Portrait of a Gentleman

For a long time this pastel was catalogued as a Rosalba Carriera. That was an easy thing to assume in Venice. Carriera had made pastel the fashionable way to have your face taken, quick to sit for and flattering in a soft, powdery way, and by the 1730s her studio was one of the places foreign visitors asked to see. Anything good in that manner tended to drift to her name.

It has since been given to Marianna Carlevarijs, daughter of the view painter Luca Carlevarijs and part of the same Venetian circle. The case rests on how closely it matches her handful of secure works, the Balbi family portraits in the pastel room at Ca' Rezzonico in Venice. The sitter has never been identified, and the Brera's older title for the picture was simply Portrait of an Unknown Man. The museum dates it to 1737, and prints the date with a question mark.