23 miniatures at this point in her career) by ordering them directly from her studio while in Venice or doing so entirely through correspondence, having the small-format pictures delivered to their homes. However, the artist also boasted influential friends in Italy and Venice itself.6 Antonio Maria Zanetti, an art collector and writer, as well as an artist in his own right (known today primarily for his caricatures of famous personalities from the world of Venetian art and culture) numbered among Carriera’s closest lifelong friends and supporters, as would also, in later years, the author and translator Luisa Bergalli (see essay by Tiziana Plebani in this volume).7 Intellectuals like Giovanni Battista Recanati and fellow painters such as Sebastiano Bombelli, Antonio Balestra, and Giovanni Felice Ramelli were also among the closest friends of the artist and her family. Internationally renowned performers such as the dancer Barbara Campanini (see cat. 50) and singer Faustina Bordoni (see cat. 51) chose Carriera when the time came to have their portraits painted. The first official recognition for her achievements in painting came in 1705, when Carriera was officially inducted on 27 September as a painter of miniatures into the Accademia di San Luca in Rome. It warrants mentioning that she was awarded the special distinction of an accademica di merito (academician on merit) rather than the status more typically accorded to women: honorarymembership, or accademica d’onore.8 After a great deal of hesitation, she eventually submitted her reception piece of a miniature of a young girl with a dove, which was given the title Allegory of Innocence in the academy’s early guidebooks (fig. 2).9 The turn of the 18th century and her first admission to an academy coincided with a new phase in Carriera’s artistic career, when the artist first discovered pastel painting. As with attempts to discover who trained the artist or how exactly she first came to start painting miniatures, it has to date not been possible to establish beyond doubt who or what led Carriera to take up pastel painting.10 One concrete date can be gleaned, however, from a letter Fig. 2 (cat. 31) Rosalba Carriera Girl with Dove (Innocence) c. 1705 · tempera on ivory · 10.5 × 8.5 cm Rome, Accademia Nazionale di San Luca, inv. no. 442
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