Here, we have met Rosalba Carriera and revealed the clever ways and tactics this outstanding artist used to build a unique career as an independent female painter.

With her astute inventions – including erudite references to Venetian great masters and to ancient and early modern literature – Carriera proved to be an exceptionally talented woman early in her career, highly aware of her singular role in the art world, and unwilling to shy away from displaying her capacities. Not even theoretically problematic themes for a female painter such as eroticizing or purely erotic paintings were an obstacle or a taboo for Carriera whose clients and admirers greatly appreciated these works without reservations or scruples of any shape or form.

It was Carriera's preference for pastel painting which guaranteed her international fame and made her a leading figure in the development and spread of the pastel portrait as a new fashion. Moreover, with what I called the ‘Carriera mask’, the artist created a market for a specific type of female pastel portrait that offered her clients a particular identity, based on being a recognizable Carriera painting of a beautiful woman. These uniformed works coexist with portraits that reflect a strong sense of humanity and psychological truth. The artist's outstanding capacity to imitate nature while also capturing every nuance of expression or state of mind, and every hint of the physical or mental well-being of her sitter, was another novelty within the realm of pastel portraits that was enormously successful and that found numerous followers.

In exploring some of her allegorical or mythological pastels, we once again meet an artist whose inventions and iconography proved to be original and the fruit of a witty and courageous painter who, like in the genre of miniature painting, enthusiastically tackled titillating, erotic images.

And none of these accomplishments can be underestimated for a woman artist in the eighteenth century. The mere fact that Carriera owned and ran her own workshop was an extraordinary success, not to mention the regular presence of the local and international aristocracy and intellectual elite. Remaining unmarried, independent of any personal emotional conditions, could only be of help.