Children playing blind man's bluff

Bordignon painted these children at blind man's buff in the early 1870s, only a few years after the Veneto had left Austrian rule and joined the new kingdom of Italy. He came from Castelfranco Veneto, a small town on the mainland, and much of his early work stayed close to that world of village courtyards and country childhoods. Here a blindfolded child gropes forward while the others scatter and tease, the game the Italians call mosca cieca, the blind fly. There is no lesson pinned to it, just the noise and quickness of an afternoon caught in oil. The canvas first belonged to the civic collection of his home town before it came to the Accademia in Venice.