Portrait of Eleonora Chigi, Princess of Teano

Sablet's 1793 portrait of Eleonora Chigi, Princess of Teano, was produced during his long Roman period, when he served as portraitist to the Italian and international aristocracy who formed Rome's social elite. The Chigi family was one of the great Roman banking and noble dynasties, with roots in the Renaissance when Agostino Chigi had been perhaps the wealthiest man in Italy; by 1793 the family remained prominent in Roman society despite the turbulence beginning to reach Italy from revolutionary France. Eleonora Chigi's portrait is typical of the aristocratic commissions Sablet received: a formal likeness that communicates rank and refinement through pose, dress, and setting rather than through individual psychological penetration. The tension of 1793 — the year of the Terror in France, the beginning of the Wars of the First Coalition — is not visible in the serene, timeless quality Sablet projects onto his Roman aristocratic subjects. The work is now in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, indicating the broad dispersal of European aristocratic portrait collections through the art market of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Sablet applies a polished neoclassical technique appropriate to aristocratic portraiture: smooth blended transitions, controlled lighting from a single source, and careful attention to the textures of fine fabric. The princess's bearing and costume carry the primary visual weight, with the background kept neutral to enhance the formal presence of the figure.