Marianna Carlevarijs

In the pastel room at Ca' Rezzonico, the museum of 18th-century Venice on the Grand Canal, a group of portraits of the Balbi family hangs under her name. They came to the museum in 1960 with that attribution already attached, and they are the fixed point against which anything else offered as hers is measured. One of them, Caterina Balbi, is dated to about 1740.

She worked in pastel in the years when Venice had settled on it as the agreeable way to have a face taken, quick to sit for and soft in the finish. Rosalba Carriera had made that fashion, and Marianna belonged to her circle. She had learned to draw in her father's house, where Luca Carlevarijs painted views of Venice for foreign visitors, and the Zenobio, the wealthy Venetian family who had backed him, supported her as well. She died in 1750, at 47.