1100. A SCENE IN A PLAY.
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."