Pompeo batoni biography definition
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Pompeo Batoni
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 specialize 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 Great Britain. 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 his rivalry with Anton Raphael Mengs.
In addition to art-loving nobility, Batoni's subject
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Pompeo Batoni
Lucca 1708–1787 Rome
Saint Louis Gonzaga
ca. 1744
oil on canvas, oval, in an 18th-century frame
31 7/8 x 26 3/8 inches
81 x 67 cm
Provenance
Sir Charles Turner (1726–1783), Kirkleatham, Yorkshire
Marquis de Sagenzac (1867–1962), Brussels, 1925
with M. & C. Sestieri and Alberto di Castro, Rome, 1968; acquired bygd the following
Private Collection, New York
Exhibited
New York, Colnaghi, Pompeo Batoni (1708–1787), 17 November–18 månad 1982
Philadelphia, Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Splendor of 18th-Century Rome, 16 March–28 May 2000; traveled to Houston, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, The Splendorof Rome: The 18th Century, 25 June–17 September 2000
Worcester, Worcester Art Museum, Hope and Healing: Painting in Italy in a Time of Plague, 1500–1800, 3 April–25 September 2005
Bibliography
Edgar Peters Bowron, Pompeo Batoni (1708–1787), New York, 1982, exh. cat., pp. 20–21, reproduced no. 6.
Anthony Clark a
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Pompeo Batoni (Lucca 1708–Rome 1787) was one of eighteenth-century Europe’s most famous artists, lionized by popes, princes, and connoisseurs who saw his poetic and technically dazzling art as the acme of Italian painting and wore a path to his studio in one of Rome’s most fashionable districts. That simple fact bears stating, given how far Batoni’s star would sink among later generations; Sir Joshua Reynolds’s prediction that the artist would soon fall into near oblivion seems justified by the sale of a distinguished painting in 1928 for just £2. Few of his pictures were on view to the general public in eighteenth- or nineteenth-century Britain, while those papering its stately homes remained the preserve of cognoscenti. To the extent that Batoni was remembered it was for his Grand Tour portraits, suave images of British milordi that have occasioned more gossip than analysis, rather than the secular and sacred compositions on which he staked his reputation.
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