Portrait of the architectural theorist Carlo Lodoli

The man in this portrait is not a patrician but a Franciscan friar, and in his own century he was one of the odder minds in Venice. Carlo Lodoli taught mathematics and physics to young noblemen and argued something almost no one then would accept, that a building's forms should follow from what its material can actually do, and that stone should not be cut to imitate the shapes of timber. Later writers called him the Socrates of architecture, and like Socrates he wrote almost nothing down. His ideas survived only because former pupils set them on paper after him. Lodoli had died in 1761, so this likeness looks back at a man already gone. Longhi kept the palette low and earthy, close to a single brown, and placed the friar among a few books and papers.