[Studio Portrait: Man Wearing Carnival Mask, Venice]

The carte de visite, composed of a print of approximately 2 x 4 inches mounted to card stock, is perhaps the most ubiquitous form of nineteenth-century photography. From the late 1850s through the latter half of the century, these economical keepsakes circulated en masse and spurred a veritable “cartomania.” This is an example of those distributed by the commercial photography studios of Conrad in Naples and Ponti in Venice, depicting occupational “types” related to those cities, such as a hooded member of a religious confraternity, a masked Pulcinella (a stock theater character), a musician, a water carrier, and an oyster shucker, among others. While these stereotypical images charmed tourists interested in foreign customs, they also appealed to a growing clientele of middle-class Italians as a means of reflecting on their own social standing.