The Life and Work of Rosalba Carriera (1673–1757): The Queen of Pastel is the first extensive biographical narrative in English of Rosalba Carriera. It is also the first to provide a scholarly investigation into the external and internal factors that helped to create this female painter's unique career in eighteenth-century Europe. It documents the difficulties, complications and consequences that arose then, or that more generally can also arise today, when a woman decides to become an independent artist. This book contributes a new, in-depth analysis of the interplay between society’s expectations, generally accepted codices for gendered behaviour, and one single female painter's astute strategies for achieving success as well as autonomy in her professional life as a famed artist.

I have written this study with the intention of presenting this outstanding and fascinating painter to a wider, English-speaking audience, as to date, there are surprisingly few publications on this artist in English. Furthermore, it is intended to offer a basis for future investigations into Carriera's contributions to the fields of art history, history, gender and sociology.

Over forty years have passed since Linda Nochlin published her famous and groundbreaking essay with the provocative title ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Painters?’ Her presentation of the social factors that held women back in their pursuit of an artistic career has provided a theoretical ground for a new scholarly approach to the subject. Ever since then, feminist and gender studies have explored the historical process of artistic production and the lives and careers of those women who, generally with great unconventionality, pursued their aims in the artistic realm. New questions have been asked about their private, social and public environments. After the publication of the first compendia of forgotten names of female artists across various cultures and ages in the 1970s, new methodological approaches in the various academic disciplines began further opening up this new field of scholarly investigation. The resulting momentous paradigm shift has raised our awareness, and has also changed, and is still changing, how we evaluate women's contributions to the arts.

In the light of these four decades of rigorous research, as well as of increased public interest in female artists, it is difficult to understand why a figure such as Rosalba Carriera has almost disappeared from view, the one artist who was more celebrated in her day than any female painter before her.