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Giovanni Battista Langetti (Genoa 1635 - Venice 1676)
Archimedes with Allegorical Figures of War and Peace
Oil on canvas, 69 11/16 x 92 1/2 In.
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Provenance:
Formerly Count Walmoden collection; London, Richard Buckle collection; London, Sotheby's sale, 26 February 1958, lot 144; London, Sotheby's sale, 16 November 1966, lot 132; Genoa, private collection; Lugano, private collection.
Literature:
Marina Stefani, G. B. Langetti, dissertation, University of Padua, 1965-1966, pp. 137-138;
Marina Stefani, "Nuovi contributi alla conoscenza di Giambattista Langetti", Arte Veneta, 1966, pp. 197, 202, note 33, fig. 240;
Marina Stefani, "Giovanni Battista Langetti", in C. Donzelli, G. M. Pilo, I Pittori del Seicento Veneto, Florence, 1967, p. 215;
Rodolfo Pattucchini, La Pittura Veneziana del Seicento, Milan, 1983 [1981], vol. I, p. 247, vol. 2, fig. 786;
Oreste Ferrari, "L'iconografia dei filosofi antichi nella pittura del secolo XVII in Italia", Storia dell'Arte, 57, 1988, p. 149;
Piero Pagano, Maria Clelia Galassi, La Pittura del' 600 a Genova, Milan, 1988, fig. 391;
Marina Stefani Mantovanelli, "Giovanni Battista Langetti", Saggi e Memorie di Storia dell'Arte, 17, 1990, p. 68, pl. 280, fig. 57.
Exhibited:
Pittori Genovesi a Genova nel '600 e nel '700, exh. cat, Genoa, Palazzo Bianco, 6 September- 9 November 1969, pp. 294-295, No 123.
The style of Giovanni Battista Langetti, Genoese by birth but Venetian by adoption, is unlike that of any other painter. His pictorial language was unvarying throughout his career, which ended abruptly when he died at the age of forty-one. The artist, defined as tenebroso by Boschini, uses a broad, powerful idiom to express themes that combine idealism with a realism that is often brutal, cruel, or at the very least pathetic. His oeuvre, assembled by Marina Stefani Mantovanelli (1990), consists of no less than one hundred and thirty-two paintings, each of them entirely composed of figures: philosophers, heroes from Greek and Roman Antiquity, mythology and the Bible, most often expressed through single-figure formats. Our painting is one of Langetti's most complex works, not only for its ambitions composition but for its use of symbolism and allegory. The subject of the learned Archimedes (c. 287-212 BC), a mathematician, astronomer and physicist, was treated several times by the artist. He is depicted alone in his study (Philadelphia Museum of Art; Braunschweig, Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum) or at the moment of his assassination by a Roman soldier during the capture of Syracuse, despite Marcellu's plea to spare his life (formerly Venice, private collection, among other versions). Our subject has been identified by different scholars as Archimedes between the figures of War and Peace. The figure of Archimedes is easily recognizable by the globe upon which he rests his right hand, and by the manuscripts suggesting his famous reputation: he supported the theory of a heliocentric universe one thousand seven hundred years before Copernicus.
The group on the right probably refers to the taking of Syracuse. The beautiful young woman, sad and richly adorned with jewels, seems far from likely as an allegorical figure of Peace, since she has none of its attributes. She is also accompanied by an elegant page-boy who holds the drapery that covered her. Partly nude and placed prominently in the foreground, could she not symbolize the capture of Syracuse, a city known for its great wealth and extreme refinement, and which was sacked by the Romans? On that occasion, Archimedes "was then, as fate would have it, intent upon working out some problem by a diagram, and having fixed his mind alike and his eyes upon the subject of his speculation, he never noticed the incursion of the Romans, nor that the city was taken." (Plutarch, Life of Marcellus, Dryden/Clough translation). Here, the scientist turns his back on the disaster. In order to defend Syracuse, Archimedes had perfected highly effective defensive machinery to be used against the Roman army led by Marcellus. But the Romans succeeded in entering the city, not because of a failure in its defences but thanks to the treachery of some of its citizens at the very moment they were celebraling a feast in honour of Artemis.
Stylistically, our painting is close to Socrates Tempted by Phryne (Udine, Museo Civico), which also combines the two sides of Langetti's art: on the one hand, beautiful, richly-coloured Baroque forms, echoing his apprenticeship with Pietro da Cortona (1597-1669), and on the other, the tenebrism to which he always remained faithful as a mature artist. The powerful body of Archimedes, ultimately descended from Michelangelo, is the bravura passage of our picture, which Stefani Mantovanelli dates to about 1663, when the artist was twenty-eight years old.
Early sources concur in stating that Langetti did not remain in his native Genoa for long, and that he left for Rome shortly after 1650, aged about sixteen, to join Pietro da Cortona. Some authors have therefore concluded, without documentation, that he made a short trip to Naples at this point, in order to explain the strong influence of Ribera. It is certain, however, that in about 1658-1660 he settled permanently in Venice, where he completed his training with the Genoese painter Giovanni Francesco Cassana (1611-1691 ), who had also corne to Venice early on, in the wake of Strozzi. Langetti's Venetian career was highly successful, if we are to judge by the large number of surviving works and his premature death. He made a number of documented journeys, such as those to the Florence of Grand Duke Ferdinand II de' Medici, to Bergamo, where several of his paintings entered the gallery of Count Giacomo Cararra, and to the area around Padua, where he probably sojourned with a local artist identified by Stefani Mantovanelli as Pietro Liberi (1605-1687). A great admirer of Domenico Tintoretto (1560-1635), Langetti was the last devotee of the authentic tenebroso style, which evolved in quite a different manner after his death.
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