Pietro Longhi has long been erroneously categorized as a mere "tattling

journalist" rather than a painter of high art, "without Lancret's charm or Hogarth's satiric

bite."1 Michael Levey, for example, had this to say about Longhi's work: "Local patrons

commissioned his little pictures which held up to nature no more than a small hand-

mirror, none too steadily, in which the more amiable surfaces of life are prettily reflected

back."² John Symonds likewise claims that "there is neither tragedy nor satire, and only a

thin silvery vein of humor, in his work."³ However, a closer look at his oeuvre reveals a

mind well aware of the historic changes approaching Venice during the latter half of the

Eighteenth-Century. Amazingly, not only was Longhi incredibly successful under the

watchful eye of the censors of the Serenissma, but he was also frequently commissioned

by the very aristocrats he so subtly mocked. Nowhere is he more prophetic than in the

painting "The Rhinoceros" of 1751, the original version of which hangs in the

Ca'Rezzonico in Venice and the second in the National Gallery in London.

Ostensibly a rendering 'from life' of the Dutch Rhinoceros which traveled

throughout Western Europe during the years 1741 and 1758 and made its debut in Venice

during the annual Carnival festival in 1751, the image more accurately displays the

aristocratic visitors in carnival guise who came to look at the wondrous creature (Fig. 1).

The foreground is dominated by the body of the armored pachyderm in its small arena

with passing references to its food and excrement. Behind the rhinoceros, in two

subsequent rows of benches, stand the onlookers. In the first row waving a whip and the

severed horn of the rhinoceros is the keeper of the animal. On his left stand three

visitors, the first unmasked and the second and third in carnival clothing, one wearing the

bauta, a white mask worn by both sexes, form the two-headed semi-creature seen so

commonly in Longhi's images of the Carnival (Fig. 2). To the far right, sits a pensive

character smoking a pipe whom T.H. Clarke identifies as Captain Douve Mout van der

Meer, the owner of the rhinoceros. Directly above this figure, posted on the wall in

trompe-l'oeil, is a paper which declares the painting as a "true portrait of a Rhinoceros

brought to Venice in the year 1751, made by the hand of Pietro Longhi as a commission

from the Nobleman Giovanni Grimani dei Servi: Venetian Patrician."⁴ In the back row

stands a child with two women, the tallest of which, standing in the center, wears the

moreta, a black mask which covers the entire face, while the other holds her mask in her

hand. The London variation (Fig. 3) is almost an exact duplicate except that the note on

the wall is missing and the man to the left of the animal keeper and Captain van der Meer

are masked, creating an even more alienating effect.

Presenting these images isolated from their historical context they would appear

to be nothing more than a simple representation of an event in everyday Venetian life.

However, when empowered by the socio-cultural surroundings of Eighteenth-Century

Venice, they reveal a much more provocative yield. Venice during the Age of the

Enlightenment was a culture in decline, "constricted by economic, political and social

structures that had become ossified."⁵ Forever fascinated by their maritime city, the

nobility paid scant attention to the surrounding countryside which was more and more the

site of their "natural resources and productive capacities."⁶ Even more profound was the

fact that, largely due to a declining population of nobility in Venetian society, the

Serenissima ennobled 127 new families between 1647 and 1718. "Three fifths of the new

men were merchants or traders, one fifth lawyers or members of the secretariat or

Chancery and one fifth Terraferma nobles."⁷ What evolved then, was a small patrician

class with a greater and greater gap between the incredibly wealthy and the incredibly

poor.

The wealthy aristocrats, almost unconsciously aware of their declining splendor,

spent their time reveling in their own magnificence. The great days of the Most Serene

Republic were long in the past. The noble families whom had once patronized Titian,

Tintoretto, Giorgione, and Veronese with great commissions honoring mythological gods

and Christian saints, instead hired Tiepolo to fresco their palaces with cycles honoring

themselves.⁸ "The few remaining noble house of affluence, whether ancient houses like

the Pisani or relative newcomers such as the Rezzonico,"⁹ as demonstrated by their

glorifying palace frescos, saw themselves as ruling their dying homeland with godlike

power. In fact, "the conservatism of Venetian eighteenth-century politics has often been

referred to."¹⁰ Progressive writers such as Rousseau and Helvetius were banned and

Carlo Goldoni, though initially popular, left Venice forever in 1760, because, as cultural

historian Oliver Logan puts it, he "wrote bourgeois comedy"¹¹ which, however encased in

an aristocratic wardrobe "exude a Moliereque bon sens."¹²

Perhaps to counter the effects of this stifling absolutism, Eighteenth-Century

Venice became the city of carnival. Running from the first Sunday in October until Lent,

with a brief reprieve for Christmas, Carnival in Venice literally lasted half the year, odd

when compared to the short lived carnivals of other European contries.¹³ "In a city once

determined to dominate the seas and extend its power and trade into every corner of the

globe, there was no longer thought for anything save amusement."¹⁴ "Behind the shelter

of the mask, everyone did as he pleased"¹⁵ as St. Mark's Square became a spectacle of

outrageous costumes and mysterious intrigue. As Marcel Brion explains, "It was

cluttered with fortune tellers and acrobats, quacks and puppet shows, theaters and

animals. Trained monkeys, lions in cages, giraffes and rhinoceroses brought from

overseas attracted hordes of curious onlookers." It was a city obsessed with the strange.

Nowhere is this fascination more apparent than in the costumes worn by the revelers

themselves. For example:

Other favorites were just as dark and sinister. Many of the costumes were directly pulled

from the stage, most notably that of the comedia dell'Arte. Pulcinella, for example, a

favorite of the Venetian gentry was "a clown, but a grotesque and sinister clown,

strangely bound up with legends of death and sexuality, his tremendous nose is a phallic

symbol."¹⁷ Arlecchino, another favorite, was represented by a "black leather mask made

in the shape of a permanent, infectious grin."¹⁸ The carnival goers were in no way

restricted, though, to the characters of the comedia dell'Arte. "They could seek

inspiration in the exotic garbs of Africa and China, Turkey and the Caucasus."¹⁹

Anything was accepted, provided it was different.

Modern semiotic research, spearheaded by Mikhail Baktin, has uncovered

important aspects of the Carnival which shed light on Longhi's "Rhinoceros" as well as

give insight into the mystery of Venice itself. As V.V. Ivanov states, "at certain moments

in the seasonal cycle, which are defined differently in various cultures, certain groups (or

categories) of people, usually occupying an inferior position, exercise ritual authority

over their superiors."²⁰ Ivanov posits that this "natural theater in which animals and

animal-like beings take over the power and become the masters"²¹ is a necessary shifting

of binary opposites to alleviate the stress of the rest of the year, which would certainly

make sense in what would otherwise be a static society such as Eighteenth-Century

Venice. However, the semiotician and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva colors this theory

with that of abjection, pointing not to the ends, but to the means of this binary shifting.

"The function of these religious rituals," she declares, "is to ward off the subject's fear of

his own identity sinking irretrievably,"²² a powerful statement in light of Venice's setting

sun. And so, one can examine the tradition of the carnival mask from a new perspective,

as undoubtedly the noble class which helped to sanction the debauchery of Carnival was

the main character on the carnival scene. For although carnival was ostensibly a time

when everyone, patrician and peasant alike, was "protected by the anonymity of the

mask,"²³ no doubt the wealthy aristocrats with their incredibly exotic garb which only

they could afford and their multitude of servants for whom only they could have

sufficient means, stood out in this sea of anonymity. As Giovanni Comisso stated when

discussing this unusual aspect of his contemporary Venice, the masks allowed the

noblemen to travel through Venetian streets without the "indignity of contact with the

masses."²⁴ In a society in which everything was on display, as can be seen in Longhi's

painting "The Morning Levee" (Fig. 4), in which a couple act out the tradition of taking

breakfast in bed while at the same time 'holding court,' the mask was a welcome barrier

between the wealthy aristocrats and those who they most despised, the majority of the

population. The universalizing tendencies of the Enlightenment were felt just as much in

Venice as elsewhere in Europe, however suppressed by the authorities, and that "which at

the same time restored and systematized, unleashed and bound the power of the Other,

against and within the consciousness of the Same."²⁵ This was the world in which Pietro

Longhi traveled, one of mystery, but also one of hypocrisy.

Longhi was born in 1702 to a goldsmith named Falca in Venice. After training

for a time with Balestra in his hometown, Longhi traveled to Bologna to study genre

painting with Guiseppe Maria Crespi. By the mid-1700s he was a respected painter

producing such works as "The Swoon" (Fig. 5) and "The Collation" (Fig. 6). During the

years 1750 and 1760, his style changed, taking on a darker palette, and so too did his

subjects, shifting from the aristocratic interior and its comedy of manners to the Venetian

street with its bizarre amalgamation of eerie masks and curious performers. It was just at

this time, in the year 1756, that he became one of the founding members of the Venetian

Academy of Painters, demonstrating not only his popularity, but also his commitment to

a Venetian art style to rival and compete, though of course still firmly based upon, the

French Royal Academy in Paris. This is an important fact, for just as Chardin was

becoming widely accepted and the work of Greuze was entering it's mature stage, Longhi

was already an accepted and respected artist, though working in a similar vein. What

differentiated Longhi from his French contemporaries was a willingness to be covert. He

does not "attempt to bring the accumulated details of a complex scene before us. He

leaves the context of his chosen incident to be divined."²⁶This very vagueness is what

allowed him to move freely within his regressive society. For as Francis Haskell states,

"Pietro Longhi was certainly admired and collected by a great number of patrician

families in no way associated with advanced ideas, and in most people's eyes his break

with fantasy can have had no connection with directly political motives."²⁷ This despite

the fact that in the more progressive circles, "his works were regarded as somewhat

subversive."²⁸

In the face of this background historical context, it becomes apparent that a new

reading of Longhi and, for our purposes, his masterpiece "The Rhinoceros" is in order,

one decidedly at odds with the traditional interpretation in which nineteenth-century

French writers Mariette and Edmond de Goncourt "reduce Longhi more and more to the

role of a chronicler, a peintre de moeurs, and untiring illustrator of a Venice seen through

the languid veil of romanticism."²⁹ For a thorough examination, one must first begin

with his choice of subject, the rhinoceros. Certainly this was a commission, so Longhi

did not have absolute control over its production, but what he did manage to do with it,

within the confines of this framework is extraordinary.

The rhinoceros was, in the Eighteenth Century akin to a myth. The first

rhinoceros to reach the European continent was in Lisbon in 1515 as was famously

documented by the German artist Albrect Durer (Fig. 7) and the fantastical nature of the

European fascination with the animal can be seen in the juxtaposition of it with a unicorn

in the illuminated manuscript of the early seventeenth century, De omnium animalium

naturis atqueformis (Fig. 8). The rhinoceros depicted by Longhi was the fifth of its kind

to reach the European shore, however, it was the first with a fairly extensive life span

and, thanks to its economical owner, was the first to travel throughout Europe,

disseminating its image everywhere it went. It was documented by not only Pietro

Longhi in Venice, but also by J.E. Ridinger in Augsburg, J.B. Oudry in Paris (Fig. 9), and

Francesco Lorenzi in Verona.³⁰ The fascination with the rhinoceros as a 'monstrous

beast,' however, was not quenched by the dissemination of images. In fact, through the

juxtaposition of the rhino with other marginalized groups in painting and sculpture, the

rhinoceros became more widely regarded as an abject creature (Figs. 10 & 11). Longhi

then, as is quite obvious, was meant to depict this fanciful animal with its aura of

'Otherness' and document the patron's visit to see the creature. However, "the animal

here portrayed is a gentle creature, smaller than one would have thought, its head more

like a large pug than a ferocious wild beast."³¹ What one is immediate aware of in

looking at this image is that the carnival-goers, with their ghostly masks and inattentive

glances, are just as much on display as the creature. This is possibly Longhi's most

reoccurring theme, and he had many, in which a marginalized 'Other' is juxtaposed to the

aristocratic spectators who, in their bauta and moretta, look more alienating and

grotesque than the very 'Others' they came to visually consume. "Thus we have series of

Quacks, Fortune-Tellers, Perfume-Sellers, Showmen, the crowd of swindlers, tricksters,

meddlers which throng the arcades of the Doge's palace."³² But a quick look at images

such as the "The Tooth-Drawer" (Fig. 12), "The Fortune-Teller" (Fig. 13), "The

Elephant" (Fig. 14), "The Lion Show" (Fig. 15), and "Magrath the Giant" (Fig. 16)

demonstrates that the images are dominated not by the characters who are referenced in

the title, but by "the rather eerie presence of the figures wearing the domino or bauta."³³

The 'Otherness' of the masked figures is further unveiled when one looks to another of

Longhi's masterpieces, "The Ridotto" (Fig. 17), where the creatures with which he

represents the nobility in their private casinos appear to be anything but human.

"The Rhinoceros," when seen in this light, is not an image of the rhinoceros itself,

but of the aristocratic visitors who have come to appropriate its strangeness, as

demonstrated by the horn of the 'castrated' creature in the keeper's hand. Based upon this

theme of the loss of the phallic, the figures are structured in a traditional pyramidal shape,

subverted by the fact that it rests on the shoulders of the now powerless animal which

stands amid its own feces and finds its apex in the tallest woman, who due to the wireless

moretta, which is supported by a button in her mouth, is by definition unable to speak.

This pictorial symphony of powerlessness in no way falls into the conventional

definition of Longhi's oeuvre which states that he "aimed at Truth, but avoided truths

which were sinister or painful."³⁴ As Longhi's image so eloquently demonstrates, "the

immortal Lion of St. Mark was still the symbol of Venice, but the tamed lion which was

shown in St. Mark's Square during the Carnival of 1762 was the image of the Republic's

decline."³⁵

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