Carriera's House on the Grand Canal, a Fashionable Space of Self-Representation

Houses and rooms are a reflection of the person who inhabits and works in them. They are semiotic spaces that reveal how the world constructs the subject and that also show how the subject constructs him/herself. Carriera's residence on the Grand Canal represents a particularly interesting example of an aptly constructed space that can be read as a theatrical mise en scène of her desired identity and as her own, cleverly created image of herself. A crucial and contextual analysis and evidence of Carriera's house serve as a basis to investigate the artist's more direct representation of herself in her self-portraiture.

The mere fact that this palazzo was the home and production site of an internationally renowned, unmarried, independent woman artist, where representatives of the entire European aristocracy often met, marked this hospitable palace as an exceptional place. Outside of the lagoon and during the same period, this integration of private and public sphere, of living space and workshop in a painter's house could be more easily found. As Angela Rosenthal informs us: ‘From a variety of sources we can tell that during the eighteenth century in London, artists usually integrated the portrait studio with adjoining gallery into their homes.’ And the house in Rome of Angelica Kauffmann, who lived a generation after Carriera, contained her studio and her salon, both of which attracted an international artistic crowd. In Paris, Rosenthal points out, Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun described her house and studio as indistinct from one another. But in Venice it was truly exceptional that this same arrangement could be found in Carriera's house. It was an external manifestation that, like clothes and social manners, served to promote her as a professional and virtuous producer and to target specific clients, both of which formed portions of a notable marketing strategy.

The most captivating room inside the palazzo was the one that served as a living space, a salotto and, at the same time, as her own atelier, which fittingly faced north. This salon space was thus a casa-studio and in this respect comparable to the home of her predecessor in Bologna, Elisabetta Sirani.