Pompeo Batoni
Pompeo Girolamo Batoni or Battoni (25 January, 1708 - 4 February, 1787) was an Italian painter whose style incorporated elements of the French Rococo, Bolognese classicism, and nascent Neoclassicism.
Biography
He was born in Lucca, the son of a goldsmith, Paolino Battoni. He moved to Rome in 1727 or 1728, and apprenticed with Sebastiano Conca and/or Francesco Imperiale (1679-1740).
By the early 1740s, however, he started to receive independent commissions. In 1741, he was inducted into the Accademia di San Luca. His celebrated painting, The Ecstasy of Saint Catherine of Siena (1743) [1] illustrates his academic refinement of the late-Baroque style. Another masterpiece, his Fall of Simon Magus[2] was painted initially for the St Peter's Basilica.
Batoni became a highly-fashionable painter in the Rome, particularly after his rival, the proto-neoclassicist Anton Raphael Mengs, departed for Spain in 1761. Batoni befriended Winckelmann and, like him, aimed in his painting to the restrained classicism of painters from earlier centuries, such as Raphael and Poussin, rather to the work of the Venetian artists then in vogue.
He was greatly in demand for portraits, particularly by the British traveling through Rome [3][4], who took pleasure in commissioning standing portraits set in the milieu of antiquities, ruins, and works of art. There are records of over 200 portraits by Batoni of visiting British patrons [5]. Such "Grand Tour" portraits by Batoni came to proliferate in the British private collections, thus ensuring the genre's popularity in the United Kingdom, where Sir Joshua Reynolds would become its leading practitioner. In 1760, the painter Benjamin West, while visiting Rome would complain that Italian artists "talked of nothing, looked at nothing but the works of Pompeo Batoni"[6].
In 1769, the double portrait[7] of Joseph II and Leopold II won an Austrian nobility for Batoni. He also portrayed Pope Pius VI[8]. According to a rumor, he bequeathed his palette and brushes to Jacques-Louis David.
He was married twice, to Caterina Setti (d. 1742) in 1729, and then to Lucia Fattori in 1747, and had twelve children; three of his sons assisted in his studio. From 1759 Batoni lived in a large house on the Via Bocca di Leone in Rome, which included a studio as well as exhibition rooms and a drawing academy. He died in Rome.
Gallery
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Lady Mary Fox, 1767 -
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Portrait of Clement XIII, Galleria Venezia, Rome
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Achilles at the Court of Lycomedes, 1745, oil on canvas, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence -
Diana & Cupid, 1761, oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
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The Sacred Family, Capitoline Museums, Rome -
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Architecture, Sculpture and Painting
References
- Clarck, M. (1985). Pompeo Batoni. Oxford.
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Footnotes
- ^ Ecstasy of Saint Catherine of Siena at Museo di Villa Guinigi in Lucca.
- ^ Fall of Simon Magus (1750) at Cleveland Museum of Art.
- ^ Portrait of John Talbot
- ^ Portrait of John Wodehouse
- ^ European Paintings; Keith Christiansen. Notable Acquisitions (Metropolitan Museum of Art) (1982) pp39-41.
- ^ K. Christiansen. p40
- ^ Portrait of Emperor Joseph and his brother, Grand Duke Leopold, in Rome
- ^ Portrait of Pius VI