Pompeo Batoni

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Pompeo Girolamo Batoni or Battoni was a highly influential Italian painter whose style incorporated elements of the French Rococo, Bolognese classicism and nascent Neoclassicism.

[edit] Biography

He was born in Lucca on (25 January, 1708; and died in Rome on 4 February, 1787. Batoni was born 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. His celebrated 1743 painting, The Ecstasy of Saint Catherine of Siena(1743)<ref>Ecstasy of Saint Catherine of Siena at Museo di Villa Guinigi, Lucca.</ref> illustrates his academic refinement of the late-Baroque style. Another masterpiece, his Fall of Simon Magus<ref>Fall of Simon Magus at Cleveland Museum of Art.</ref>, was painted initially for the St Peter's Basilica (1750).

Batoni became a highly-fashionable painter in the Rome, particularly after his rival, Anton Raphael Mengs, departed for Spain in 1761. Batoni befriended Winckelmann and, like him, preferred the restrained classicism of Raphael and Poussin to the work of the Venetian artists then in vogue.

He was greatly in demand for portraits, particularly by the British <ref>Portrait of John Talbot</ref><ref>Portrait of John Wodehouse</ref>, who took pleasure in commissioning standing portraits set in the milieu of antiquities, ruins, and works of art. Such "Grand Tourist" 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 1769, the double portrait<ref>Portrait of Emperor Joseph and his brother, Grand Duke Leopold, in Rome</ref> of Joseph II and Leopold II won an Austrian nobility for Batoni. He also portrayed Pope Pius VI<ref>Portrait of Pius VI</ref>. According to a rumor, he bequeathed his palette and brushes to Jacques-Louis David.