LANDI, GASPARE. - Painter, b. in Piacenza on 6 Jan. 1756, d. there on 24 Feb. 1830. Abandoned as a young boy by his father, he was taken in at the convent of S. Maria in Campagna, in whose sacristy there remain some oval paintings with portraits of friars in the guise of saints, his first known works, already revealing his effectiveness as a portraitist.
Having moved to Rome in 1781, he first attended the school of Batoni, then that of Corvi, becoming one of the exponents of the Neoclassical movement, and he achieved wide success by painting, according to the fashion of the time, canvases on mythological subjects or subjects drawn from Greek-Roman history. His paintings on sacred subjects are also numerous, among them the two large compositions with The Deposition of the Virgin in the Tomb, and The Apostles Finding the Tomb Empty, in the cathedral of Piacenza (1804), and the one with the Journey 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 education and the seriousness and taste of a fine colourist, even if somewhat affected, do not always save him from academic pedantry; his name is today above all linked to his activity as an honest and precise portraitist, the most acute and refined among the academic painters of his time. 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.
Bibliography2 works
Emma Zocca