The Memoirs of Count Carlo Gozzi Volume II Part 18

VII.

A series of frescoes attributed to Pietro Longhi should also here be mentioned. They decorate three sides of the staircase of the Palazzo Sina (formerly Gra.s.si) on the Grand Ca.n.a.l. The bal.u.s.trades of an open loggia or gallery are painted with bold architectural relief. Behind the pilasters of this balcony a motley company of life-sized figures promenade or stand about in groups. Some are entering in Carnival costume, with masks and long mantles. Others wear the gala dress of the last century. Elderly ladies are draped in the black zendado of Venetian aristocracy. Grave senators bend their courtly heads beneath the weight of snowy periwigs. Lacqueys in livery and running footmen in Albanian costume wait upon the guests, handing chocolate or wines on silver trays. This scene of fashionable life is depicted with vivacity; the studies of face and att.i.tude are true to nature; an agreeable air of good tone and sober animation pervades the whole society. Probably many of the persons introduced were copied from the life; for it is reported of Longhi that one of his greatest merits was the dexterity with which he reproduced the main actors in the _bel monde_ of Venice--so that folk could recognise their acquaintances upon his canvas merely by the carriage of their mask and domino.

Owing to restoration, it is difficult to say how far the fresco-painting was well executed, and to what extent the original tone has been preserved. At present the colouring is somewhat chalky, dull, and lifeless; and I suspect Longhi's brush-work suffered considerably when the palace was internally remodelled some years ago.

VIII.

It only remains to speak of Pietro Longhi's sketch-book. This collection of original drawings, numbering 140 pieces, and containing a very large variety of studies (several pages being filled on front and back with upwards of ten separate figures) was formed by Alessandro Longhi. It came into the possession of the patrician Teodoro Correr, who bequeathed it, together with the rest of his immense museum, to the town of Venice.

As a supplement to Longhi's paintings, this sketch-book is invaluable.

It brings us close to the artist's methods, aims, and personal predilections in the choice of motives. Most of the drawings are done in hard black pencil or chalk, heightened and corrected with white; a few in soft red chalk. Unfortunately, they have suffered to a large extent from rubbing; and this injury is likely to increase with time, owing to the clumsy binding of the volume which contains them.

Studies from the nude are conspicuous by their extreme rarity and want of force. Great attention has been paid to the details of costume and furniture. The _zendado_, the _bautta_, the hoop, the bag-wig, the fop's coat and waistcoat, the patrician's civil mantle, the knee-breeches and stockings of a well-dressed gentleman, are copied and re-copied with loving care. Painters at the easel, ballet-girls with castanets, maid-servants holding trays, grooms and lacqueys, men on horseback, serenaders with lute or mandoline, ballad-singers, music and dancing-masters, women working at lace-pillows, gentlemen in bed, sportsmen discharging their fowling-pieces, gondoliers rowing, little girls in go-carts or fenced chairs, sellers of tarts upon the street, country boys in taverns, chests of drawers, pots, pans, jugs, gourds, wine-flasks, parrots in cages, ladies at the clavichord, queues, fans, books, snuff-boxes, tables, petticoats, desks, the draperies of doors and windows, wigs, footmen placing chairs for guests, beaux bowing in the doorway or whispering tender nothings at a beauty's ear, old men reclining in arm-chairs, embroiderers at work, m.u.f.fs, copper water-buckets, nurses with babies in their arms, silver plate of all descriptions:--such is the farrago of this multiform and graceful, but limited, series of transcripts from the world of visible objects. It is clear that Longhi thought "the proper study of mankind is man;" and man as a clothed, sociable, well-behaved animal.

His sketches are remarkable for their strenuous sincerity--their search after the right att.i.tude, their serious effort to hit the precise line wanted, their suggested movement and seizure of life in the superficies.

They have a sustained air of good-breeding, refined intelligence, and genial sympathy with the prose of human nature. Landscape might never have existed so far as Longhi was concerned. I do not think that a tree, a cloud, or even a flower will be found among the miscellaneous objects he so carefully studied and drew so deftly. The world he moved in was the world of men and women meeting on the surface-paths of daily intercourse. Even here, we do not detect the slightest interest in pa.s.sionate or painful aspects of experience. All Longhi's people are well-to-do and placid in their different degrees. The peasants in the taverns do not brawl, nor the fine gentlemen fight duels, nor the lovers in the drawing-rooms quarrel. He seems to have overlooked beggary, disease, and every form of vice or suffering. He does not care for animals. With the exception of a parrot, a caged canary, and a stiffly drawn riding-horse, the brute creation is not represented in these sketches. No sarcasm, no grossness, no violence of any kind, disturbs the calm artistic seriousness, the sweet painstaking curiosity of his mental mood. The execution throughout is less robust than sensitively delicate. We feel a something French, a suggestion of Watteau's elysium of fashion, in his touch on things. In fine, the sketch-book corroborates the impression made on us by Longhi's finished pictures.

IX.

With all his limitations of character and artistic scope, Longi remains a very interesting and highly respectable painter. In an age of social corruption he remained free from impurity, and depicted only what was blameless and of good repute. We cannot study his work without surmising that manners in Italy were more refined than in our own country at that epoch--a conclusion to which we are also led by Goldoni's, Carlo Gozzi's, and even Casanova's Memoirs. Morally licentious and politically decadent the Venetians undoubtedly were; but they were neither brutal, nor cruel, nor savage, nor sottish. Even the less admirable aspects of their social life--its wasteful luxury and effeminate indulgence in pleasure--have been treated with so much reserve by this humane artist, that youth and innocence can suffer no contamination from the study of his works. At the same time they are delightful for their gracious realism, for their nave touch upon the follies of the period. Those who love to dream themselves back into the days of hoops and perukes--and there are many such among as now--should not neglect to make themselves acquainted with Pietro Longhi.