POMPEO GIROLAMO BATONI
On this day of 25th January, Pompeo Girolamo Batoni (25 January 1708 – 4 February 1787) was born in Lucca, Italy.
He was a painter who displayed a solid technical knowledge in his portrait work and in his numerous allegorical and mythological pictures. The foreign visitors travelling Italy and reaching Rome during their "Grand Tour" made the artist specialize in portraits. Batoni won international fame largely thanks to his customers of noble origin, kings and queens of Poland, Portugal, and Prussia, the Holy Roman Emperors Joseph II and Leopold II, Popes Benedict XIV, Clement XIII, Pius VI, Elector Karl Theodor of Bavaria, and many more.
Batoni's style took inspiration from French Rococo, Bolognese classicism, and the work of artists such as Nicolas Poussin, Claude Lorrain, and Raphael. As such Pompeo Batoni is considered a precursor of Neoclassicism.
Pompeo Batoni apprenticed with Agostino Masucci, Sebastiano Conca and/or Francesco Imperiali.
Batoni owed his first independent commission to a sudden storm, when Forte Gabrielli di Gubbio, count of Baccaresca took cover under the portico of the Palazzo dei Conservatori on the Capitoline Hill. Here the count met Batoni, who was drawing the ancient bas-reliefs and the paintings of the staircase of the palace. Gabrielli 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
His notable followers include Vincenzo Camuccini, Angelo Banchero , Benigno Bossi , Paolo Girolamo Brusco , Antonio Cavallucci , Marco Cavicchia, Adamo Chiusole, Antonio Concioli , Domenico Conti Bazzani , Domenico Corvi , Felice Giani , Gregorio Giusti, Gaspare Landi , Nicola Antonio Monti , Giuseppe Pirovani , Pasquale Ciaramponi, Carlo Giuseppe Ratti, Henry Benbridge Maria Cosway Ivan Martos , Johann Gottlieb Puhlmann, and Johannes Wiedewelt .
The painter Benjamin West, while visiting Rome would complain that Italian artists "talked of nothing, looked at nothing but the works of Pompeo Batoni".