LONGHENA, BALDASSARRE. – Architect, born in Venice in 1598 to a family from Ticino (from Maroggia on Lake Lugano), died there on 18 February 1682. He soon abandoned sculpture, in which he had been trained by his father and of which the cenotaph of Bishop Gabriele Severo in S. Giorgio dei Greci (1619) is a modest example, in order to devote himself exclusively to architecture.
The first work whose date is known with certainty is his masterpiece: the basilica of S. Maria della Salute (begun in 1630 and still unfinished at his death), a brilliant transformation of the Renaissance theme of the centrally planned church into the idiom of Venetian pictorialism. His subsequent works do not attain the same degree of stylistic coherence. Palladian reminiscences, already evident in the façade and interior of the Salute, are even more pronounced in the interior of the cathedral of Chioggia (1633); while in the façades of S. Giustina (1640) and S. Tomà (1652), both remodeled in the eighteenth century, and in the interior of S. Maria del Pianto (1647), the Sansovinian taste is very much alive. The emphatic superimposition of ornament which, in his later works (interior of S. Maria degli Scalzi, 1660; façade of the Ospedaletto, 1674), seems almost to accept the heavy decorative taste of Lombard Baroque, reaches its most exaggerated expression in the funerary monument of Doge Giov. Pesaro at the Frari (1669).
In civil construction, L. remained faithful to Sansovinian models, from his earliest works (the Giustinian Lolin Palaces at the Accademia, the Widman Palace at S. Canciano, etc.) to his later and more significant works, such as the Palazzo Pesaro (begun in 1676), perhaps the most imposing expression of Venetian Baroque, and the Palazzo Rezzonico (1680), completed much later by Massari.