149 Perhaps Carriera found some compensation in her large international circle of friends and aristocratic patrons who called on her in her studio, thereby linking the city and the nowmuch diminished Venetian Republic with Europe’s centres of power. It was not until 1720 that she finally yielded to the persistent entreaties of the French banker and collector Pierre Crozat and accepted his invitation to Paris, where, accompanied by her mother, her sisters, and her brother-in-law Antonio Pellegrini, she stayed at Crozat’s Paris residence, the Hôtel de Crozat. During this journey, Rosalba kept meticulous diaries that bear witness to her triumphant success. Shemet the great and the good as well as celebrated fellow painters, and she recorded the burden of her huge workload and themany commissions she could hardly keep up with. The highlight was undoubtedly her admission, on 26 October 1720, to the French Académie royale de peinture et sculpture – the arbiter of taste and the premier art institution in France – as the first foreign female artist to be awarded the accolade. In April/May 1721 she travelled back to Venice. Just over two years later, in June 1723, and once again accompanied by her mother and her sister Giovanna, Carriera travelled to Modena, some 200 kilometres southwest of Venice, and stayed for about five months. Rinaldo d’Este, Duke of Modena and Reggio, whom she had met earlier, had invited her to his court to paint portraits of his three daughters, then in their early to mid-twenties. These portraits had to be turned out in multiples and were sent to various European courts in the hope of finding suitable husbands for the princesses. Rosalba described her stay as boring, although the ducal collection of paintings did offer her some diversion. In November, the artist and her family returned to Venice. In 1728, the painter attended the ceremonial act of Hereditary Homage for Emperor Charles VI and his wife Elisabeth Christine in Gorizia, whichwas then part of the Habsburg Empire. Here the groundwork was laid for her final and fruitful journey, which was to take her to the imperial capital of Vienna.2 Her brother-in-law, the artist Giovanni Pellegrini, who had been active in Vienna since 1725, most likely had a hand in the invitation to the Habsburg capital, where Carriera and her sisters enjoyed the imperial splendour of architecture, music, and the fine arts. They immersed themselves in court life, and Rosalba continued to receive numerous portrait commissions. Of particular note are her portraits of the female members of the House of Habsburg, as well as the evidently warm personal relationship that developed between her and the Dowager Empress Wilhelmine Amalie.3 In letters to her mother, who was getting too old and frail to travel and had stayed behind in Venice, it is clear how much Rosalba enjoyed her time in Vienna, the cultural sophistication, themany encounters and, above all, the esteem in which she was held. She arrived back in Venice in the autumn. The trip to Vienna proved to be her final journey; she did not leave Venice again until her death some thirty years later, in 1757. RE 1 • Sensier 1865, p. 18. 2 • Oberer 2020, pp. 250–256. 3 • Sani 2022.
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