Pietro Longhi - Masked Party in a Courtyard

Pietro Longhi (1702—1785) was a painter of the Rococo period known for his small scenes of Venetian social and domestic life. He was the son of the silversmith Alessandro Falchi, in whose workshop he received his first education. Later he worked under the direction of the Veronese artist Antonio Balestra, but his only important work of this kind, the monumental ceiling "The Fall of the Giants" (completed in 1734) for Palazzo Sagredo, failed. It is likely that because of this he left Venice for a while and studied in Bologna with the genre painter Giuseppe Maria Crespi.