ピエトロ・ロンギ

Pietro Longhi painted the intimate life of eighteenth-century Venice—the gambling parlors, the dressing rooms, the dance lessons, the everyday moments of a merchant republic at leisure. Born in 1701, the son of a silversmith, he trained under Antonio Balestra and Giuseppe Maria Crespi before returning to Venice around 1732. His small-scale genre scenes, often crowded with masked figures half-hidden by Carnival disguises, became enormously popular among the Venetian elite.