Biography

Italian painter, part of a family of painters, daughter of Luca Longhi. She assisted her father with large altarpieces and copied many of his works. Her own work often resembles his but is on a smaller scale. She was also indebted to contemporary Florentine and Bolognese painters. Of her 15 known works, 12 are small Virgin and Child compositions, which Vasari praised for their 'purity of line and soft brilliance of colour'. Her early works are simple compositions, using a limited palette and emphasizing linearity over modelling. St Catherine of Alexandria (1589; Museo d'Arte della Città, Ravenna) was painted for the monastery of Classe in Ravenna and is probably a self-portrait of the artist.

After 1590 Longhi's colour became more brilliant, and her figures attained a certain monumentality. She also began to employ the device of a curtain draped around a column (taken from such painters as Correggio and Parmigianino) and of an area opening out onto a landscape or sky in the background of her compositions, as in Virgin and Child with St John the Baptist (c. 1595-1600; Gemäldegalerie, Dresden). The sfumato technique and the pyramidal composition are reminiscent of Leonardo and of Raphael's Florentine works (1506-08).

After 1600 she seems to have abandoned full-figure compositions in architectural settings in preference for simple pious images. The Virgin with Sleeping Child (c. 1600-05; Walters Art Museum, Baltimore), one of her most devotional paintings, avoids narrative or Mannerist pictorial riddles and concentrates on the viewer's intimate relation to the figures depicted. As with most of her work, it reflects the intense religious ideals of the Counter-Reformation.