Giovan Battista Langetti
1635–1676 · Republic of Venice · Tenebrism
The story
Venice in the middle of the 17th century liked its painting bright and airy, so Giovan Battista Langetti stood out. He worked in deep shadow, with a single hard light falling on straining, half-naked bodies. Born in Genoa around 1635 and trained partly in Rome in the circle of Pietro da Cortona, he brought that southern taste for drama and darkness north to the lagoon.
He became the leading tenebrist in Venice, the local champion of the shadowy manner that descended from Caravaggio. His subjects were rarely gentle: bound prophets, tormented philosophers, the Titan Prometheus with the eagle at his liver. This matched a current of neo-Stoic thought fashionable in the Veneto then, which prized endurance under suffering, and Langetti gave that idea a body and a grimace.
He worked hard and fast for about 20 years and died in Venice in 1676.
