Oil painting on canvas depicting "The Return of the Prodigal Son", the seventeenth century, Allegedly by Giovan Battista Langetti (Genoa, 1635 - Venice, 22 October 1676), 93x100 cm. The work is Allegedly by Giovan Battista orally Langetti (Genoa, 1635 - Venice, 22 October 1676). Few and fragmentary news we hear about his first period of training, but it is conceivable a stay in Rome, during which the Langetti is active at the workshop of Pietro da Cortona. In the aftermath, it is likely its pr

Oil painting on canvas depicting "The Return of the Prodigal Son", the seventeenth century, Allegedly by Giovan Battista Langetti (Genoa, 1635 - Venice, 22 October 1676), 93x100 cm. The work is Allegedly by Giovan Battista orally Langetti (Genoa, 1635 - Venice, 22 October 1676). Few and fragmentary news we hear about his first period of training, but it is conceivable a stay in Rome, during which the Langetti is active at the workshop of Pietro da Cortona. In the aftermath, it is likely its presence in Naples, where he remained deeply impressed by the vision of works by Jusepe de Ribera, thus enriching its store of knowledge, made up of reminiscences of the Genoese painters Joachim Asseretos and Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione, and those of Flemish Rubens and Van Dyck, which in Genoa aveveno stayed and performed several works in the first decades of the seventeenth century. By the mid-50s of the century will travel to Venice, where he lived for the rest of his life, spending an initial period at the workshop of Giovan Francesco Cassana, as he tells us the artist and writer Marco Boschini, which in 1660 published the navegar pitoresco Charter, the pictorial beauty of Venice. As evidence of the fame acquired by Langetti there are also some commissions arrived from outside Venice, such as those coming from Florence, by the Grand Duke Ferdinand II de 'Medici, and Padua, where he will be active in the Church of the Dominicans. The work in question is the return of the episode of the prodigal son, narrated in the parable of Jesus, from the Gospel according to Luke. The compositional cutting, the labeled use of shading, the clear reference to naturalism riberesco, therefore the painting traced back to the years and the atmosphere of the "of Gloomy" group, which had luck in Venice around the middle of '600. The same Luigi Lanzi coined for Langetti the title of Prince of Gloomy. The award, therefore, could be confirmed by comparing the painting under analysis with the works of certain Langetti as the representative of Apollo and Marsyas, where it seems clear citation of the character depicted back, placed on the far left of the painting, or that representing Diogenes and Alexander, Painting, 1650 and kept at the Fondazione Querini Stampalia in Venice.