abstract:'Il Ridotto' (Italian : "The Private Room") is a wing of Venice's San Moisè Palace. In 1638 it was converted at the behest of Venice's city leaders into a government-owned gambling house.
In the first section, history paintings documenting the familiar events of 18th-century Venice, such as masked carnival-goers at the Ridotto, the state-run gambling house, are executed in precise detail, according to the canons of the neoclassical current of the day, with none of the fanciful splashes of color in the artist's later work.