22 Rosalba Carriera was born in Venice on 12 January 1673 to Alba Foresti and Andrea Carriera, a clerk in the employ of the city-republic. She was given the name Rosalba Zuanna (Giovanna) at her baptism ten days later.1 A second daughter, born in October 1675, was also baptized Rosalba Giovanna, probably in view of the perilous state of her elder sister’s health. Fearing that their eldest child would die in infancy, the parents decided to give the same name to their second daughter.2 To distinguish the two girls, the elder was called Rosalba while her younger sister was known as Giovanna (and, variously, Nenetta and Zanina within the family). A third daughter, Anzola (Angela) Cecilia, was born two years later, in September 1677. All three daughters were taught needle-lacemaking by their mother, an art for which Venice was famed, although they also had lessons in Latin, French, andmusic, which went well beyond the sort of education typically given to the daughters of non-aristocratic Venetian families in the late 17th century.3 Exactly when Rosalba first took up painting is not known. Likewise, the question of who first gave her art lessons is still a subject of debate due to the vagueness of the sources.4 However, we do know that she would have instructed her sisters in painting froman early age, in keeping with the ideas of a time when first-born daughters were expected to take responsibility for their younger siblings. Over the years, Giovanna came to be Rosalba’s most important assistant both inside and outside the studio. She spent her entire life supporting and accompanying her elder sister, while Angela appears to have largely abandoned painting andmarried the painter Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini at some point around 1703/04. In 1700, the Carriera familymoved out of the Rio di San Barnaba to a house on the Grand Canal next to the Palazzo Venier dei Leoni, which today houses the Peggy Guggenheim Collection (fig. 1). That same year, Rosalba began collecting her extensive correspondence. Published in 1985 in two volumes edited by Bernardina Sani, these writings represent an invaluable treasury of documents unique in art history, which still today continue to provide scholars with a rich seam of materials on Carriera.5 The early letters lend a number of illuminating insights, such as how by her late twenties the artist had already established a wide-ranging international network of customers, who bought her early works (Carriera was still painting Fig. 1 The Ca’Biondetti, the Carriera family’s palazzo on the Grand Canal in Venice
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