ABSTRACT
An important milestone in the history of art was reached by the Roman Accademia di San Luca at its general meeting of 25 September 1705. On that day the celebrated Venetian painter Rosalba Camera (Figure 2.1) was unanimously elected to membership in the venerable artists' academy despite institutional restrictions against female members. Admitted as an accademica di merito, a rank that acknowledged professional status, Camera was immediately distinguished from those few previous women who had been received only as honorary members in a category designed to include learned amateurs, collectors, patrons and connoisseurs, but not professional artists (accademico d'onore). The fact that Carriera lived exclusively in Venice and worked in media (miniature and pastel) often considered 'lesser', 'decorative' or 'feminine' (quite possibly because of her association with them), was doubtless of significance to the Roman academicians, but I shall argue that her unprecedented degree of international fame and the professional ambition of the Academy itself worked in her favor. Cultural celebrity was a commodity in which eighteenth-century academies increasingly wished to invest; indeed, they could not afford to ignore it. Camera's meteoric rise in popularity and reputation made her an attractive candidate for membership in the Accademia di San Luca and the officers of the institution, including the principe (president) Carlo Maratti, the professor of painting Benedetto Luti, and the life secretary Giuseppe Ghezzi, were not slow to welcome her into their ranks. The academic thirst for fame
triumphed over long-standing prejudice against women artists and media usually associated with women.
