歯抜き師

Longhi made his name painting Venetians at their small daily amusements, and around 1750 that meant a scene like this: a charlatan on a raised platform pulling a tooth while a masked Carnival crowd looks on. A tooth-puller was half doctor, half street performer, drawing a paying audience with patter and a little blood. Venice in these years had lost its old power at sea and turned into Europe's pleasure city, and Longhi's little canvases are the diary of that world, the masks worn casually in daylight, the idle onlookers, the theatre of it all. He worked small and quiet where his contemporary Tiepolo went vast and heavenly. The painting hangs today in the Brera in Milan.