24 - Rosalba Carriera (Venice 1675–1757), workshop/student of

Rosalba Carriera (Venice 1675–1757), workshop/student of Portrait of a Noblewoman with a Little Monkey Pastel on paper 66 x 54.5 cm This work is based on the painting housed at the Louvre Museum in Paris; it is worth noting her habit of making one or more copies of all the paintings she created from 1720 onward Rosalba Carriera is among the greatest artists of 18th-century Europe. She is considered the greatest female artist of all time. Her style offers the most perceptive and penetrating insight into 18th-century Venetian and European society and was fundamental to the development of French portraiture. Through her portraits, she explored in an unparalleled way the ideals of grace and elegance of an era: the swan song of the European nobility, which, a few decades later, would lose its status within a society transformed by Enlightenment ideas. Raised to cultivate the arts, as was customary for young women of the time, Rosalba and her two sisters studied music, literature, painting, embroidery, and foreign languages. Rosalba soon devoted herself to the study of painting, particularly miniatures and portraits, delving into and rediscovering the pastel technique, which had fallen into disuse by that time. Having become famous for the delicacy of her miniatures, she began to portray the most prominent figures of the era using the pastel technique, in which she excelled in Europe. Thanks to the extremely delicate shading and strokes of pure color that this technique allows, her patrons found in her works both an extreme delicacy in the velvety skin tones and the realistic precision of the details. Her success, combined with her knowledge of several languages, opened the door to many European courts, where she enhanced her reputation by painting miniatures and portraits for royal families and the court nobility. She died in Venice at just over eighty years of age, on April 15, 1757, after a painful decade marked by blindness. Rosalba Carriera (Venice 1675–1757), workshop/pupil of Portrait of a Noblewoman with a Little Monkey Pastel on paper 66 x 54.5 cm The work is based on the painting held at the Louvre Museum in Paris. It is worth noting the artist’s practice of producing one or more copies of all the paintings she executed from 1720 onward