Pompeo Batoni: Prince of Painters in Eighteenth-Century Rome
By Edgar Peters Bowron and Peter Björn Kerber
Yale University Press, $60

In John Meade Falkner’s wonderful Gothic novel The Lost Stradivarius (1895), the protagonist is haunted by a painting of an 18th-century ancestor, an Englishman who lived in Italy and immersed himself in the black arts. Despite its evident power to disturb, the portrait is not taken down because it is "very perfect from an artistic point of view, being painted by Battoni, and in his happiest manner."

Pompeo Batoni (the preferred spelling has one "t") was the most popular and successful painter in Rome from the 1750s until his death in 1787 at the age of 79, a master of portraiture and history painting alike who was welcome in the homes of the aristocracy and the salons of the intelligentsia. In this respect he continued the tradition started by his idol, Raphael, who elevated the status of the artist from tradesman to peer of the elite. But rather than the princes of the Church immortalized by Raphael, in a more secular age Batoni’s clients were likely to be English, Irish and Scottish travelers on the Grand Tour, whom he depicted amid landscapes and artifacts that spoke of their fashionable interest in classical archaeology.

Published to commemorate the 300th anniversary of the artist’s birth, this book accompanies an exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and the National Gallery in London, but it is really a monograph rather than a catalogue. The biography and the detailed studies of all phases of Batoni’s work should help retrieve the artist from the obscurity to which he has somewhat unfairly been consigned. While his may never become a household name, the colorful sensuousness of Batoni’s technique and the precision with which he recorded the details of costume and surroundings make his paintings deeply pleasing objects to contemplate.

Batoni’s full-length treatment of Colonel the Hon. William Gordon virtually defines the term "swagger portrait." The elegant, commanding Scotsman stands with the tip of his sword planted in the ground, dressed in a gold-embroidered red coat and a tartan kilt and swathed in sumptuous tartan folds that hang from his shoulder down to the ground. His foot rests on the plinth of a statue of the goddess Roma, and in the background looms the Colosseum. The tartan—and this is well before the phony Highland revival of Victorian times; in fact, not long after the final defeat of the Jacobite cause—is beautifully rendered and can be identified as a Huntly plaid. The colonel’s name is carved into a piece of broken classical sculpture located at the lower right of the picture.
 
Batoni painted the young Robert Clements, the future Earl of Leitrim, with a book in his hand, leaning against a bust of Homer. Other portrait accoutrements include musical instruments and scores and faithful dogs lying at their masters’ feet, all indicative of the interests and pursuits of the sitters. As for expression, don’t look for psychological depth in a Batoni portrait. The faces and poses of his subjects—for example, the Viscount Charlemont, painted in three-quarter-length view with a brocaded pink and green jacket and pink breeches—show not the innermost soul but the social mask of complete confidence and "aristocratic carelessness" that they wished to project to the world.

Bowron and Kerber also devote interesting chapters to the artist’s historical, mythological and allegorical subjects and to his drawings. In the former he distinguished himself by often setting his own programs rather than simply taking iconographic orders from patrons. In his allegorical canvas "Philosophy Ruling Over the Arts" (1745–47), based on a passage from Plato’s Laws, he included among the arts a figure representing metalwork, a nod to the trade of his father, a goldsmith from Lucca. As for his drawings, they show that draftsmanship was the firm foundation of an art so assured that the paintings hardly ever show corrections under X-ray examination. True, Batoni gives us pure surface, but what a surface!