Figure 5.4 Gaspare Traversi: Posing for a Portrait, oil on canvas, 100 × 131 cm. 1754. Paris, Musée du
Louvre.
Source: © 2015. © Photo Josse/Scala, Florence.The theme of dressing up resonated throughout the century. Paintings on this subject sometimes appealed
to the sophisticated insights of the cognoscenti rather than condemning unambiguously their love of playful
disguise. Watteau’s fêtes galantes celebrated the wearing of theatrical costumes, particularly those of his
commedia dell’arte figures, while evoking a melancholic mood that suggested the fragility of such
pleasures. The engravings of JeanMichel Moreau the Younger (1741–1814) also reflected a concern
with the deceptive appearances of the theater, represented initially as unproblematic but later (during the
Revolution) more negatively (Craske, 1997, 167–168). Fragonard’s fantasy figures are often represented
in fancy dress (e.g. in a fashionable “Spanish costume”) in order to proclaim a form of selfconfident
social display and appeal to those viewers familiar with deliberately confusing and fantastical social
masquerade balls. In Italy, Longhi’s images appealed to the Venetian elite by playing on references to the
theatrical and deceptive nature of the masquerade and its costumes, while assuming also in the viewer a
capacity for clearsightedness. Longhi exposed the superficial thrill of “looking” in his Clara the
Rhinoceros (Clara la rinoceronte, 1751) representing a crowd of visitors in masquerade costume,
including face masks, gawping at a “curious” unfamiliar animal while engaged in carnivalesque
concealment of their own bodies: the whole represents to the discerning viewer a travesty of the