Maria Giovanna Clementi

In 1723 the court of Turin needed a portrait of the king to send to Paris, a gift for the French marshal Villars. Filippo Juvarra, the court architect, named the painter he thought best suited, and that painter was a woman. Giovanna Battista Maria Buzano, a Turin surgeon's daughter born in 1690, could never have joined the city's guild of painters, which admitted only men. She trained instead with the court portraitist Giovanni Battista Curlando, married Giuseppe Bartolomeo Clementi in 1711 and signed her pictures with his surname. Turin called her la Clementina.

For more than 30 years she painted the house of Savoy, and her portraits of the royal family went as gifts to other Italian courts, to Paris, to Lorraine and to Cologne. When Charles Emmanuel III came to the throne in 1731, he made her his official portraitist. The German traveller Johann Georg Keysler wrote that Clementina, at Turin, was the best portrait painter. Juvarra stood godfather to one of her daughters, and she raised nine children, on her own after her husband died in 1744.

The last payment recorded in the royal accounts, in 1755, covered nine portraits painted over the previous three years. By then the brothers Giuseppe and Domenico Duprà had become the court's portrait painters. She died in Turin in 1761.