Pietro Longhi’s oblique perspective: Venetian painting, its past and its present

Michaliszyn, Maja (2020) Pietro Longhi’s oblique perspective: Venetian painting, its past and its present. Doctoral thesis, University of East Anglia.

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Abstract

Reassessing the career of Pietro Longhi (1701–1785), this thesis brings to light distinctive ways in which his artworks were shaped by evolving technologies and art markets, social practices and philosophical ideas, as well as through the artist’s interactions with noble patrons, print-makers, publishers, itinerant performers, writers, and artists. Longhi is described as a self-aware painter, highly conscious of the need to distinguish himself in the commercial art world, critically responding to the surrounding world and experimenting with his viewers’ pictorial experiences. The thesis thereby challenges still prevalent views of Longhi as both a naïve and unskilled artist and also of Venice as an unchangeable place. Four themes are identified as central to his practice: paintings within paintings, which fashion the artist and his noble patrons as both current and connected to an illustrious past; printing, through his direct involvement with the technology, the mobility of print through the city, and its distinctive formal characteristics; pictures of mondi nuovi (peepshow boxes), which were connected to print, as well as to questions about vision and knowledge; and exotic animals, which connect patrons to specific public displays in the city, as well as with renewed interests in natural history and physiognomy. These themes reveal the diversity of his work and the multiple roles it played in his patrons’ lives, in their identities as nobles, and in his distinctive artistic practice and self-presentation. As such, this thesis argues that Longhi and his art not only participated in, but also actively promoted an image of a modern and changing Venetian art world.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Arts and Humanities > School of Art, Media and American Studies
Depositing User:	Chris White
Date Deposited:	20 Dec 2022 10:48
Last Modified:	20 Dec 2022 10:48
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/90311
DOI:

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