Blind-Man's Buff

Blind-man's buff — in which a blindfolded player attempts to catch and identify other players — was among the most widely depicted parlour games in eighteenth-century European art, favoured by Rococo painters from Fragonard to Tiepolo as a vehicle for exploring themes of sensory deprivation, social play, and the trope of blindness as erotic or social metaphor. Longhi's version, in the Royal Collection, situates the game within a Venetian domestic setting, his characteristic social observation applied to a leisure activity that crossed generational and gender lines. The Royal Collection's acquisition of this work reflects the long-standing British appetite for Venetian eighteenth-century genre painting, which was extensively collected by British aristocrats on the Grand Tour.

The blindfolded central figure's outstretched arms and uncertain posture create a dynamic axis within the composition, around which other players arrange themselves in attitudes of evasion and suppressed laughter. Longhi renders the spatial uncertainty of the blindfolded figure through subtle asymmetries of stance.