95 In 1711, Frederick Augustus, Elector of Saxony, embarked on an extended educational tour of Germany, Switzerland, France, and Italy that would continue into 1719. By February of 1712, he had already reached Venice, a city still new to him. Like his father, Augustus the Strong, he would develop a great fondness for the art of the city on the lagoon, as shown by the numerous works in the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister by artists such as Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese, and continuing all the way to Tiepolo and Canaletto. He also cultivated a special passion for the pastels of Rosalba Carriera, then a rising star among Venice’s artists. An ardent admirer of Carriera’s works, he “was prepared to pay any price for highly-prized works by Rosalba, no matter where they were found.”1 Although the provenance and acquisition history of many pictures by Carriera remain unclear, the purchases of large ensembles of her works are documented in a number of cases. Unfortunately, however, the vague titles listed in these documents make it difficult to identify individual works. We know, for example, that Count Francesco Algarotti was tasked by Augustus III with commissioning fromCarriera a series of the Four Elements, which she duly executed between 1744 and 1746 (see cats. 78–81).2 In 1750, twelve pastels by Rosalba from the estate of the savant Giambattista Recanati (whose widow Fioravanza Ravagnani sold them in order to acquire a Meissen porcelain service) arrived in Dresden, with Giovanni Pietro Minelli acting as intermediary agent.3 And in 1753, the cavalier Andrea Diedo received a chocolate and coffee service as compensation for five pastels by Carriera.4 The final group accession purportedly occurred following Rosalba’s death in August 1757, when Augustus is said to have purchased all of the works that remained in her studio,5 but there is something dubious about this assertion, since we know that a number of pastels were instead inherited by family members of hers, and no painting by her is explicitly mentioned in the post-mortem inventory.6 The collection of the British consul Joseph Smith – a patron of the arts and close friend of Carriera who owned no less than 38 of her works – was shipped to England, where they were absorbed by the collection of King George III; 23 of these pastels were indeed subsequently offered to Augustus III in 1760,7 but failed to arrive in Saxony as a consequence of the Seven Years’ War. In any case, assembled in Dresden now was thus the largest collection of pastels by Rosalba Carriera anywhere, consisting of altogether 157 works.8 This extraordinary ensemble of pastels by Rosalba, amassed over a period of several decades, seems to have given rise to the idea of presenting them together, separately from the oil paintings, in a “Cabinet of Rosalba.” They were joined by: four pastels by the cosmopolitan artist Jean-Étienne Liotard, a native of Geneva, among them the celebrated Chocolate Girl; two works by Maurice Quentin de Latour, the most esteemed French pastellist; as well as ten pastels by the German Anton Raphael Mengs. Johann Christoph Knöffel’s conversion, in 1745/46, of the former Stallhof (mews) into a picture gallery, or Gemäldegalerie, also presented the elector with the opportunity to create a special exhibition space for the pastels. In the first volume of works in the gallery, entitled Recueil d’Estampes d’après les plus célèbres Tableaux de la Galerie Royale de Dresde and published by Carl Heinrich von Heineken in 1753, a floor plan by Michael Keyl identifies the room labelled “C” as a “Cabinet de Pastel” (fig. 1). From the Residenzschloss, the elector would enter the Gemäldegalerie via the Long Corridor (today the Gewehrgalerie/Firearms Gallery), and hence always entered the Pastel Cabinet first. The cabinet itself consisted of a rectangular room, located in the upper story, measuring approximately 55 square metres and with a height of nine meters. It received light from the northeast via two windows; the wall facing the mews was sealed. The earliest description of the interior design is from Giovanni Lodovico Bianconi, although it appeared only somewhat later, in 1781: “The Rosalba Cabinet is a large roomwith pale green wallpaper, and looks out onto a broad, beautiful street. The long wall opposite the windows is covered from top to bottom with the loveliest pastel paintings, all by the hand of this good painter, more than 100, perhaps. On display in their midst, as though in her own home, is a self-portrait by the immortal Venetian, which stands out from all of the others. On the two side walls, where two gilded doors face one another, and through which visitors enter, are pastels by Mengs, Liotard, Mr. De la Tour, and several others, all among the best pastel painters of our century. The fourth long wall, the one opposite Rosalba, has only windows of broad plate glass, while mounted from top to bottom on the walls between them [negl’ interfenestri] are large Frenchmirrors, thereby enchanting the viewer by doubling these delightful objects. Like the bright glazing and gilded frames, the pastels are all identical in size. The floor is inlaid with all manner of foreign woods; the arched ceiling is white, but decorated and gilded in the Arab style.”9 In his Umständliche Beschreibung (Detailed Description), Johann Christian Hasche, a chronicler of Dresden, relativizes Bianconi’s elaborate descriptionwith the words: “When printed reports tell of a painted hall, and prattle on about statues, ensembles of marble and metal, porphyry and serpentine, this only confirms that [their authors] have never actually seen it. The ceiling is white, unpainted, the walls are covered in green damask with goldmouldings and clad above in similar leafwork; the pictures hang on the walls in splendid, hand-carved gold frames. Displayed on the lower rails of the frames is the royal coat of arms,
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