Italian painter. After a brief training in Piacenza, he was sent to Rome in 1781 by his patron, Marchese Giovan Battista Landi. He studied under Pompeo Girolamo Batoni
and Domenico Corvi and copied works by Raphael,
Michelangelo and 17th-century masters. In Rome he also established a close friendship with Antonio Canova,
with whom he shared a preference for studying from live models. Praised for his use of colour, his soft, perfectly measured brushwork and his sense of composition, Landi acquired immediate fame and received numerous commissions for mythological and religious paintings and portraits. Works such as his two large pictures in Piacenza Cathedral, the Funeral of the Virgin (1802) and the Apostles at the Empty Tomb (1804), testify to his attachment to 17th-century imagery.
In 1809 and 1811 he was one of the painters who received imperial commissions to glorify Napoleon, for example Napoleon Concluding an Armistice with Prince Liechtenstein, Minister Plenipotentiary of Vienna, also known as the Armistice of Znai m (1809; untraced). A significant work of this period, the Marys at the Tomb (c. 1812; Florence, Pitti), illustrates Landi s eclectic Neoclassicism . The composition of four life-size figures, inspired by David
and Canova in its use of relief-like forms, shallow space and emphatic gesture, is rendered in soft colours that derive from Batoni. Landi s handling of an early Renaissance subject in a perfect academic manner has been interpreted as a statement of his differences with Purismo. He is now remembered chiefly as a portrait painter; Antonio Canova
(1806; Rome, Galleria Borghese) combines vivid physical accuracy with a penetrating characterization of the sculptor s creative energy. Appointed professor at the Accademia di San Luca in 1812, Landi encouraged study from the nude; in 1817 he succeeded Canova as the Accademia s president.