Pompeo Batoni ( Pompeo Girolamo Batoni)
Paintings
The Return of the Prodigal Son
Portrait of a Young Man
Sir Sampson Gideon and an unidentified companion
Time orders Old Age to destroy Beauty
Apollo and two Muses
The Marchioness of Headfort Holding Her Daughter Mary
The Madonna and Child with the Infant Saint John the Baptist
Portrait of Sir Wyndham Knatchbull-Wyndham
Portrait of a Woman
Venus Caressing Cupid
Diana and Cupid
William Weddell
Portrait of John Scott of Banks Fee
Portrait of Richard Milles
William Fermor
Edward Weld
Emperor Joseph II and Emperor Leopold II
Portrait of Count Kirill Grigorjewitsch Razumovsky
Susanna and the Elders
Portrait of a Gentleman
Portrait of John Talbot, later 1st Earl Talbot
Acis and Galatea
Christ in Glory with Saints Celsus Julian Marcionilla and Basilissa
Emperor Joseph II and Emperor Leopold IIPortrait of John Scott of Banks Fee
Time orders Old Age to destroy Beauty
Portrait of John Marquis of Monthermer
Portrait of Sir Wyndham Knatchbull-Wyndham
Achilles and the Centaur Chiron
The Ecstasy of St Catherine of Siena
Portrait of Princess Giacinta Orsini Buoncampagni Ludovisi
The Marriage of Cupid and Psyche
Don José Moñino y Redondo, Count of Floridablanca
Portrait of Charles William Ferdinand, Duke of Brunswick and Lüneburg
A Knight in Rome: Charles Cecil Roberts
Venus Presenting Aeneas with Armour Forged by Vulcan
Portrait of John Talbot, later 1st Earl Talbot
Emperor Joseph II with Grand Duke Pietro Leopoldo of Tuscany
James Caulfeild, 4th Viscount Charlemont (Later 1st Earl of Charlemont)
Portrait of a Woman, traditionally identified as Margaret Stuart, Lady Hippisley
Portrait of Sir Wyndham Knatchbull-Wyndham
Sir Sampson Gideon and an unidentified companion
The Marchioness of Headfort Holding Her Daughter Mary
Thomas Tayleur, First Marquess of Headfort
San Marino risolleva la Repubblica
The infant Hercules strangling serpents in his cradle
The women of Darius before Alexander the Great
Cleopatra showing Octavius the bust of Julius Caesar
Thetis Takes Achilles from the Centaur Chiron
Drawings
Academic Nude
Male Nude Leaning on a Ladder
Study of a Female Figure
A dog, looking to the left
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The Return of the Prodigal Son
Pompeo Girolamo Batoni (25 January 1708 – 4 February 1787) was an Italian painter who displayed a solid technical knowledge in his portrait work and in his numerous allegorical and mythological pictures. The high number of foreign visitors travelling throughout Italy and reaching Rome during their Grand Tour, made the artist specialized in portraits. Batoni won international fame largely thanks to his customers, mostly British of noble origin, whom he portrayed, often with famous Italian landscapes in the background. Such "Grand Tour" portraits by Batoni were in British private collections, thus ensuring the genre's popularity in the United Kingdom. One generation later, Sir Joshua Reynolds would take up this tradition and become the leading English portrait painter. Although Batoni was considered the best Italian painter of his time, contemporary chronicles mention of his rivalry with Anton Raphael Mengs.
In addition to art-loving nobility, Batoni's subjects included the kings and queens of Poland, Portugal and Prussia, the Holy Roman Emperors Joseph II and Leopold II (a fact which earned him noble dignity), as well the popes Benedict XIV, Clement XIII and Pius VI, Elector Karl Theodor of Bavaria and many more. He also received numerous orders for altarpieces for churches in Italy (Rome, Brescia, Lucca, Parma, etc.), as well as for mythological and allegorical subjects.
Batoni's style took inspiration and incorporated elements of classical antiquity, French Rococo, Bolognese classicism, and the work of artists such as Nicolas Poussin, Claude Lorrain and especially Raphael. As such Pompeo Batoni is considered a precursor of Neoclassicism.
Biography
John Talbot, later 1st Earl Talbot, 1773, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
William Fermor, 1758, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Portrait of Maria Anna of Austria, Queen of Portugal
Early life
Pompeo Batoni was born in Lucca, the son of a goldsmith, Paolino Batoni. He moved to Rome in 1727, and apprenticed with Agostino Masucci, Sebastiano Conca and/or Francesco Imperiali (1679–1740).
Career
Batoni owed his first independent commission to the rains that struck Rome in April 1732. Seeking shelter from a sudden storm, Forte Gabrielli di Gubbio, count of Baccaresca took cover under the portico of the Palazzo dei Conservatori on the Capitoline Hill. Here the nobleman met the young artist who was drawing the ancient bas-reliefs and the paintings of the staircase of the palace. Impressed by his skill and the purity of the design, Gabrielli asked Batoni to see some of his works, and when conducted to the painter's studio he was so awed by his talent that he offered him to paint a new altarpiece for the chapel of his family in San Gregorio Magno al Celio, the Madonna on a Throne with child and four Saints and Blesseds of the Gabrielli family (1732–33). The Gabrielli Madonna obtained general admiration and by the early 1740s Batoni started to receive other independent commissions. 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 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 than to the work of the Venetian artists then in vogue. Commenting on Batoni, the art historians Boni and de Rossi said of Batoni and Mengs the other prominent painter in Rome during the second half of the 18th-century, that Mengs was made painter by philosophy: Batoni by nature...(Batoni) was more painter than philosopher, (Mengs) more philosopher than painter.[3] In 1741, he was inducted into the Accademia di San Luca.
He was greatly in demand for portraits, particularly by the British traveling through Rome,[4][5] 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.[6] 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 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".[7]
In 1769, the double portrait[8] of the emperor Joseph II and his brother Pietro Leopoldo I (then Grand Duke of Tuscany, later emperor Leopold II), won an Austrian nobility for Batoni. He also portrayed Pope Clement XIII and Pope Pius VI.[9]
It is believed he painted the staffage for some of the landscape paintings of Hendrik Frans van Lint.[10]
According to a rumor, before dying in Rome in 1787, he bequeathed his palette and brushes to Jacques-Louis David, to whom, full of admiration for his Oath of the Horatii, Batoni would have confessed: "Only the two of us can call themselves painters".
Death
His late years were affected by declining health; he died in Rome in 1787 at the age of 79, and was buried at his parish church of San Lorenzo in Lucina. Batoni's last will executors were cardinal Filippo Carandini and James Byres, the Scottish antiquary, but the estate was insolvent and his widow was forced by the events to petition the Grand Duke of Tuscany, whom Batoni had painted in 1769, for financial assistance, offering in exchange her husband's unfinished self-portrait, today at the Uffizi in Florence.
Personal life
From 1759 Batoni lived in a large house at 25, Via Bocca di Leone in Rome, which included a studio as well as exhibition rooms and a drawing academy. He was married twice, in 1729 to Caterina Setti (died 1742), and then in 1747 to Lucia Fattori, and had twelve children; three of his sons assisted in his studio.
Influence
Bust on the wall of Batoni's birthplace
Portrait of John V, King of Portugal
Thomas Taylour, 1st Marquess of Headfort, 1782, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Vincenzo Camuccini is said to have frequented his studio. The Italian Angelo Banchero of Sestri Ponente, Benigno Bossi of Arcisate, Paolo Girolamo Brusco of Genoa, Antonio Cavallucci of Sermoneta, Marco Cavicchia of Arpino, Antonio Concioli of Pergola, Domenico Conti Bazzani of Mantua, Domenico Corvi of Viterbo, Felice Giani of San Sebastiano Curone, Gregorio Giusti of Pistoia,[11] Gaspare Landi of Piacenza, Nicola Antonio Monti of Ascoli Piceno, Giuseppe Pirovani of Pavia, and Carlo Giuseppe Ratti of Savona, were among his students or were influenced by his work.[12] Among the foreigners, Henry Benbridge of Philadelphia, Maria Cosway of Florence, Ivan Martos of Poltava, Johann Gottlieb Puhlmann of Zieko, and Johannes Wiedewelt of Copenhagen were among Batoni's most notable followers.
Criticism and exhibitions
Pompeo Batoni was among the most celebrated Italian painters in his day and his patrons and collectors included royals and aristocrats from all over Europe. His fame and reputation decreased over the 19th century until 20th-century scholars dedicated their critical attention to him and again revived his fame among the general public. Among them the following can be noted: the German Ernst Emmerling, the Englishmen John Steegman and Benedict Nicolson, the Italian Isa Belli Barsali, the American Anthony M. Clark and Edgar Peters Bowron.
The first exhibition devoted to Pompeo Batoni was held in his hometown Lucca in 1967, after which two other were organized in London and New York in 1982. He was again the subject of a major exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the National Gallery in London, and the Ducal Palace in Lucca in 2007-2008.
List of works
(In chronological order)
The Virgin Mary enthroned with saints of the Gabrielli di Gubbio family — (1739) San Gregorio al Celio, Rome
The five allegories of the Arts — (1740) Stadelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt am Main
Caterina di Siena in Ecstasy — (1743) Museo di villa Guinigi, Lucques
Achilles and Lycomedes — (1745) Uffizi, Florence
Le Temps donnant l'ordre à la Vieillesse de détruire la Beauté — (1746) National Gallery, London
Defeating Simon Magus — (1746–1755) St Peter's Basilica, Rome
Aeneas escape from Troy — (1750) Sabauda Gallery, Turin
Vulcan - (1750) National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa
Cleopatra shows Octavian the bust of Ceasar - (1755) Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dijon
The Sacred Family — (1760) Capitoline Museum, Rome
Diane et Cupidon — (1761) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Portrait of Charles Crowle — (1761–1762) Louvre, Paris
Portrait of Lord Dundas — (1764) Aske Hall, Yorkshire, England
Portrait of Sir Gregory Page Turner — (1768) Private Collection
Selfportrait — (1773–1774) Uffizi, Florence
Portrait of Thomas William Coke — (1774) Holkham Hall, Norfolk, England
Portrait of Pius VI — (1775–1776) Sabauda Gallery, Turin
Portrait of Douglas, 8th Duke of Hamilton— (1775–1776) Inveraray Castle
Madonna — Church of Santa Maria in Monterone, Rome
Portrait of Pierre André de Suffren — (vers 1785)
Gallery
Footnotes
"Ecstasy of Saint Catherine of Siena - at Museo di Villa Guinigi in Lucca". Wga.hu. Retrieved 2012-07-20.
Fall of Simon Magus (1750) at Cleveland Museum of Art[dead link]
Memorie per servire alla storia della romana Accademia di San Luca by Melchiorre Missirini, page 221.
"Portrait of John Talbot". Getty.edu. 2009-05-07. Retrieved 2012-07-20.
"Portrait of John Wodehouse". Oberlin.edu. Retrieved 2012-07-20.
Christiansen 1982, pp. 39-41.
Christiansen 1982, p. 40.
Portrait of Emperor Joseph and his brother, Grand Duke Leopold, in Rome[dead link]
"Portrait of Pius VI". Mv.vatican.va. Retrieved 2012-07-20.
Hendrik Frans van Lint, called le Studio (Antwerp 1684 - Rome 1763), Landscape with a Watermill and Dancing Figures (The Wedding of Isaac and Rebecca) at Gallerie Canesso
Guida di Pistoia per gli amanti delle belle arti con notizie By Francesco Tolomei, page 178.
Le belle arti, Volumes 1-2, by Giovanni Battista Gennaro Grossi, page 196.
References and further reading
E. Peters Bowron and P. Kerber, Pompeo Batoni, Prince of Painters in Eighteenth-Century Rome (2008)
Christiansen, Keith (1982). European Paintings; Notable Acquisitions. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Clark, Antony M. (1985). Pompeo Batoni. Oxford: Phaidon Press. ISBN 0-7148-2341-4.
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