Carlotta Cortudino ca. 1852 Giacomo Caneva Italian Giacomo Caneva was among the circle of Italian, French, and British artists who, beginning about 1850, exchanged ideas and information about their photographic work at informal meetings at the Caffè Greco, in Rome's Piazza di Spagna. Caneva's embrace of photography, first the daguerreotype and later the paper negative process, was a natural outgrowth of his training as a painter of perspective scenes. In this intimate portrait of a reclining girl bathed in light, the wall of the photographer’s balcony functions as a makeshift backdrop. Caneva staged many images on the sunlit terrace of his studio on the via Babuino, just down the street from the Caffè Greco. He was the first photographer working in nineteenth-century Rome to make genre scenes with peasants a major subject.. Carlotta Cortudino. Giacomo Caneva (Italian, 1812-1865). ca. 1852. Salted paper print from paper negative. Photographs