LANDI, GASPARE. - Painter, b. at Piacenza on 6 Jan. 1756, d. there on 24 Feb. 1830. Abandoned as a youth by his father, he was taken in at the convent of S. Maria in Campagna, in whose sacristy there remain several oval portraits of friars in the guise of saints, his earliest known works, already revealing his skill as a portraitist.
Having gone to Rome in 1781, he first attended Batoni’s school and then Corvi’s, becoming one of the exponents of the Neoclassical movement. He achieved considerable success by painting, in the fashion of the time, canvases with mythological subjects or subjects drawn from Greco-Roman history. Numerous also are his paintings of sacred subjects, including the two large compositions of The Deposition of the Virgin in the Tomb and The Apostles Finding the Empty Tomb, in Piacenza Cathedral (1804), and that of the Journey to Calvary in S. Giovanni in Canale, likewise in Piacenza (other canvases are in S. Lorenzo in Piacenza, in the Colleoni Chapel at Bergamo, in S. Francesco di Paola at Naples, etc.). His eighteenth-century training, and his seriousness and taste as a refined, if somewhat affected, colorist, did not always save him from academic pedantry; today his name is chiefly associated with his activity as an honest and precise portraitist, the most perceptive and refined among his contemporary academicians. Among the best known is the portrait of Antonio Canova (Rome, Galleria Borghese), to whom he was bound by friendship and whom he succeeded, in 1817, as president of the Accademia di S. Luca.