Untitled (Pifferari)

Taken to catalogue and document cultural practices, photographs such as this one were intended as portraits of professions or ethnographic types rather than portraits of individuals. An unidentified photographer captured the picturesque pifferari, country musicians who wandered European cities around Christmas playing before images of the Virgin and on the streets. They were a common theme for French and Italian painters and photographers in the 1840s and 1850s.