Very little is known of Longhi's career, and that little has no great
importance. He was the son of a goldsmith, born at Venice in 1702, and
brought up to his father's trade. While yet a lad, Pietro showed unusual
powers of invention and elegance of drawing in the designs he made for
ornamental silver-work. This induced his parents to let him study
painting. His early training in the goldsmith's trade, however, seems to
have left an indelible mark on Longhi's genius. A love of delicate line
remained with him, and he displayed an affectionate partiality for the
minutest details of decorative furniture, dress, and articles of luxury.
Some of his drawings of plate--coffee-pots, chocolate-mills, ewers,
salvers, water-vessels--are exquisite for their instinctive sense of
graceful curve and unerring precision of contour. It was a period, as we
know, during which such things acquired an almost flawless purity of
outline; and Longhi felt them with the enthusiasm of a practised
artisan.
He studied painting under Antonio Balestra at Venice, and also under
Giuseppe Maria Crespi at Bologna. The baneful influences of the latter
city may be traced in Longhi's earliest known undertaking. This is an
elaborate work in fresco at the Sagredo Palace on the Grand Canal. The
patrician family of that name inhabited an old Venetian-Gothic house at
San Felice. Early in the last century they rebuilt the hall and
staircase in Palladian style, leaving the front with its beautiful
arcades untouched. The decoration of this addition to their mansion was
intrusted to Pietro Longhi in 1734. The subject, chosen by himself or
indicated by his patron, was the Fall of the Giants--_La Caduta dei
Giganti_. Longhi treated this unmanageable theme as follows. He placed
the deities of Olympus upon the ceiling. Jupiter in the centre advances,
brandishing his arms, and hurling forked lightnings on the Titans, who
are precipitated headlong among solid purple clouds and masses of broken
mountains, covering the three sides of the staircase. The scene is
represented without dignity, dramatic force, or harmony of composition.
The drawing throughout is feeble, the colouring heavy and tame, the
execution unskilful. Longhi had no notion how to work in fresco,
differing herein notably from his illustrious contemporary Tiepolo. A
vulgar Jove, particularly vulgar in the declamatory sweep of his left
hand, a vulgar Juno, with a sneering, tittering leer upon her common
face, reveal the painter's want of feeling for mythological grandeur.
The Titans are a confused heap of brawny, sprawling nudities--studied,
perhaps, from gondoliers or stevedores, but showing a want of even
academical adroitness in their ill-drawn extremities and inadequate
foreshortenings. It was essential in such a subject that movement
should be suggested. Yet Longhi has contrived to make the falling rocks
and lurid clouds look as though they were irremovably wedged into their
places on the walls, while his ruining giants are clearly transcripts
from naked models in repose. Here and there upon the ceiling we catch a
note of graceful fancy, especially in a group of lightly-painted
goddesses,--elegant and natural female figures, draped in pale blues and
greens and pinks, with a silvery illumination from the upper sky. But
the somewhat effeminate sweetness of this episode is ill-combined with
the dull and impotent striving after violent effect in the main subject;
and the whole composition leaves upon our mind the impression of "sound
and fury, signifying nothing."