This Jewish woman of the Ottoman Empire wears a blue jacket worn over a black dress, with red shoes and a tall hat draped in a veil (“Dona Ebrea in casa”).
The Torah views the defection of one single Jewish soul from Judaism as the ultimate tragedy, for is not “one solitary Jewish life an entire world”? And an intermarriage is nothing…
Theresa Concordia Mengs painted this self-portrait with pastels, her preferred medium, when she was about twenty years old, a few years after her family moved from Dresden to Rome.