The Parrot as the Male Appendage

Analyzing Innuendo in Rosalba Carriera’s A Young Lady with a Parrot

Abstract

Around 1730, Italian painter Rosalba Carriera produced A Young Lady with a Parrot, a pastel work quintessential to the rococo pictorial style and its development. Featuring a sensuously depicted woman holding a parrot, it has become a frequently cited example in the discussion of recurrent themes of erotic passion, indulgence, and wit in rococo art. This article intends to examine the painting in greater depth with a specific focus on Carriera’s role as a female artist within eighteenth-century Europe. In comparison to her male contemporaries, Carriera faced restrictions that limited the subject matter she could depict without jeopardizing her career. Resultantly, Carriera may have utilized the parrot in A Young Lady with a Parrot as a metonym for male genitalia and, by extension, a synecdoche for the painting’s male audience. In doing so, Carriera could concurrently bypass her impositions and offer subversive commentary on the trope of voyeurism in painting and its usage of male surrogates. To corroborate this possibility, this article will look at Carriera’s A Young Lady With a Parrot alongside her circa 1730 pastel portrait A Lady With a Parrot and 1705 watercolour miniature Innocence. Furthermore, it will compare the erotic pastel portrait to Antoine François Dennel’s 1788 engraving The Test of The Corset to highlight Carriera's inversions of expected voyeur motifs.