Pietro Longhi

The son of a Venetian silversmith, Pietro Longhi (1702-85) was apprenticed to Giuseppe Crespi of Bologna before returning to Venice, aged 31, where he started off painting typical religious commissions and altarpieces. In 1734, he was commissioned to fresco the grand stair of the Ca' Sagredo with the monumental, sincere but rather silly Fall of the Giants.

This herculean effort seems to have been a turning point in his career, because shortly afterwards he turned his hand to small paintings, especially genre scenes from everyday life, notably of bourgeois or society Venetian enjoying themselves, gambling, courting, masked for Carnival (someone has estimated that half of the figures he painted were masked) or playing music, offering us some of the best clues of what life in Venice was like in the 18th century, or at least what people thought life should be like. He has been called the 'Hogarth of Venice' but as art historian Bernard Berenson famously wrote about him: