, 1773.
J. Paul Getty Museum,
Los Angeles ,
Houston , Queen of Portugal''
Early life Pompeo Batoni was born in
Lucca, the son of a
goldsmith, Paolino Batoni, and his wife, Chiara Sesti. On 5 February 1708, he was baptised in the
Basilica of San Frediano. 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), a second version of which (1736) is now at the
Gallerie dell'Accademia in
Venice. The Gabrielli
Madonna obtained general admiration, and by the early 1740,s Batoni started to receive other independent commissions. His celebrated painting,
The Ecstasy of Saint Catherine of Siena (1743) illustrates his academic refinement of the late-
Baroque style. Another masterpiece, his
Fall of Simon Magus 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. In 1741, he was inducted into the
Accademia di San Luca. '' 1762,
National Portrait Gallery, London.
Grafton went on to become
Prime Minister. He was greatly in demand for portraits, particularly by the British travelling through Rome, 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 alone. 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". In 1769, the double portrait 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. It is believed he painted the
staffage (background figures) for some of the landscape paintings of
Hendrik Frans van Lint. According to a rumour, 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 he had twelve children; three of his sons assisted in his studio. His daughters Rufina, who died on 27 April 1784 at age 27, and Maria Benedetta were accomplished singers. ==Influence==