Portrait of a boy

By the 1720s a foreign visitor to Venice on the grand tour often went home with a small pastel by Rosalba Carriera, and this portrait of a boy is one of those. It was made around 1726, in coloured chalk on paper, and it is tiny, barely the size of a sheet of writing paper. In her diary Carriera noted a payment of 50 zecchini from the French consul in July 1727, most likely for this very head, part of a group of pastels linked to a French family living in the city. Pastel was the reason she could work this way at all. The powdered chalk sits loose on the paper and comes away at the slightest jolt, so these portraits could not really travel or be cleaned. That fragility is why 13 of her pastels have stayed together here at the Gallerie dell'Accademia, in the Venice where she made them.