16 Facts About Pompeo Batoni

Pompeo Girolamo Batoni was an Italian painter who displayed a solid technical knowledge in his portrait work and in his numerous allegorical and mythological pictures.

Such Grand Tour portraits by Pompeo Batoni were in British private collections, thus ensuring the genre's popularity in Great Britain.

Pompeo Batoni received numerous commissions for altarpieces for churches as well as for mythological and allegorical subjects.

Pompeo Batoni's style took inspiration and incorporated elements of classical antiquity, French Rococo, Bolognese classicism, and the work of artists such as Nicolas Poussin, Claude Lorrain, and especially Raphael.

Pompeo Batoni was born in Lucca, the son of a goldsmith, Paolino Batoni, and his wife, Chiara Sesti.

The Gabrielli Madonna obtained general admiration and by the early 1740s Pompeo Batoni started to receive other independent commissions.

Pompeo Batoni's celebrated painting, The Ecstasy of Saint Catherine of Siena illustrates his academic refinement of the late-Baroque style.

Pompeo Batoni became a highly-fashionable painter in Rome, particularly after his rival, the proto-neoclassicist Anton Raphael Mengs, departed for Spain in 1761.

Pompeo 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.

Pompeo Batoni 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.

Such "Grand Tour" portraits by Pompeo 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.

Pompeo Batoni portrayed Pope Clement XIII and Pope Pius VI.

From 1759, Pompeo 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.

Pompeo Batoni was married twice, in 1729 to Caterina Setti, and then in 1747 to Lucia Fattori, and he had twelve children; three of his sons assisted in his studio.

Pompeo Batoni was among the most celebrated Italian painters in his day, and his patrons and collectors included royals and aristocrats from all over Europe.

The first exhibition devoted to Pompeo Batoni was held in his hometown of Lucca in 1967, after which two other were organized in London and New York in 1982.