Portrait of Almorò III Alvise Pisani and his family

By the 1750s the grandest families of Venice liked to be painted the way the English painted themselves, gathered together, life-size, at ease rather than stiffly posed. That is what Longhi did here for the Pisani, one of the wealthiest houses in the Republic. At the centre sits Almoro III Alvise Pisani, a procurator of Saint Mark, with his wife Paolina Gambara and their children, his brother among them, and behind the group a figure of Justice with her scales. Two touches fix the family in its world. On the right a man points off toward the long stables of the Pisani's enormous villa at Stra on the Brenta, the country palace they were then finishing. And a man in black, thought to be the children's tutor, the abbot Gregoretti, holds out a bussola, the ring-shaped Venetian biscuit, to the young ones. The canvas reached the Accademia in 1979 from the family's own heirs.