Painter, born in Venice, NE Italy. He excelled in small-scale satirical pictures of Venetian life. Most of his work is in Venetian public collections, but the National Gallery, London, has three, of which the best known is Rhinoceros in an Arena. His son Alessandro (17331813) was also a painter, and some of his portraits are now attributed to his father.
Pietro Longhi (November 5, 1701 - May 8, 1785) was a Venetian painter of scenes of life in contemporary Venice.
Biography
Pietro Longhi was born in Venice in the parish of Saint Maria, first child of the silversmith Alessandro Falca and his wife, Antonia.
Among his early paintings are some altarpieces and religious themes. Henceforward, the majority of his paintings were genre scenes; His characteristic genre paintings, depict subjects of everyday life and gallant interior scenes and reflect the 18th century's turn towards the private and the bourgeois.
Many of his paintings show Venetians at play, or masked, such as the depiction of the crowd of genteel citizens awkwardly gawking at a freakish rhinoceros (see image). For another chronicle the daily activities such as the gambling parlors (Riddoti) that proliferated in the 18th century (compare it to Guardi's contemporary painting .
Longhi is well-known as a draughtsman, whose drawings were often done for their own sake, rather than as studies for paintings.
A paraphrase of Bernard Berenson states that "Longhi painted for the Venetians passionate about painting, their daily lives, in all dailiness, domesticity, and quotidian mundane-ness. but upholds a deep respect of customs, of great refinement, with an omnipresent good humor distinguishes the paintings of the Longhi from those of Hogarth, at times pitiless and loaded with omens of change ".
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