Pompeo Girolamo Batoni
1708 - 1787
Pompeo Girolamo Batoni or Battoni was an Italian painter whose style incorporated elements of the French Rococo, Bolognese classicism, and nascent Neoclassicism. His early success was as a painter of religious and mythological works, but he is now famous above all for his portraits. He is called the last great Italian personality in the history of painting at Rome.
He was born in Lucca, the son of a goldsmith, Paolino Battoni. Pompeo Batoni moved to Rome in 1727, and apprenticed with Sebastiano Conca and Francesco Imperiale. By the early 1740s, he started to receive independent commissions, and in 1741, he was inducted into the Accademia di San Luca. 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 the 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 to the work of the Venetian artists then in vogue.
He was greatly in demand for portraits, particularly by the British traveling 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. 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 Sir Joshua 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 Joseph II and Leopold II won Austrian nobility for Batoni. He also portrayed Pope Pius VI. According to a rumor, he bequeathed his palette and brushes to Jacques-Louis David.
He was married twice, and had twelve children. Three of his sons assisted in his studio. He died in Rome.
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