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Pompeo Batoni
Pompeo Batoni
was one of the greatest Italian painters of the
eighteenth century. Authentic in style and original
in creativity, he was a true "star" of his time,
having painted portraits of three popes, twenty-two
European monarchs, and an infinite number of
aristocrats who competed to have his services in
Rome between about 1740 and 1787, the year of his
death. |
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Of him, Lucca recalls in particular the famous Ecstasy of
St. Catherine (1743, image below), once preserved in the
Church of St. Catherine, and now
admirable in the
Museum of Palazzo Mansi (but often
on loan to other important cultural institutions of
Lucca, including Villa Guinigi).
He became famous in Rome, where he went very young, then
Batoni refused irritated the protection of the Republic
of Lucca in money and commissions, and did not return to
his small country because the patrons of Lucca (including
the godfather Alessandro Guinigi) had suspended
his pension condemning his hasty (according to them)
first marriage. However, he always continued to place,
next to the signature on the paintings, in Latin a "Lucensis".
Batoni had an impressive production of over 600 paintings,
the result of fifty-five years of an extraordinary career,
always on the rise, which saw him engaged, at some point
with the decisive collaboration of his children, in an
impressive amount of paintings on order. His talent was put
to the test, always with gratifying results, in various
genres: from gigantic altarpieces to smaller paintings of
domestic devotion, from historical scenes to mythological
and allegorical scenes, up to the portrait he has profoundly
renewed and to which he has perhaps more attached if not his
fame at the time, certainly the enormous fortune of
collecting for which his works, but in particular portraits,
are present in private collections and museums around the
world.
Pompeo Girolamo Batoni was born in
Lucca
on January 25, 1708, from Paolino Batoni, a
well-known goldsmith from Lucca and Chiara Sesti.
According to the learned Lucchese Tommaso Trenta
until he was 7 years old, he had a physical problem that
prevented him from moving correctly, a problem that then
disappeared over time. He learned art and attention to
detail from his father, becoming skilled at chiseling
precious metals. It was certainly from his father's workshop
that what was called a "hard-working Dutch finiteness" came
about. He began to design sacred goldsmithery, including a
chalice for Pope Benedict XIII, which was his
opportunity to highlight himself. In the Senate of Lucca he
wanted in fact to show his gratitude to Pope Benedict XIII
for having elevated the diocese of Lucca to an archdiocese,
he decreed to present them as a gift a golden chalice, whose
achievements were precisely entrusted to the young Batoni.
The excellence of this work, especially in the beautiful
figures around the chalice, made known the extraordinary
talent of the future painter to the city nobility, who
decided to finance it.
Meanwhile he followed the study of painting under the
direction of the Lucchese Domenico Brugeri and
Giovanni Domenico Lombardi. With the financial help
provided by Alessandro Guinigi in primis (of the powerful
Lucchese family of the same name), and by seven other
noblemen from Lucca, in 1727 he moved to
Rome
when he was only 19 years old in 1727, with the intention of
learning that art which was of greats of the past such as
Raffaello,
Guercino
and
Annibale Carracci.
In the eternal city his masters were Sebastiano Conca,
Agostino Masucci and Francesco Imperiali.
In
1730, having married the daughter of the custodian of
the Farnesina at the age of 22, he lost the financial
aid of his patrons from Lucca and was forced to support
himself by selling copies of ancient sculptures and
painting fans. Batoni that in that year was at the
school of Francesco Imperiali. His initial works were
concentrated mostly in portraits, then in religious
subjects, as was the case for a first important work:
the Madonna Enthroned with Saints and Blesseds of the
Gabrielli family, commissioned to him by the
Count of Baccaresca Forte Gabrielli. in 1733 for the
Church of San Gregorio al Celio, with obvious
influence of the Imperial and Carlo Maratta, a painter
active in Rome twenty years earlier.
The genesis of the creation of the Madonna on the throne
with Saints and Blesseds of the Gabrielli family was
also an opportunity that Batoni was able to seize. In April
1732 Rome was hit by violent rains. In search of shelter,
Fort Gabrielli di
Gubbio,
Count of Baccaresca took refuge under the portico of the
Palazzo dei Conservatori in Campidoglio, where the young
Pompeo was drawing bas-reliefs of the palace staircase.
Impressed by his skill and purity of design, Gabrielli asked
Batoni to see other works of his and was so impressed by his
talent that he offered to paint the altarpiece for the
chapel of his family that would end up in San Gregorio Magno
al Celio. This important work caused the general admiration
of the Roman high spheres. It was the beginning of a
dazzling career.
Already
in the painting with Christ and Saints for the
Church of Saints Celsus and Julian (1735), and in
the Judgement of Solomon (Prato, private collection),
the Allegories of the Arts of 1740 (Stadelsches
Kunstinstitut,
Frankfurt am
Main) approached a more
rigorous classicism, linked to the two Bolognese putters
Domenichino and Guido Reni. With these
works Batoni conquered the Roman environment, with the
arrival of numerous commissions of paintings of
religious, allegorical, mythological subjects. In 1737
he was commissioned by the scholar Marco Foscarini
- later Venetian ambassador to Rome, and later doge - to
paint a triumphant Venice (Raleigh, North
Carolina Museum). The work, as the American art
historian Antony Clark pointed out, derives from
the Triumph of Bacchus by Pietro da Cortona and
the Triumph of Flora by Nicolas Poussin. The
influence of Guido Reni can be seen in another of
his early works (about 1737-1740), the Truth
discovered by Time (Rome, Galleria Colonna).
From
1738 to 1750 Batoni worked for the family of the
Counts Merenda of Forlì, but also took commissions
of great importance, such as the paintings for
Benedict XIV at the Quirinale and the altarpieces
for the Church of Santa Maria della Pace in
Brescia, and for the Church of San
Vittore in Corpo in
Milan, for the friars Filippini of
Chiari, for
Messina, as well as the two now at the
Museo Nazionale Villa Guinigi: his most famous altar
canvas will be that for
St. Peter's
Basilica in the Vatican, the Fall
of Simon Magus was painted in 1755. However, the
work did not convince the Reverend Fabbrica di San
Pietro and two years after it was placed in the Vatican
Basilica, it was removed and posted in the Church of
Maria degli Angeli. This was a decisive moment in
Batoni's career.
From that moment on, the balance he had maintained between
religious/mythological painting and portraiture quickly
shifted in favour of the latter, thanks also to the
links he created with English and Irish visitors
travelling to Rome. In 1747 Batoni married his second
wife Lucia Fattori with whom he had seven more children.
Three of his sons helped him in his workshop. After the
"rejection" of St. Peter's, from 1750 to 1770 Batoni
produced almost exclusively portraits, first for noble
and wealthy English and Irish, and then with his
reputation as a portrait painter now established in
continental Europe and England, followed the important
commissions from popes, nobles and royal houses in
Europe.
His mythological subjects, painted especially between 1740
and 1760, were very appreciated, among which the two stories
of Hercules and the two stories of Achilles of the
Uffizi
stand out. Also worth mentioning are the splendid Magdalene
(Dresden),
painted for Count Merenda di Forlì in 1740, and the Marriage
of Psyche (1756), now in
Berlin (Staatliche Museen).
A
large part of his abundant production consists of
portraits now scattered in public and private galleries
in Italy and abroad. The type of mythological French
portrait, followed by the Batoni for the Marquise
Merenda, is also found in later paintings such as Lady
Fetherstonhaugh in the guise of Diana of 1751 (in the
photo), or in the Girl in the guise of Innocence of 1752
(both Uppark Sussex, Collection
Meade-Fetherstonhaugh), and in the portraits, from 1780,
of Aleksandra Potocka as Melpomene (Krakow,
National Museum) and Izabella Potocka as Polymnia
(Warsaw,
National Museum). In 1744 the painter from Lucca painted
the first portrait for an English nobleman passing
through Rome, that of Joseph Leeson (now in
Dublin,
at the local National Gallery).
Over time, many portraits of English gentlemen followed.
Batoni, developed a new type of portrait: the character, in
front of ruins or ancient statues, or against the beautiful
backdrops of the Roman countryside, rivals in dignity with
that of ancient statues. It was necessary to update it to
the fashion of the excavations that were taking shape (the
first excavations of Herculaneum date back to 1738, those of
Pompeii to 1748), and in the same period it was an important
memory, for the client, of the
Grand Tour
as far as Rome.
In Rome he met the daughter of the custodian of the
Farnesina, Caterina, married some time later and with whom
he had five children (the woman died in 1742, at a young age;
she will remarry in 1747 with Lucia Fattori, with
whom she had another seven children). They were not lucky
years in terms of finances, it seems that to support his
family he also had to sell some of his copies to passers-by
and travelers of all kinds.
Classicist tendencies did not emerge with paintings
depicting mythological subjects, probably among the most
valuable works (mention is made of "Ercole fanciullo",
now in the Uffizi Gallery, or "Achille alla corte di
Licomede". Painting style acquired in the
school
Masucci and Ferdinandi, as well as through the
collaboration of major landscape designers (including
Locatelli and Van Bloemen).
Batoni
put in his portraits his wide human understanding. They
were rarely compassionate and adulterous, such as Pius
VI of 1755 (now in three versions, one in the Warsaw
National Museum and one in
Turin
in the
Galleria Sabauda
and one in the
Vatican Museums)
or the Portrait of Cardinal Malvezzi of 1744
(Rome, Malvezzi-Campeggi Collection).
The
spirit of the century dominates most of these works: if
the characters are striking for their naturalistic and
psychological notation, which is valid for the needs of
similarity, for their external vivacity, they are also
characterized by a dynamic ideal balance: like the
Portrait of Sir Humphrey Morice of 1762 (now in the
Norton Conyers House in Yorkshire, by chance this
English country house was the one that inspired the
places of Jane Eyre to Charlotte Brontë'),
all balanced with connections and counterpoints; the
Portrait of Lord John Brudenell-Montagu of 1758 (Boughton
House, Kettering Northamptonshire), a thoughtful and
refined work; the Portrait of Joseph of Austria with his
brother Leopold of 1769 (Vienna,
Kunsthistorisches Museum), or the
Portrait of William Gordon of 1766 (Fyvie Castle,
Aberdeenshire), impetuous in its appearance and pose, in
Scottish costume on a background where the Colosseum
appears.
Batoni came to exacerbate the rendering of the character in
his most natural propensity. An example of this is the
Portrait of the Archbishop Giovanni Domenico Mansi
in the Pinacoteca Nazionale of Lucca, painted
between 1765 and 1769. There is no longer any
Raphaelesque or classical memory in these figures freely
set in space, cut with almost photographic
unscrupulousness, caught in the ephemeral and even
relevant life of a gesture, in turning around, in
presenting oneself.
Yet
Batoni, a friend of Anton Raphael Mengs, a great
representative of neoclassicism in Europe and a splendid
portrait painter, despite feeling the charm of antiquity,
cannot be defined as a neoclassical painter. The
Bolognese painter Onofrio Boni already noticed
this when he wrote in his Elogio a Batoni in
1787, by then a consecrated artist, that he had been
made a painter "by nature", against the Mengs "made
a painter by philosophy", that is, by his studio -
and he meant that the painter from Lucca was a
distinguished painter, a spontaneous assimilator, who
always went towards the pure sources of art. Batoni
followed in fact a fantastic and complex vein, which
often led him away from programs and theories. Linked to
the classicist tradition, his painting takes on various
and autonomous particular nuances: sometimes imbued with
the verve of the century, other times more attentive to
drawing and distribution of composition, other times
still deformed as the painting of a mannerist. And in
the interest of the human figure, which was masterfully
realized in the portrait, in excluding landscapes and
still lifes, Batoni draws attention to one of his
aspects, the close link with the time in which he lived
and with the new ideas that snaked in Europe, an aspect
that is the basis of his success in the English world.
In Lucca, Pompeo Batoni is also known from the bust and
plaque of his birthplace, in Via dell'Anguillara,
look at him well in the face, because in front of you you
find an artist who later became the best Italian painter of
his time, so was his fame. His clients also came from places
like England and Ireland, and today we find his paintings
from the
Louvre in
Paris to the Metropolitan in
New York. The high number of foreign visitors during the
Grand Tour in Italy (and Rome in particular),
contributed to the large commissions he received from all
over Europe. There were also several illustrious portraits
of sovereigns, from Frederick II of Prussia, his
great admirer, to the King of Poland, the Emperors of the
Holy Roman Empire, Joseph II and Leopold II,
as well as three popes (Benedict XIV, Clement XIII and Pius
VI) and several others, including important patrons from all
over Europe.
From
1759 onwards, Batoni lived in a large house in Via Bocca
di Leone in Rome. Struck by apoplexy, he died on
February 4, 1787, at the age of 79. He was buried in the
Church of San Lorenzo in Lucina, his Roman parish
(where Nicolas Poussin is also buried). His works can be
admired in many places in Italy and abroad, at
Palazzo Pitti,
at the
Hermitage of St. Petersburg the 'Continence
of Scipio', in
Lisbon
the 'Seven Shoals of Altar', at the
Royal Palace
of Caserta the 'Allegory of
Religion and Allegory for the death of two children of
Ferdinand IV', at the Quirinal the 'Handing over of
the keys and the Evangelists'. In Lucca, his hometown,
are guardians of the works of Batoni various buildings,
including Palazzo Mansi, Palazzo Cenami,
Palazzo Mazzarosa, Palazzo Minutoli-Tegrimi,
Villa Guinigi
and several others with numerous temporary exhibitions.
Let's conclude with what the American painter Benjamin
West, who lived in Italy between 1760 and 1763, once
confided to a friend: "When I came to Rome, the Italian
artists of the time spoke of nothing else, they looked at
nothing but the work of Pompeo Batoni".
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