Barbara Longhi

Barbara Longhi (* 1552 in Ravenna , Italy; † 1638 there ) was an icon painter of the Counter Reformation .

Saint Catherine of Alexandria

Life

Barbara Longhi and her brother Francesco Longhi were trained in painting by their father Luca Longhi in a typical family workshop. The children's works hardly differed from those of their father. In a pronounced mannerist style they made altarpieces for churches throughout Emilia-Romagna. It was only ten years after his death that Longhi found her own style and later made a name for herself primarily as a portrait painter. She particularly impressed with her soft style and the gentle brilliance of her colors.

Of the fifteen pictures she has identified so far, twelve are depictions of the Madonna and Child . Longhi preferred to produce her depictions of the Madonna as small-format devotional pictures, all of them self-contained, fully focused on the Christ Child. The meager source situation gives no precise information on the order situation or patrons, the small formats suggest private clients. The pictures enjoyed great popularity as small private altars and served counter-Reformation spirituality and the new cult of Mary. In her later development phase, Longhi gave her Madonnas more space and placed them in front of architectural motifs such as draped columns and lyrical landscapes.

Few of her pictures are dated and some bear her monogram BLF (Barbara Longhi Fecit - Barbara Longhi made it). Amazingly, there is only one portrait among her works. This depicts a monk. This is surprising, as her sensitive portraits have been praised, for example by Munizio Manfredi, the director of the Academy in Bologna. The art critic and painter Giorgio Vasari mentioned the then 16-year-old painter in his résumés : her clear lines and the gentle brilliance of her colors were unique and that she was very good at drawing and started to paint quite gracefully and in a good manner.

Like the artists Artemisia Gentileschi , Fede Galizia and Elisabetta Sirani and numerous other painters of the 16th and 17th centuries, she was inspired by the legend of Judith from the Apocrypha of the Old Testament to create a picture of Judith with the head of Holofernes . Compared to Gentileschi's work, she does not portray Judith as a cold-blooded murderer, but rather as an innocent person. The picture is in the Pinacoteca Ravenna.

Their most productive period was probably between 1590 and 1605. Barbara Longhi lived her entire life in Ravenna, where she died in 1638.

Works (selection)

• Virgin and Sleeping Child (c.1570), Grohs-Collison Collection, Birmingham, Alabama
• Madonna and Child Crowning a Saint (1590–1595), Louvre , Paris
• Madonna with the Child and the Johannesknaben (1595–1600), Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister , Dresden
• The healing of Agatha (altarpiece around 1595), Santa Maria Maggiore, Ravenna
• Cappuccini altarpiece (around 1595), Breastfeeding Madonna (1600–1605), Brera , Milan
• The mystical wedding of St. Catherine, with John the Baptist (around 1600), Museo Biblioteca del Grappa
• Virgin and Sleeping Child (around 1600–1605), Walters Art Gallery , Baltimore

literature

• Debra N. Mancoff: Women who changed art Prestel Munich 2012, ISBN 978-3791347325 , pp. 8–9, 20–21
• Christiane Weidemann, Petra Larass, Melanie Klier: 50 women artists you should know Prestel Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-7913-3957-3 , pp. 20–21
• Christina Haberlik , Ira Diana Mazzoni : 50 classics - artists, painters, sculptors and photographers . Gerstenberg, Hildesheim 2002, ISBN 978-3-8067-2532-2 , pp. 20-23

Individual evidence

1. ^ Giorgio Vasari: CVs of the most famous painters, sculptors and architects (1568). German Edition by Ludwig Schorn and Ernst Förster. New ed. and a. by Julian Kliemann. Darmstadt 1983, vol. 4, p. 20