Portrait of Faustina Bordoni Hasse

This 1730 pastel of Faustina Bordoni Hasse in Ca' Rezzonico, Venice, is one of several portraits Carriera made of the celebrated soprano, supplementing the 1724 Dresden example. By 1730 Bordoni had married the composer Johann Adolf Hasse and settled at the Dresden court, where she and her husband dominated operatic life for decades. Ca' Rezzonico — the great Venetian palace now serving as a museum of eighteenth-century Venetian life — holds this work in an appropriate context: the palace and its collections represent exactly the world in which both Carriera and Bordoni moved. The two women were near contemporaries, connected through Venice and Dresden, and Carriera's repeated return to Bordoni as a subject suggests genuine admiration for a figure of comparable cultural celebrity in a different field.

This later portrait of Bordoni, compared to the 1724 Dresden version, might show a more settled characterisation — the celebrated soprano at thirty-two rather than at the beginning of her career. Carriera's pastel technique in 1730 is at full maturity, and the characterisation here balances personal intimacy with public celebrity.