Description

81. PIETRO LONGHI: PAINTINGS AND DRAWINGS. COMPLETE EDITION. (ISBN : 0714813761 / 0-7148-1376-1) Longhi, Pietro and Pignatti, Terisio Description du livre: 419 pages, 550 b&w illustrations, 24 colour plates. Chronological Table. Documents. Bibliography. Phaidon Press, Oxford. 1969. Hardback in dustjacket. Pietro Longhi has been described as the Moliere of painting and as an Italian Lancret or Watteau. Goldoni praised him for his 'brush which seeks the truth'. He was the best-loved painter in Venice in the eighteenth century; yet the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries did not appreciate his works. Only in recent years have fairer and more sensitive assessments of his art been made. Longhi was born in Venice in 1702. In the early 1730s he decided to abandon 'historical' and decorative painting in order to devote himself to painting conversation pieces, ridotti, parlours, games, masquerades, and other frivolous pastimes of eighteenth-century Venetian society. These he reproduced with gentle humour and a light and graceful touch, never with the moralistic purpose of Hogarth, with whom he has often been contrasted. Longhi did not confine himself to genre painting: some of his rustic and hunting scenes are among the finest he painted. The author of this book, Terisio Pignatti, was Director of the Musei Civici in Venice, and therefore in a unique position to study Longhi's paintings and drawings, most of which are still in the artist's native city. This is the first complete corpus of Longhi's works. The text consists of an introduction, documents of biographical interest and an anthology of Longhi criticism, as well as a complete catalogue of his paintings and drawings and those sometimes attributed to him. All Longhi's known paintings and drawings are reproduced. *Freitag 5721. N° de réf. du libraire004450 Size: Quarto