Alessandro Longhi

Alessandro Longhi spent his life painting the faces of Venice's ruling class in the Republic's final decades, before Napoleon ended a thousand years of Venetian independence in 1797. He came from a painting family. His father was Pietro Longhi, celebrated for small, gently satirical scenes of Venetian drawing rooms and carnival, and Alessandro trained partly with him and partly with the portraitist Giuseppe Nogari.

He chose a different road from his father. Instead of little social scenes he became the official portraitist of the Venetian painters' academy, setting patricians in their robes against dim backgrounds, with a plain, unflattering attention to the actual person in front of him.

In 1762 he did something few painters attempt. He published the Compendio delle vite de' pittori veneziani, a set of short lives of the leading Venetian artists of his own century, and he etched the portraits and printed the text himself. It is still one of the main sources we have for who those painters were and what they looked like.