the description of him as "the
Goldoni of painters"--Goldoni, the popular playwright, with
whom Longhi was nearly contemporary, and who, like him, just
reflects "the shade and shine of common life, nor renders as it
rolls grandeur and gloom." "Longhi used to tell Goldoni that
they were brethren in art. Longhi surveyed human life with the
same kindly glance and the same absence of gravity or depth of
intuition as Goldoni. They both studied nature, but nature only
in her genial moods. They both sincerely aimed at truth, but
avoided truths which were sinister or painful" (J. A. Symonds,
in the _Century Guild Hobby Horse_, April 1889). Longhi was
the son of a goldsmith, and as a lad showed unusual skill in
designs for ornamental plate: hence the affectionate partiality
in his pictures for the minutest details of decorative
furniture, dress, and articles of luxury.
The engraved portrait on the wall is inscribed "Gerardo Sagredo di
Morei," and perhaps the picture is a group of the Sagredo family, for
whose palace in Venice Longhi painted some frescoes in 1734. The family
preferred, perhaps, to be taken in the characters of a scene in a play
of Goldoni's or some other popular writer--just as in the "Vicar of
Wakefield" they resolved to be drawn together, in one large historical
piece. "This would be cheaper, since one frame would serve for all, and
it would be infinitely more genteel; for all families of any taste were
now drawn in the same manner."