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And there is, too, the work of the painters Niccolo Rondinelli, Cotignola, Luca Longhi and his sons, Guido Reni, and others. Later the papal government undertook many great public works.
Longhi describes the case of a woman of twenty-seven, an epileptic, with metritis and copious catamenia twice a month. She was immoderately addicted to drink and sexual indulgence, and in February, 1835, her menses ceased. On May 8th she was admitted to the hospital with a severe epileptic convulsion, and until the 18th remained in a febrile condition, with abdominal tenderness, etc.
"Maestro Luca de' Longhi of Ravenna," he says, "a man of studious habits and quiet reserved character, has painted many beautiful pictures in oil, with numerous portraits from the life in his native city and its neighbourhood.
Pietro Longhi Hogarth Tiepolo A gambling wife Canaletto Guardi The Vivarini Boccaccini Venetian art and its beginnings The three Bellinis Giovanni Bellini A beautiful room Titian's "Presentation" The busy Evangelists A lovely ceiling. A number of small rooms which are mostly negligible now occur.
Longhi is here, with his little society scenes; Tiepolo, with some masterly swaggering designs; Giambettino Cignaroli, whom I mention only because his "Death of Rachel" is on Sundays the most popular picture in the whole gallery; and Canaletto and Guardi, with Venetian canals and palaces and churches.
Nor will I omit to mention that a daughter of his, called Barbara, still but a little child, draws very well and has begun to paint also in a very good manner and with much grace." There are five pictures by Luca Longhi in the Accademia besides three portraits. The third room in the Accademia, filled with various works of little merit of the sundry schools of Italy, may be neglected.
One has to wonder at the strange indifference which settled over those descendants of the illustrious men whose names are built into the magnificent palaces on both sides of the Grand Canal; and there is perhaps no greater lesson than that which may be learnt from studying the private history of the noble patrician families of Venice of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries men whose hearts were opened to all great emotions and by looking at the marionette life of the men and women of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, such as it is portrayed in the pictures of Longhi, where the Chamber of Sighs never empties itself of the opulent gamblers who patronized the Ridotto night and day.
No. 494 at Hertford House, a glittering view of the Dogana, is perhaps Guardi's masterpiece in England; No. 135 in the National Gallery, Canaletto's. Pietro Longhi was born in Venice in 1702, five years after Hogarth was born in London. He died in 1762, two years before Hogarth in Chiswick. I mention the English painter because Longhi is often referred to as the Venetian Hogarth.
The shabby footboy, summoned by Pansy he might, tarnished as to livery and quaint as to type, have issued from some stray sketch of old-time manners, been "put in" by the brush of a Longhi or a Goya had come out with a small table and placed it on the grass, and then had gone back and fetched the tea-tray; after which he had again disappeared, to return with a couple of chairs.
And in knowing this Venetian much may be learned of the decadence of Venice, which had come to produce, not the great and reverent and serious men who laid her stones and covered her walls with sweet and splendid works expressive of the endurance and piety of great souls, but such men as Casanova the gambler, Goldoni the play-writer, Longhi and Canaletto the painters; and then, as the best among them all, the honest Venetian whom we now meet, sometimes called the Shakespeare of Venice, but in fact only a play-writer, a Venetian nobleman, who depicted in a dispassionate temper the trivialities of his age, and lacked both the milieu and the material to produce a great work.
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