CONCA, Tommaso - b. 1734 Roma, d. 1822 Roma

Italian painter. His father was a painter and cousin to the more famous painter Sebastiano Conca; the two were Tommaso’s first teachers in Baroque painting. In 1770, Tommaso was made member of Accademia di San Luca, Rome’s guild of painters.

From 1775 to 1782 he worked for Marcantonio Borghese, painting the ceilings of two rooms in the renovated Galleria Borghese, in collaboration with Giovanni Battista Marchetti (1730-1800). In Sala del Sileno, above a Roman statue of Silenus he set scenes from that character, along with Bacchus and his followers. In the Sala Egizia, dedicated to Egyptian sculpture, he represented the Nile, Cybele and astronomical bodies, adorning the space between them with mock Egyptian idols; on the walls he added eight scenes of Egyptian religion and the lives of Marcus Antonius and Cleopatra.

Between 1782 and 1787 Conca painted Apollo and the Muses, a fresco decorating the Sala delle Muse, a room in the papal Museo Pio Clementino in Vatican. At the end of his life, he completed another fresco in the Vatican’s Museo Chiaramonti, which celebrate the restitution of paintings that had been taken to Musée Napoléon.

Following Anton Raphael Mengs he shifted to a Neoclassical style. One of his pupils was Camillo Guerra (1797-1874).

Ceiling vault

The picture shows the frescoes on the ceiling vault in the Sala delle Muse in the Museo Pio-Clementino in the Vatican. They represent Apollo scenes and ancient Greek poets, in the centre panel The Contest between Apollo and Marsyas.

In 1770, the museum for the Vatican’s antiquities was founded under Pope Clement XIV. In it is the last great hall painted with an elaborate fresco program in Rome in the eighteenth century. The ceiling of the Sala delle Muse, painted by Tommaso Conca between 1782 and 1787, alludes to the statues installed in this space, among them, in addition to the Apollo with Muses discovered in Tivoli in 1774, sculptures of philosophers and poets.