Portrait of Luísa Todi by Élisabeth Louise Vigée-Lebrun

Luísa Todi was one of the most celebrated singers of the late eighteenth century, a Portuguese mezzo-soprano whose voice provoked fierce debate about which was superior — hers or that of her rival, the soprano Gabrielli. Vigée Le Brun painted this portrait in 1789, the year of the Revolution, during the period of her most prolific output before leaving France. The National Museum of Music in Lisbon holds this canvas as a document of Todi's fame and of the cultural world in which celebrated performers and visual artists moved in overlapping circles. Vigée Le Brun painted numerous portraits of women from the performing arts as well as from the aristocracy, and these images helped consolidate the subjects' celebrity. The portrait shows Todi with a musical attribute — consistent with commemorating her professional achievement — within the warmly refined style that made Vigée Le Brun the most fashionable female portraitist in Europe.

The portrait follows Vigée Le Brun's characteristic format for female sitters: three-quarter or half-length, warm flesh modelling, the face given luminous precedence. A musical attribute — perhaps sheet music or an instrument — identifies the professional context while remaining compositionally subordinate to the face and figure.