Domenico Piola

(b Genoa, 1627; d Genoa, 8 April 1703). Painter, draughtsman, printmaker and designer. He was the leading artist in Genoa in the second half of the 17th century, providing ceiling frescoes for many Genoese churches and palaces and producing paintings for private collectors. He was also a prolific draughtsman, whose many designs for thesis pages and book illustrations promoted his work throughout Europe. The enormous and multifarious productivity of his studio, his numerous collaborations with other artists and the fact that most of his most ambitious projects have been destroyed have discouraged any systematic study of his work.

     

 
A VENETIAN REVIVAL
 

A renewel in Venetian painting was signalled by the arrival of Domenico Fetti (1589-1623) from Rome, the German Johann Liss (c.1595-1631), and the Genoese Bernardo Strozzi. They had all assimilated the lessons of Caravaggio, Rubens, and the Carracci. In the later 17th century, the dark "tenebrist" style, which involved an emphatic use of chiaroscuro for dramatic effect, gradually gave way to a brighter, more sumptuous style of painting, particularly in the work of Pietro Liberi (1605-87). The arrival of Luca Giordano from Naples and Giovan Battista Langetti (1635-76) from Genoa presaged the more atmospheric work of Tiepolo and his contemporaries.
      

Pietro Liberi
Europa Crowned by Genius
1640

Pietro Liberi

(b Padua, 1605; d Venice, 8 Oct 1687).

Italian painter. He moved to Venice at an early age and studied with Alessandro Varotari (il Padovanino). Travels from 1628 to 1638 took him to Constantinople, Tunis and several European countries. In Rome from 1638 to 1640, he copied the frescoes of Michelangelo and Raphael, studied the works of the Carracci, Pietro da Cortona and Guido Reni, and also came under the prevailing influence of Gianlorenzo Bernini. His earliest known work, the Rape of the Sabines (1641; Siena, Pin. N.), richly reflects this experience of Rome. On his return journey to Venice (c. 1643) he stopped in Bologna and may have seen works by Emilian artists, from Correggio to Reni, in Parma.

 

Pietro Liberi
Allegoria della temperanza

Pietro Liberi
Dame bei der Toilette

Pietro Liberi
Giove circondato da deita femminili

Pietro Liberi
Die Muse Urania

Pietro Liberi
Diana und Callisto

Pietro Liberi
Anticni prizor

Giovanni Battista Langetti
The Vision of St. Jerome
c. 1660
 

Giovanni Battista Langetti

(b Genoa, 1635; d Venice, 22 Oct 1676).

Italian painter. His work suggests that Gioacchino Assereto was his principal teacher in Genoa. He must have travelled to Rome at a very early age, and there he studied under Pietro da Cortona (Soprani and Ratti). Very little of Cortona’s style can be detected in Langetti’s extant work, however; its extreme realism and strong contrasts of light and shade are closer to the art of Ribera and his school. It seems likely that Langetti travelled from Rome to Naples, possibly in the middle of the 1650s, to study the art of Ribera, Francesco Fracanzano and Giordano. Giordano may have advised him to go to Venice, where he had himself worked some years previously, and Langetti may have chosen to go in 1656 to avoid the plague that had broken out in Naples. For a brief period he studied in Venice with Giovanni Francesco Cassana (1611–90), a second-rate Genoese artist who painted in a naturalistic style reminiscent of Assereto. He then embarked on a highly successful Venetian career; already in 1660 Marco Boschini was writing of him in glowing terms. In a career of 20 years or so he clearly produced a considerable number of paintings: his catalogue of works numbers over 120 and new paintings are still being discovered. Only four of his works can be dated, on documentary evidence: an Apollo and Marsyas (before 1660), which was described by Boschini in 1660, a Crucifixion with Mary Magdalene (1663–4; Venice, S Teresa) and the companion pieces, St Peter and St Paul (1675; Padua, S Daniele). The Apollo and Marsyas, though not a copy of Ribera’s composition on the same subject (1637; Naples, Capodimonte), is deeply indebted to it. A canvas by Langetti in the Vatican, the Martyrdom of the Maccabees, is similarly indebted to Ribera in the rendering of the figures though with a relatively open composition more reminiscent of Cortona, and can possibly be dated even earlier.

Giovanni Battista Langetti
Cato
1670

Giovanni Battista Langetti
Samson
1660

Giovanni Battista Langetti
Death of Cato

Giovanni Battista Langetti
Diogene ed Alessandro