BATONI, Pompeo

Pompeo Batoni leaned toward Neoclassicism and stands out for his portraits, some of which were given atmosphere by the insertion of unmistakably Roman buildings in their backgrounds.

In his youth Achilles was handed over to Chiron, a wise and learned centaur who taught him many arts. The Centaur is depicted playing the lyre to his pupil. A modest Neoclassical drape covers the young pupil’s lap, while a more ambiguous quiver hangs from the herm at the right.

Don Jos� Moñino y Redondo, Count of Floridablanca (1728-1808), Spanish statesman. He was the reformist chief minister of King Charles III of Spain, and also served briefly under Charles IV. He was arguably Spain’s most effective statesman in the eighteenth century. In Spain, he is simply known as Conde de Floridablanca.

Floridablanca’s portrait was painted several years later also by Goya..

The two paintings, Venus Presenting Aeneas with Armour Forged by Vulcan, and its companion-piece Hercules at the Crossroads tend towards Neoclassicism in the way they strive for clarity in its narrative presentation.

Batoni was one of the most celebrated painters of his time, and his works were sought after by the greatest princes of Europe. This painting was purchased by Grand Duke Ferdinando III of Tuscany in 1818.

Venus sits at Hercules’s feet and seductively offers him a rose.

This delicate painting of the Holy Family merges references that seem to run through the whole of Italian art: it recalls Correggio and Parmigianino in the Virgin’s pose, Raphael and Guido Reni in the classical composition, and early seventeenth-century Bolognese painting in the figure of St Joseph.

One of the most important works of the artist. In the painting, the naturalistic, genre-like representations of Anne and Joseph are contrasted with the idealized portraits of Mary and the Child.

Charles Crowle was a British lawyer who commissioned his portrait in Rome. The various objects depicted in the painting refer to his stay in Rome.

This noble intellectual had himself depicted leaning against an enormous antique vase he had purchased from Raphael Mengs. Globes, ancient artefacts and books were the attribute of a lifestyle.

In the oeuvre of Pompeo Batoni, Rococo was combined with the budding Neo-classicism. He won fame with his lyrical honeyed religious and mythological paintings, then became a favourite portrait painter of aristocrats passing through Rome during the Grand Tour, whom he often depicted surrounded with Roman antiquities and buildings.

Princess Giacinta Orsini (1741-59) was the wife of Antonio Buoncompagni Ludovisi. She was a patron of the arts and she is represented in this portrait with the attributes of the Muses.

Batoni painted relatively few Old Testament subjects during his career - less than a dozen over a fifty year stretch. One of these, Samson and Delilah exemplifies Batoni’s style in the third quarter of the century as he gradually progressed toward the pictorial qualities of his last years. The deliberate prettiness, opulent finish and brilliant colour of the early history paintings have yielded to a manner of expression in which the forms are more faintly coloured, the opulence and sumptuousness are restrained, and the handling is drier and less rich. The composition is typical of the later work, simpler and narrower in depth and dominated by verticality, and the figures are considerably elongated.

This painting intended for the celebrated collection of artists’ likenesses in the Uffizi Gallery remained unfinished due to financial difficulties. It was accepted in the collection after the death of the painter.

The companion-piece of the painting, Time Orders Old Age to Destroy Beauty, is in the National Gallery, London. The two paintings, commissioned by Bartolomeo Talenti, are mentioned together in a letter of the artist (now in the archive at Lucca).

Batoni was known and appreciated primarily as a portraitist in his own time. He painted most of the European princes who visited Rome, as well as three popes, but he was above all in demand with the European aristocracy, particularly the British travelling to Italy as part of the Grand Tour, owing to his creation of a new type of portrait in which he depicted the sitter against an antique, classical background.

The present Susanna and the Elders is a testament to Batoni’s considerable stature: he was the dominant painter in Rome in the middle years of the 18th century. His contemporaries recognized this preeminence, a position which Batoni maintained for a period of nearly fifty years. The canvas was painted by the artist in 1751 for Ernst Guido, Graf von Harrach, one of the most important collectors of the day, and remained in the family’s collection for nearly 250 years. The Susanna and the Elders is inarguably one of Batoni’s finest history pictures and one of his very few treatments of an Old Testament subject.

Batoni’s portraits, such as that of the Countess of San Martino, endow the sitter with great dignity, monumentality and elegance, combining lively colour and strong characterization.

Pompeo Batoni was a very cultured man who gained international fame at an early age. He was the first Italian artist consciously to work out a formal alternative to Rococo art and Venetian painting, which he felt to be outdated. He trained in Rome where he studied Raphael and classic Renaissance art. He quickly came up with a “reform” program for painting along controlled academic lines. He set out to provide a series of paintings that could be used as a model for religious art. In his paintings each figure is posed in a composed fashion. With the work of his rival Anton Raphael Mengs, Batoni’s art marked the first beginnings of Neo-Classicism, in an urbane, highly polished, if very derivative manner.

If we compare works on similar subjects (for example The Ecstasy of St. Francis by Piazzetta), we can measure the cultural change that Batoni was proposing.The great sense of movement contained in compositions by artists in the first half of the century could also be seen in the speed with which they painted. This was now subjected to a rigorous check. Everything was controlled and expressed in impeccable form at the cost of losing much emotional intensity. After the middle of the century, this academic way became the main influence on painting in central Italy.

Best known and last of Rome’s leading eighteenth-century painters was Pompeo Batoni. Curator of papal collections, he was extensively patronized by Grand Tourists. An assured portraitist, Batoni proved equally at home with mythological and biblical subjects, giving them a porcelain-like finish. His Marriage of Cupid and Psyche - in which the torch-bearing Hymen, god of marriage, arranges for the exchange of rings in the presence of Venus and Zephyr - presents a sleek pictorial solution to mythological subject matter.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 4 minutes):

Francesco Gasparini: The Meddlesome Cupid, aria

The two paintings, Venus Presenting Aeneas with Armour Forged by Vulcan, and its companion-piece Hercules at the Crossroads tend towards Neoclassicism in the way they strive for clarity in its narrative presentation.

Aeneas’s shield is a reminder of Batoni’s training as an artist in his father’s gold workshop. The meticulous style shows that Batoni was originally a miniature painter.

The painting originates from the church of Santi Cosma e Damiano alla Scala in Milan. The represented saints are Joseph, Zachariah, Elizabeth, and the young St John the Baptist.

This canvas is one of the first paintings of religious subject-matter executed by the artist.

The painting shows the influence of Raphael and Correggio, both of whom Batoni admired enormously. Correggio’s sensuality and sentimental religiosity obviously struck a chord with Batoni, and for many artists working in Rome in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Raphael embodied artistic perfection: as a young man Batoni drew almost daily at the Vatican Stanze and the Villa Farnesina.