Pietro Longhi was born in Venice in the parish of Saint Maria, first child of the silversmith Alessandro Falca and his wife, Antonia.

In the late 1730s, he began to specialize in the small-scale genre works that would lead him to be viewed in the future as the Venetian William Hogarth, painting subjects and events of everyday life in Venice.

Many of his paintings show Venetians at play, such as the depiction of the crowd of genteel citizens awkwardly gawking at a freakish Indian rhinoceros.

This painting, on display at the National Gallery in London, chronicles Clara the rhinoceros brought to Europe in 1741 by a Dutch sea captain and impresario from Leyden, Douvemont van der Meer.

[5] Ultimately, there may be a punning joke to the painting, since the young man on the left holds aloft the sawed-off horn (metaphor for cuckoldry) of the animal.

[7] In some, the insecure or naive posture and circumstance, the puppet-like delicacy of the persons, seem to suggest a satirical perspective of the artists toward his subjects.

That this puppet-like quality was an intentional conceit on Longhi's part is attested by the skillful rendering of figures in his earlier history paintings and in his drawings.

Celebrated genre canvases were produced by other contemporary artists in Italy such as Gaspare Traversi and Giuseppe Maria Crespi.

Longhi had not only departed the world of grand mythology of history that often allured the Venetian nobility, but also taken residence in its intimate present, as few painters in Venice had ever done.

The critic Bernard Berenson states that:[10] Longhi painted for the picture-loving Venetians their own lives in all their ordinary domestic and fashionable phases.

Repeating the figures of the flirtatious couple, Longhi displays the Ridotto as a place where the social elite— who would not exhibit such behavior in public nor unmasked—would abandon all inhibitions and pursue their actual desires.