The Dancing Lesson

By the 1860s photography studios had spread through Italian cities, and when Filippo Carcano showed this canvas at the Brera exhibition in Milan in 1865, the reaction was immediate and resentful. Critics objected to the photographic way the scene is cut and to the dogged, minute description of every detail. The room is a real one, the interior of the Poletti dance school in Milan. Carcano, then in his mid-20s, had been trained in academic history painting, and this picture belongs to a short series of deliberately ordinary scenes of daily life, an original and provocative phase between those beginnings and the landscapes of his maturity. Two years later he showed it again in Turin, in 1867.