A woman of genius

I KNOW people’s tempers from their faces,’ claimed preeminent 18th-century pastel portraitist Rosalba Carriera and images reproduced in Angela Oberer’s engrossing illustrated biography of the artist—the latest in Lund Humphries’s ‘Illuminating Women Artists’ series—testify to her out-of-the-ordinary insight

- Kate Green

Hailed by Parisian patrons of the 1720s as the ‘Queen of Pastel’, Carriera, Miss Oberer argues, became ‘the most internationally famous Venetian painter in her lifetime’. It’s not hard to see why.

Carriera was born 350 years ago, in 1673, the daughter of a Venetian lawyer. Excluded by her sex from any form of artistic training, this prodigious autodidact learnt by copying anything to hand. She forged a career in a hostile art market by confining herself from the outset to genres characterised by her contemporaries as ‘female’, including decorative miniatures, at first painted for snuff-box lids, and portraiture.

There was little, however, that was ‘female’ in Carriera’s approach to her hard-won career. Publicly, she downplayed any interest in making a living, but, by contrast, her diary is clogged with financial details. The mature Carriera did not have qualms about charging her clients fees widely regarded as exorbitant—most successfully, too. At her death in 1757, the octogenarian painter left assets valued at 24,556 zecchini, nearly 10 times Canaletto’s fortune. The annual cost of living in Carriera’s Venice has been estimated at 15 zecchini per person.