The Memoirs of Count Carlo Gozzi Volume II Part 17

SUPPLIED BY THE TRANSLATOR.

Gozzi broke off his Memoirs on the 18th of March 1798. He lived another eight years, and died upon the 4th of April 1806, aged eighty-six. On reviewing his life, we find four clearly marked periods. The first ends with the death of his father in 1745, and includes his three years'

service in Dalmatia. The second closes with the year 1756, and is marked by the break-up of the Gozzi family and his engagement in those litigations and affairs of business which formed his real occupation for a long series of years. Short as was this second period, it gave a decisive tone to his character by confirming the man's natural obstinacy and litigiousness. Undoubtedly it was not for nothing that he frequented the Venetian law-courts and studied the arts of chicanery. In all his polemical writings we detect the habit of forensic warfare, the wariness of an experienced pleader, and the licensed plausibility of one who is accustomed to conceal the weak points in his own case while magnifying the shortcomings of his adversary. His unremitting attention to practical matters made him an experienced man of business. This was the true Carlo Gozzi; not that fantastic dreamy plaything of the sprites and fairies which his romantic French and German critics have discerned in the author of the _Fiabe_. At the same time, during this second period, he never neglected literature, but went on writing in the intervals of serious affairs. Self-taught, well-nigh devoid of systematic culture in history, philosophy, and language, but gifted with a sincere admiration for the best Italian authors, with an active fancy and a natural bias for burlesque humour, he formed that peculiar manner, at once prolix and forcible, effective and slovenly, which distinguishes his published works. Unequal in style, incorrect in diction, incapable of giving perfect form or polish to his compositions, he nevertheless posed as a purist and threw himself with pa.s.sion as a conservative into the literary polemics of his day. The Accademia Granellesca, founded at the close of this period, recognised in him its stoutest champion and most quarrelsome fore-fighter. I have mentioned the year 1756 as the date which opens the third period in Gozzi's life. It marks the publication of his _Tartana degli Influssi_ and the return of Sacchi's company to Venice. This period terminates in 1781, and includes all that was most memorable in his career--the quarrel with Goldoni and Chiari, the alliance with Sacchi, the composition of the _Fiabe_ and twenty-three plays on Spanish subjects, the liaison with Teodora Ricci, and the episode of Gratarol. Gozzi was past sixty when Sacchi's company broke up, and Gratarol's misfortunes threw a gloomy light upon his past theatrical career. The fourth period of seventeen years is distinguished by little literary activity. Yet we owe to it the _Memorie Inutili_, which were professedly written as an answer to Gratarol's _Narrazione Apologetica_. Partly composed in 1780, but suppressed by order of the Government, they did not see the light until the year 1797-98, when Gozzi completed the work and sent it in a hurry to the press. Meanwhile the Republic of S. Mark had fallen, never to rise again. In the midst of this political earthquake, Gozzi retained his old aristocratic principles intact, though he bowed to custom and used the s.h.i.+bboleths of the French Revolution, as he confesses, with conscious cynicism.[85] The period of old age was pa.s.sed in comparative solitude, cheered, however, by the friendly relations which he maintained with the surviving members of his family. The cycle of his dramatic works was closed; and after 1782 he had the mortification of seeing his _Fiabe_ neglected, while Goldoni's star reascended the firmament of popularity and fame.

Indeed, the _Fiabe_ had no chance of surviving the improvised style of comedy, to support which Gozzi composed them, and which he fondly imagined immortal. Goethe, in 1788, was present at a performance given by the last debris of Sacchi's company; but when the old _Commedia dell'Arte_ and the old actors died out, the _Fiabe_ were relegated to marionettes and puppet-shows. The poet and the man of letters dwindled in Gozzi, but the man of business survived. His correspondence during this fourth period shows him engaged in various commercial affairs upon a small scale, minute in his accounts, involved in litigation, attentive to the produce of his farms, busied about the interests of friends, trafficking in lace and stuffs, groceries, wine, fowls, and carriages.[86] This forms a curious contrast to the romantic portrait of the old man vamped up for us by Paul de Musset. The ordinary troubles of advanced age--rheums, aches, and infirmities--fell upon him. In one of his letters to Innocenzio Ma.s.simo he describes their correspondence as "a hypochondriacal gazette." On the 13th of February 1804 he signed a holographic will, which shows him still loyal to his conservative creed in religion, politics, philosophy, and morals. At this time he appears to have been living in the Campo S. Angelo, one of the broadest, busiest, and sunniest squares of Venice. Indeed, he had quitted the ancestral palace of the Gozzi at S. Ca.s.siano many years before, finding it too distant from the theatres and the piazza. For a long while he occupied a casino alone in the Calle Lunga S. Moise. The little dwelling belonged to him; and in a pa.s.sage of his Memoirs, which did not lend itself to the scheme of my translation, he relates the circ.u.mstances of his removal to this habitation.[87] I shall insert it here, because it throws light upon the last stage of Gozzi's journey in this world. "Many years," he says, "had pa.s.sed away since my brothers Francesco and Almor with their families were established in Friuli, while I remained at Venice, the sole occupant of our paternal mansion. For me alone, the vast place was like a wilderness. In the winter I s.h.i.+vered with cold there. Snow, rain, and the Rialto caused me innumerable annoyances when I left the theatres at night to gain my distant home. I was growing old, and this made the journey seem each year more irksome. A casino which I owned in the quarter of S. Maria Zobenigo, Calle Lunga S. Moise, not far from S. Marco, had been let for sixty ducats a year to the majordomo of a Venetian n.o.bleman. This man left Venice with his master on an emba.s.sy, giving me no notice that he had sold his furniture and handed over my casino to the mistress of some man about the town. By a series of similar changes, the tenement pa.s.sed successively through the hands of several women of the same sort. I always got the rent and asked no questions. The best of it was that the money was punctually paid me by priests, who uttered panegyrics on the heroism of my female tenants. The last of these heroines sent to tell me that my house needed certain repairs. Accordingly I went there, and was received by a well-restored relic of womanhood, who pointed out the alterations she judged necessary in her dwelling-place. Casting my eyes over the lodgings, I thought that they would serve my purpose admirably, and told the lady so. In a moment she changed her honeyed tone and language of affected flattery to oaths and threats and declarations that nothing in the world would make her turn out. I phlegmatically remarked that she had no lease, that my lessee had no power to sublet, and that I would grant her sufficient time to seek another nest. In such matters, as is well known to readers of these Memoirs, I have always had some trouble. But at last, by taking over certain pieces of damaged furniture, I came to terms with the Nymph of Cocytus, and installed myself in my casino. I did it up, and stayed there fourteen years, letting on lease my former abode at S. Ca.s.siano. I should have been there still, had not my brother Almor written to say that he was tired of Friuli. A widower, with a son and daughter, he should like to send the former to the university at Padua, and to make a home with me in Venice. I was always ready to oblige my brother, and this casino could not hold us all. Accordingly, we took a larger house at S. Benedetto; and here my brother, much aged in my eyes, as I must probably have seemed in his, came to live with me. His children, whom I had only known as little creatures, had grown into giants. Before a year was over, the daughter made a good match in Friuli, and the son went to Padua, whence the troubles of the Revolution drove him away before he had obtained the laurels of a doctor's degree. In that commotion the laurel, destined for the brows of students, was consecrated to the kitchen and the garnis.h.i.+ng of dishes on the table."[88]

It is possible that the marriage of this niece and the subsequent marriage of his nephew broke up the joint-household at S. Benedetto, and that Gozzi then removed to the neighbouring quarter of S. Angelo.[89]

Almor and his son Gasparo were appointed executors to Carlo Gozzi's will, which winds up with the following characteristic admonition to the young man: "Preserve your affection for your well-bred, well-behaved, and excellent wife. Look to the careful education of your children, and protect them from the false maxims of that sophistic science which is the bane of our age, involving all humanity in disastrous mists of error and confusion, in labyrinths of infelicity and misery." Gozzi died on the 4th of April 1806, and was buried in the church of S. Ca.s.siano.

PIETRO LONGHI,

THE PAINTER OF VENETIAN SOCIETY DURING THE PERIOD OF GOZZI AND GOLDONI.[90]

I.

The eighteenth century was marked in Venice by a partial revival of the art of painting. Four contemporary masters--Tiepolo, Ca.n.a.letti, Longhi, and Guardi--have left abundance of meritorious work, which ill.u.s.trates the taste and manners of society, shows how men and women dressed and moved and took their pastime in the City of the Waters, and preserves for us the external features of Venice during the last hundred years of the Republic.[91]

As an artist, Tiepolo was undoubtedly the strongest of these four. In him alone we recognise a genius of the first order, who, had he been born in the great age of Italian painting, might have disputed the palm with men like Tintoretto. His frescoes in the Palazzo l.a.b.i.a, representing the embarkation of Antony and Cleopatra on the Cydnus, and their famous banquet at Canopus, are worthy to be cla.s.sed with the finest decorative work of Paolo Veronese. Indeed, the sense for colour, the robust breadth of design, and the firm, unerring execution, which distinguish that great master, seem to have pa.s.sed into Tiepolo, who revives the splendours of the sixteenth century in these superbly painted pageants. It is to be regretted that one so eminently gifted should have condescended to the barocco taste of the age in those many allegories and celestial triumphs which he executed upon the ceilings of palaces and the cupolas of churches. Little, except the frescoes of the l.a.b.i.a reception-hall, survives to show what Tiepolo might have achieved had he remained true to his native instinct for heroic subjects and for masculine sobriety of workmans.h.i.+p.

Of Ca.n.a.letti it is not necessary to say much. The fame which he erewhile enjoyed in England has been obscured of late years--to some extent, perhaps by the fussy eloquence of Mr. Ruskin, but really by the finer sense for landscape and the truer way of rendering nature which have sprung up in Europe. Ca.n.a.letti's pictures of Venetian buildings and ca.n.a.ls strike us as cold, tame, and mechanical, accustomed as we are to the magic of Turner's palette and the penetrative force of his imagination.

Guardi, the pupil and in some respects the imitator of Ca.n.a.letti, has met with a different fate. Less prized during the heyday of his master's fame, he has been steadily acquiring reputation on account of certain qualities peculiar to himself. His draughtsmans.h.i.+p displays an agreeable sketchiness; his colouring a graceful gemmy brightness and a glow of sunny gold. But what has mainly served to win for Guardi popularity is the attention he paid to contemporary costume and manners. Ca.n.a.letti filled large canva.s.ses with mathematical perspectives of city and water.

At the same time he omitted life and incident. There is little to remind us that the Venice he so laboriously depicted was the Venice of perukes and bag-wigs, of masks and hoops and Carnival disguises. Guardi had an eye for local colour and for fas.h.i.+onable humours. The result is that some of his small pictures--one, for instance, which represents a brilliant reception in the Sala del Collegio of the Ducal Palace--have a real value for us by recalling the life of a vanished and irrecoverable past. Thus Guardi ill.u.s.trates the truth that artists may acquire posthumous importance by felicitous accident in their choice of subjects or the bias of their sympathies. We would willingly exchange a dozen so-called "historical pictures" for one fresh and vivid scene which brings a bygone phase of civilisation before our eyes.[92]

In this particular respect Longhi surpa.s.ses Guardi, and deserves to be styled the pictorial chronicler of Venetian society in the eighteenth century. He has even been called the Venetian Hogarth and the Venetian Boucher. Neither of these t.i.tles, however, as I shall attempt to demonstrate, rightly characterise his specific quality. Could his numerous works be collected in one place, or be adequately reproduced, we should possess a complete epitome of Venetian life and manners in the age which developed Goldoni and Casanova, Carlo Gozzi and Caterina Dolfin-Tron.

II.

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 Ca.n.a.l. 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, brandis.h.i.+ng his arms, and hurling forked lightnings on the t.i.tans, who are precipitated headlong among solid purple clouds and ma.s.ses 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 ill.u.s.trious contemporary Tiepolo. A vulgar Jove, particularly vulgar in the declamatory sweep of his left hand, a vulgar Juno, with a sneering, t.i.ttering leer upon her common face, reveal the painter's want of feeling for mythological grandeur.

The t.i.tans 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 G.o.ddesses,--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."

III.

It is singular that Longhi should have reached the age of thirty-two without discovering his real vocation. The absence of brain-force in the conception, of strength in the design, and of any effective adaptation to architecture, which d.a.m.ns the Sagredo frescoes, is enough to prove that he was here engaged on work for which he had no faculty and felt no sympathy.

What revealed to him the true bias of his talent? Did he perchance, just about this period, come across some prints from Hogarth? That is very possible. But the records of his life are so hopelessly meagre that it were useless to indulge in conjecture.

I am not aware whether he had already essayed any of those domestic pieces and delineative scenes from social life which displayed his genuine artistic power, and for the sake of which his name will always be appreciated. He is said to have been of a gay, capricious temperament, delighting in the superficial aspects of aristocratic society, savouring the humours of the common folk with no less pleasure, and enjoying all phases of that easy-going Carnival gaiety in which the various cla.s.ses met and mingled at Venice. These inclinations directed him at last into the right path. For some forty years he continued to paint a series of easel-pictures, none of them very large, some of them quite small, in which the Vanity Fair of Venice at his epoch was represented with fidelity and kindly feeling.

The panels attributed to Pietro Longhi are innumerable. They may be found scattered through public galleries and private collections, adorning the walls of patrician palaces, or thrust away in corners of country-houses. He worked carefully, polished the surface of his pictures to the finish of a miniature, set them in frames of a fixed pattern, and covered them with gla.s.s. These genre-pictures, while presenting notes of similarity, differ very considerably in their technical handling and their scheme of colour. Our first inference, after inspecting a miscellaneous selection, is that Longhi must have started a school of imitators. Indeed this is probably the case; and it is certain that some pieces ascribed to his brush are the production of his son Alessandro, who was born in 1733. Yet closer study of authentic paintings by Pietro's hand compels the critic to be cautious before he rejects, on internal evidence of style, a single piece a.s.signed by good tradition to this artist. The Museo Civico at Venice, for example, contains a large number of Longhis, some of which seem to fall below his usual standard. I have, however, discovered elaborate drawings for these doubtful pictures in the book of his original sketches, which is also preserved there. Longhi must therefore have painted the pictures himself, or must have left the execution of his designs to a pupil.

Again, the style of his two masterpieces (the _Sala del Ridotto_ and the _Parlatorio d'un Convento_, both in the Museo Civico) differs in important particulars from that of the elaborately finished little panels by which he is most widely known. These fine compositions are marked by a freer breadth of handling, a sketchy boldness, a combined richness and subtlety of colouring, and an animation of figures in movement, which are not common in the average of his genre-pieces. When I come to speak of the family portrait of the Pisani, signed by his name, I shall have to point out that the style of execution, the scheme of colour, and the pictorial feeling of this large composition belong to a manner dissimilar from either of those which I have already indicated as belonging to authentic Longhis.

IV.

It has been well observed by a Venetian writer, whose meagre panegyric is nearly all we have in print upon the subject of this painter's biography, that "there is no scene or point of domestic life which Longhi has not treated many times and in divers ways. All those episodes which make up the Day of a Gentleman as sung at a later date by Parini, had been already set forth by the brush of Longhi."[93]

The duties of the toilette, over which ladies and young men of fas.h.i.+on dawdled through their mornings; the drinking of chocolate in bed, attended by a wife or mistress or obsequious man of business; the long hours spent before the looking-gla.s.s, with maids or valets matching complexions, sorting dresses from the wardrobe, and fixing patches upon telling points of cheek or forehead; the fas.h.i.+onable hairdresser, building up a lady's tower with tongs, or tying the knot of a beau's bag-wig; the children trooping in to kiss their mother's hand at breakfast-time--stiff little girls in hoops, and tiny _cavalieri_ in uniform, with sword and shoe-buckles and queue; the vendors of flowered silks and laces laying out their wares; the pert young laundress smuggling a _billet-doux_ into a beauty's hand before her unsuspecting husband's face; the fine gentleman ordering a waistcoat in the shop of a tailoress, ogling and flirting over the commission, while a running footman with tall cane in hand comes bustling in to ask if his lord's suit is ready; the old patrician lolling in his easy-chair and toying with a fan; the abbe turning over the leaves of some fresh play or morning paper: scenes like these we may a.s.sign to the Venetian forenoon.

Afternoon brings ceremonious visits, when grand ladies, sailing in their hoops, salute each other, and beaux make legs on entering a drawing-room, and lacqueys hand round chocolate on silver salvers.

Dancing-lessons may perhaps be a.s.signed to this part of the day; a spruce French professor teaching his fair pupil how to drop a curtsey, or to swim with solemn grace through the figures of the minuet. At night we are introduced to the hall of the Ridotto; patricians in toga and snow-white periwig hold banks for faro beneath the glittering chandeliers; men and women, closely masked, jostle each other at the gambling-tables, where sequins and ducats lie about in heaps. The petty houses, or _casini_, now engage attention. Here may be seen a pair of stealthy, m.u.f.fled libertines hastening to complete an a.s.signation. Then there are meetings at street-corners or on the landing-places of _traghetti_--mysterious figures flitting to and fro in wide miraculous _bautte_ beneath the light of flickering flambeaux. Both men and women in these nocturnal scenes wear m.u.f.fs, trimmed with fur, and secured around their waist by girdles.

Theatres, masked b.a.l.l.s, banquets and coffee-houses, music-parties in villa-gardens, the a.s.semblies of literary coteries, promenades on the piazza, and Carnival processions, obtain their due share of attention from this vigilant observer. But, as is the way with Longhi, only episodes are treated. He does not, like some painters of our own time--like Mr. Frith, R.A., for instance--attempt to bring the acc.u.mulated details of a complex scene before us. He leaves the context of his chosen incident to be divined.

The traffic of the open streets--quack-doctors on their platforms with a crowd of gaping dupes around them, mountebanks performing tricks, the criers of stewed plums and sausages, fortune-tellers, itinerant musicians, improvisatory poets bawling out their octave stanzas, cloaked serenaders tw.a.n.gling mandolines--such motives may be found in fair abundance among Longhi's genre-pieces. Nor does he altogether neglect the country. Many of his pictures are devoted to hunting-parties, riding-lessons, shooting and fis.h.i.+ng, all the amus.e.m.e.nts of the Venetian _villeggiatura_. Peasants lounging over their wine or pottage at a rustic table are depicted with no less felicity than the beau and coquette in their glory. The grimy interior of a village-tavern is portrayed with the same gusto as a fine lady's gilt saloon.

V.

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 pa.s.sionate. With a kind of sensitive French curiosity, he likes to graze the darker and the coa.r.s.er side of life, and pa.s.s 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 coa.r.s.er 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 att.i.tude 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.

VI.

In 1763 an Academy for the study of the arts of design was opened by some members of the Pisani family in their palace at S. Stefano. The chiefs of that patrician house were four sons of the late Doge Alvise Pisani. According to Lazari, my sole authority for this pa.s.sage in Longhi's biography, the founder of the Academy was a Procuratore di S.

Marco, who had a son of remarkable promise. This son he wished to instruct in the fine arts; and Pietro Longhi was chosen to fill the chair of painting, which he occupied for two years. At the end of that time young Pisani died, and the inst.i.tution was closed--now that the hopes which led to its foundation were extinguished.[94]

Among the few facts of Longhi's life this connection with the Pisani Academy has to be recorded. It is also of some importance in helping us to decide whether a large portrait-picture, representing the chiefs of the Pisani family, together with the wife and children of one of its most eminent members (Luigi, a G.o.dchild of Louis XIV.), is rightly ascribed to him. The huge canvas, which is now in the possession of the Contessa Evelina Almor Pisani, was found by her rolled up and hidden away in a cabinet beneath the grand staircase of the Palazzo Pisani at S. Stefano.[95] It proved to be in excellent preservation; and it is signed in large clear text letters--_opus Petri Longi_. So far there would seem to be no doubt that the picture is genuine; and I, for my part, am prepared to accept it as such, when I consider that Longhi enjoyed the confidence of the Pisani family and presided over their Academy about the period when it was executed. Yet the student of his works cannot fail to be struck by marked differences of style between this and other authentic pictures from his hand.

The central group consists of the n.o.ble Lady Paolina Gambara, wife of Luigi Pisani, seated with her children round her.[96] Her husband stands behind, together with his three brothers and an intimate friend of the house. Allegorical figures representing the arts and sciences complete the composition. In the distance is seen the princely palace of Stra upon the Brenta, which was designed in part by one of the Pisani brothers. The arrangement of these inter-connected groups is excellent; the characterisation of the several heads, admirable; the drawing, firm and accurate; and the whole scene is bathed in a glow of roseate colour which seems actually to radiate light. Longhi, so far as I am aware, produced nothing in the same style as this complicated masterpiece of portraiture and allegorical suggestion. In conception, execution, and scheme of colour, it reminds us of a French painter; and if he had left a series of such works, he might have deserved what now seems the inappropriate t.i.tle of the Venetian Boucher.

I cannot pretend to have seen more than a small portion of Longhi's pictures. But this portrait of the Pisani family detaches itself as something in a different key of feeling and of workmans.h.i.+p from any with which I am acquainted. Admirers of his art should not fail to pay it the attention it deserves; and if the day comes when a thorough study of this interesting master shall be made, it is not impossible that genuine paintings in the same manner may be discovered.