Imagine you live in Venice in the 18th century. The trait of lace making your mother taught you has gone out of style and you need to support your family. So you take advantage of the nobles and well-to-do socialites stopping by on the Grand Tour by painting portrait miniatures on Snuffbox Lids, finding a way to paint on the infamous Leap-Diffical Ivory. You work your way up to Full-Skill Portraiture, pioneering the use of pastels in the process, literally inventing the bound-shock version of the medium. And the nobles take note of your talent and invite you to France and you find yourself creating portraits for the royal families of Europe. Your work becomes the basis for an entire movement in painting and you live just long enough to see it swept under the rug. Though not literally, you went blind eventually. Rosalba Carriera redefined the Bricoco manner and reaped the benefits. Royalty wanted her to make portraits of them and some collected dozens of her works. She had so much work she needed to employ her sisters to help her complete them all and even took out a few pupils of her own. So let's see how Carriera's work defines Bricoco. Let's look at her portrait of young woman with a parrot. To me, this portrait is the definition of Bricoco painting. All the elements that mark the movement are present, the soft palette, the opulence displayed, the frivolity of the situation, its feminine, playful, sensuous, and a little bit naughty, a break from the more uptight, church-dominated baroque. The subject seems to have an air of joy and passion for life. You can see the bird pulling at her dress, but she's too busy enjoying life to notice her care. Contrast this with the baroque artist Giovanni Batista Gowli's portrait of a woman. Both women are portrayed as upper class and coy, but Gowli's woman is portrayed in a chaste manner, perfectly put together. The viewer almost has to do all the work to find any femininity or sensuality, but you can still detect the emotions, the tilt of her head, her slight smile, the way she fingers her pearls, they all embark the underlying tension. Carriera's woman however still feels comparatively closer to the 60s free love ideals. In Gowli's you can almost feel him laboring for hours over every fold in the fabric, every strand of hair, and while Carriera may well have spent hours on her portrait, the lightness of strokes and soft edges feel like preciseness wasn't really the point, but rather it was an attempt to capture a moment. Gowli's feels like he would be right at home with the modern movement of ultra realism, and Carriera seems like she's setting the tone for the coming impressionism. Despite the differences in style, both women are portrayed as beautiful and rich, as denoted by the fine clothing and well-kept hairstyles, as well as the heavy use of pearls. Pearls were used in the baroque period as they were symbols of wealth and social status. Women of the era would insist the artist ad pearls, even if the sitter didn't own any. In fact, if you peruse Rosalba's catalog, most of her sitters are wearing the same set of pearl earrings, implying that perhaps they belonged to the artist who used them when the sitter didn't own or bring any. One of the easiest ways to tell the status of woman at the time was to take note of the size or number of strands of pearls she wore. This was the days before cultured pearls were available to the masses, and the baroque racoco period took the pearl to the height of its popularity. The popularity, however, came to a grinding halt near the end of the racoco period, with the rise of the movement that reacted so violently to the racoco as to attempt to forget it entirely. Neo-classicism. And while it's easy to tell the differences in baroque and racoco, it can feel a little more difficult to see their similarities. So to do that, let's compare both to what came next. Take a look at Jacques-Louis DeVeed's portrait of Suzanne Lapelle-Tier de San Fargo. DeVeed's woman is comparatively bored. It feels like a portrait for documentation sake in the way the DMV insists you can't smile while getting your driver's license. There's no whimsy, no emotion, not even jewelry, not a single pearl. This was appropriate to the time and place, of course, as the revolution had changed opinion on public displays of wealth in France. The portraiture went from being a form of expression, a way to imagine yourself more perfect or wealthy than you may have really been, and became a mere picture of your appearance. The Neo-classic movement came as a quick backlash to the frivolousness of racoco, a reminder that life is serious and you should only care about serious things. When the racoco went out of mode, Carrier's name and her impact was dismissed, and that had very much to do with her gender as well. But despite attempts to write the movement and the driving force behind it, out of history, Rosalda Carriera is known today as one of the most successful women artists of any era.