The main figures in this painting are members from different social classes of the Serenissima (Venice) as they are observed in an everyday setting. Pietro Longhi highlights women’s centrality, who enjoyed unparalleled freedom in Venice. The Venetian painter also interprets the scientific Enlightenment of the time through this work.
About Pietro Longhi
Pietro Longhi was born in 1702 in Venice, the son of Alessandro Falca, a silversmith. He studied drawing and modelling with his father, and for his initial training was apprenticed to Antonio Balestra until the end of 1718. In the 1720s and 1730s, Longhi received a number of public commissions for large-scale religious pictures in Venice which remain mostly untraced.
His earliest identifiable genre works consist of pastoral motifs and peasant interiors on small canvases that appear to date from the mid-1730s. The subject matter and naturalistic detail of these works are imbued with North Italian and Bolognese peasant life and rusticism.
