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 Canal. 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,
brandishing his arms, and hurling forked lightnings on the Titans, who
are precipitated headlong among solid purple clouds and masses 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 illustrious contemporary Tiepolo. A
vulgar Jove, particularly vulgar in the declamatory sweep of his left
hand, a vulgar Juno, with a sneering, tittering leer upon her co