Longhi used to tell Goldoni that they--the painter and the
playwright--were brethren in Art; and one of the poet's sonnets records
this saying:--
"Longhi, tu che la mia Musa sorella
Chiami del tuo pennel che cerca il vero."
It seems that their contemporaries were alive to the similar qualities
and the common aims of the two men; for Gasparo Gozzi drew a parallel
between them in a number of his Venetian Gazzetta. Indeed the
resemblance is more than merely superficial. 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.
This renders the designation of Venetian Hogarth peculiarly
inappropriate to Longhi. There is neither tragedy nor satire, and only a
thin silvery vein of humour, in his work. Indeed it may be questioned
whether he was in any exact sense humorous at all. What looks like
humour in some of his pictures is probably unconscious. In like manner
he lacked pathos, and never strove to moralise the themes he treated.
Where would Hogarth be if we excluded Gargantuan humour, Juvenalian
satire, stern morality, and cruel pathos from his scenes of social life?
Longhi is never gross and never passionate. With a kind of sensitive
French curiosity, he likes to graze the darker and the coarser side of
life, and pass it by. He does not want to probe the cancers of the human
breast, or to lay bare the festering sores of vice. What would become of
Hogarth if he were deprived of his grim surgical anatomy? Neither in the
heights nor in the depths was Longhi at home--neither in the region of
Olympian poetry nor in the purgatory of man's sin and folly. He sailed
delightfully, agreeably, across the middle waters of the world, where
steering is not difficult.
In all this Goldoni resembles him, except only that Goldoni had a rich
vein of cheerful humour. It would be therefore more just to call Longhi
the Goldoni of painting than the Venetian Hogarth.
Longhi's portrait, unlike that of Goldoni, betrays no sensuousness. He
seems to have had a long, refined face, with bright, benignant black
eyes, a pleasantly smiling mouth, thin lips, and a look of gently
subrisive appreciation rather than of irony or sarcasm. The engraving by
which I know his features suggests an intelligent, attenuated
Addison--not a powerful or first-rate man, but a genially observant
superior mediocrity.
Although Longhi, as a personality, is clearly not of the same type as
Hogarth, there are certain points of similarity between the men as
artists. Both were taught the goldsmith's trade, and both learned
painting under Bolognese influences. Both eventually found their sphere
in the delineation of the life around them. There the similarity ceases.
Longhi lacks, as I have said, the humour, the satire, the penetrative
imagination, the broad sympathy with human nature in its coarser
aspects, which make Hogarth unrivalled as a pictorial moralist. At the
same time, it is difficult to imagine that Longhi was not influenced by
Hogarth. In the technique of his art he displays something which appears
to be derived from the elder and stronger master--a choice of points for
observation, an arrangement of figures in groups, a mode of rendering
attitude and suggesting movement; finally, the manner of execution
reminds us of Hogarth. Longhi abandoned his false decorative style, the
style of the Palazzo Sagredo, at some time after 1734. This date
corresponds with Hogarth's triumphant entrance upon his career as a
satirical painter of society. Possibly Longhi may have met with the
engravings of the _Marriage a la Mode_, and may have been stimulated by
them to undertake the work, which he carried on with nothing of
Hogarth's moral force, and with a small portion of his descriptive
faculty, yet still with valuable results for the student of
eighteenth-century manners.