LANGETTI, Giovanni Battista

Italian painter. His work suggests that Gioacchino Assereto was his principal teacher in Genoa. He must have travelled to Rome at a very early age, and there he studied under Pietro da Cortona. Very little of Cortona’s style can be detected in Langetti’s extant work, however; its extreme realism and strong contrasts of light and shade are closer to the art of Ribera and his school. It seems likely that Langetti travelled from Rome to Naples, possibly in the middle of the 1650s, to study the art of Ribera, Francesco Fracanzano and Giordano. Giordano may have advised him to go to Venice, where he had himself worked some years previously, and Langetti may have chosen to go in 1656 to avoid the plague that had broken out in Naples.

For a brief period he studied in Venice with Giovanni Francesco Cassana (1611-90), a second-rate Genoese artist who painted in a naturalistic style reminiscent of Assereto. He then embarked on a highly successful Venetian career. In a career of 20 years or so he clearly produced a considerable number of paintings: his catalogue of works numbers over 120 and new paintings are still being discovered. Only four of his works can be dated, on documentary evidence: an Apollo and Marsyas (destroyed in Dresden in 1945), which was described by Boschini in 1660, a Crucifixion with Mary Magdalene (1663-64; Venice, Santa Teresa) and the companion pieces, St Peter and St Paul (1675; Padua, S Daniele). The Apollo and Marsyas, though not a copy of Ribera’s composition on the same subject (1637; Naples, Capodimonte), is deeply indebted to it. A canvas by Langetti in the Vatican, the Martyrdom of the Maccabees, is similarly indebted to Ribera in the rendering of the figures though with a relatively open composition more reminiscent of Cortona, and can possibly be dated even earlier.