English: Equestrian portrait of the architect Michel-Barthélemy Hazon (1722-1822) in the costume of a Turkish Mufti,

"Joseph-Marie Vien’s portrait of Barthélemy-Michel Hazon (1722-1822) was apparently expanded from one of the many costume designs Vien executed for a fancy dress party which he, as a pensionnaire of the French Academy in Rome, helped to organize in February 1748 as part of the students’ carnival celebrations.

Here, Hazon is shown dressed in the long caftan, open, fur-trimmed over-tunic and high turban of a Mufti, a Sunni Islamic scholar of Sharia law, what would be, loosely put in religious administrative terms, the Sunni equivalent of a deacon. He is shown mounted on an Arabian horse holding a codex, which is presumably meant to be the Koran. Vien also included various Arab monuments in the background to suggest Mecca. Hazon, a confrere of Vien’s, was studying architecture at the Academy in 1748 under the patronage of Madame de Pompadour. (..)

The carnival celebrations preceding the Lenten season were one of the premier events in the Roman calendar. The students of the Academy were famous for their elaborately staged and costumed pageants, which were usually based on a foreign theme. However, the pensionnaires’ Turkish masque of 1748, which Vien designed and supervised, was nothing short of a cultural phenomenon. Even Pope Benedict XIV was said to have participated in the revels, albeit incognito. Based on a Roman triumph, the parade of Academicians winding through the streets of Rome was heralded by trumpeters and drummers, followed by twenty horsemen, splendid horse-drawn floats carrying the students disguised to evoke stock figures of the Turkish court, i.e. sultans and sultanas, viziers, eunuchs, etc. Their sumptuous costumes were made of common materials cleverly painted to imitate moirées, velvets and embroidered silks, and all the figures, even the sultanas, were played by the exclusively male pensionnaires. The masque was so celebrated that the pensionnaires were even invited to be guests of Cardinal de La Rochefoucauld at a sumptuous banquet, followed by a ball." ref