Robert Longe, Roberto de Longe (the painter’s signatures), Uberto Lalonge (Zaist, Lanzi), also called Le Longe in Cremona, was born 1646 in Brussels and died in Piacenza in 1709. In his homeland he studied with Jacques de Potter, but he was still very young when he went to Italy. In Rome he was a pupil of Giacinto Brandi, then he went to Cremona, where he worked, as Lanzi reports, with Agostino Bonisoli. After the year 1680 he settled in Piacenza, where he probably painted the frescoes in the Corpus Christi chapel (del Santissimo) in the cathedral in 1685. Between 1685 and 1694 he painted frescoes in Milan together with one of the Natali painters and in the collegiate church in Monticelli d’Ongina. In the last decade of the 17th century he worked with Felice Boselli (Piacenza, palace of the Counts Ferrari). The most important of his oil paintings are five large altarpieces for the church of San Antonino in Piacenza, which reveal traces of the influence of the painters Camillo Gavasetti and Guercino. On the small paintings from around the year 1705 (e.g. The Secrets of the Rosary, Calenzano) the colours are fresh and vivid. De Longe’s painting is marked by the influence of Guido Reni, Guercino and Lanfranco, and, of the Bolognese painters, by his contemporary Cignani. The depictions which include landscapes (biblical scenes, mythology) are influenced by Pieter Mulier, called Tempesta, who worked in Piacenza in de Longe’s time. Lanzi recognised that de Longe was an eclectic and defined him as “...a painter of various styles, who always paints gently, radiantly, harmoniously, as if he had never left Flanders...” De Longe influenced the early works of Gian Paolo Panini and the Florentine Sebastiano Galeotti. Most of the painter’s works are in Piacenza and its environs.
Lit.: Ferdinando Arisi, La donazione Anguissola al Museo Civico di Piacenza, Piacenza 1974, pp. 15-20; id., Gian Paolo Panini e i fasti della Roma del '700, Roma 1986; Seicento, Vol. I-II, Milano 1989 (Text: Luisa Bandera, biogr. Aurora Spinosa).