GASPARE LANDI. — Painter, born in Piacenza on 6 January 1756, died there on 24 February 1830. Abandoned as a youth by his father, he was taken in by the convent of S. Maria in Campagna, in whose sacristy some ovals with portraits of friars in the guise of saints remain; these are his earliest known works, already revealing his skill as a portraitist.
Having moved to Rome in 1781, he first studied under Batoni, then under Corvi, becoming one of the exponents of the Neoclassical movement and achieving wide success by painting, in keeping with the fashion of the time, canvases with mythological subjects or drawn from Greco-Roman history. Numerous are also his sacred paintings, including the two large compositions with *The Deposition of the Virgin into the Sepulchre* and *The Apostles Finding the Empty Sepulchre*, in Piacenza Cathedral (1804), and that with *The Way to Calvary* in S. Giovanni in Canale, also in Piacenza (other canvases in S. Lorenzo in Piacenza, in the Colleoni Chapel in Bergamo, in S. Francesco di Paola in Naples, etc.). His eighteenth-century training, together with his seriousness and the taste of a fine colourist—though somewhat affected—did not always save him from academic pedantry; his name today is chiefly associated with his activity as an honest and precise portraitist, the most acute and refined among his contemporary academicians. Among his best-known works is the portrait of Antonio Canova (Rome, Galleria Borghese), to whom he was bound by friendship and who succeeded him, in 1817, as president of the Accademia di S. Luca.