Portrait of Felicita Sartori in Turkish costume

Rosalba Carriera's 1730 portrait of Felicita Sartori in Turkish costume belongs to the Rococo vogue for turquerie — the fashionable imitation of Ottoman or broadly 'Eastern' dress that swept European aristocratic culture in the first half of the eighteenth century. Turquerie combined genuine curiosity about the Ottoman world with aesthetic pleasure in exotic fabrics, jewels, and headdresses, and both male and female sitters sought portraits in Turkish-style dress. The practice was not ethnographic documentation but decorative fantasy — the costumes were European approximations of perceived Eastern dress, valued for their colourful difference from Western fashion. Felicita Sartori was likely a Venetian figure within Carriera's social orbit. The Museum of Art and History Geneva holds this portrait, which arrived through the trans-European movement of collectors and artworks over three centuries.

Turkish costume offered Carriera a rich technical opportunity: turbans of wrapped silk, jewelled accessories, and fabrics in colours rarely found in European dress. She renders the exotic headdress with careful attention to the wrapped layers and any decorative elements, while the face is given the same warm, attentive characterisation as in her European-dress portraits.