Date: 02-03-2008
Owning Institution: National Gallery
Publication:     Sunday Telegraph Reviews 2004-2011  
Subject:   18th Century    

Colonel the Honourable William Gordon knows full well that he is a damn fine figure of a man. The epitome of the noble Scotsman in Italy on the Grand Tour, he stands imperiously in the Roman sunshine, amid fragments of the ancient past. Behind him stand the gap-toothed ruins of the once-mighty Colosseum. At his feet lie a broken fluted column and some pieces of cracked pediment. By his side, a marble statue of the goddess Roma stares sightlessly into the middle distance while holding out a globe of stone, as if to offer him the earth itself.

Gordon himself poses like a living statue. His costumier has ensured that he is a one-man riot of colour. Over red, gold and blue he wears great swathes of his clan’s Huntly Tartan, recreated in silk rather than heavy woollen cloth by an ingenious Roman tailor, so that it might be worn without discomfort in the heat of of the Italian sun. The fabric kilts him and swags him and follows behind him like a bride’s train; he even wears matching  Huntly tartan leggings. He rests his left hand nonchalantly on his left hip, while in his right he holds a splendidly hilted sword, its tip pointing into the dusty ground. Gordon looks like a man who has conquered Rome, rather than someone who has just turned up for a spot of sightseeing. It is 1766, he has just turned thirty, and all is most definitely well with his world.

Pompeo Batoni was the painter principally responsible for passing down the exquisite arrogance of Gordon, and a host of other British Grand Tourists, to posterity. Known in his own lifetime as “the painter of princes, and the prince of painters”, his reputation has fallen somewhat during the intervening centuries. It was perhaps inevitable that an artist who devoted so much of his life to immortalising the rich and powerful would fall out of favour in the post-Romantic age, when to be a genius – it went almost without saying – it was necessary to be a rebel. The latest exhibition in the National Gallery’s Sainsbury Wing is a brave attempt to re-establish Batoni as one of the leading painters of his time. He emerges from this carefully selected show as an extremely gifted, albeit uneven artist.

“Pompeo Batoni: Prince of Painters in Eighteenth-Century Rome” is by no means an exhibition of portraiture alone. Although he is known principally in this country as a face-painter to the British aristocracy, Batoni also created numerous religious pictures, mythologies and allegories. His work in this vein combines the rectilinear rigour of the Neoclassical style with the softness and sensuality of Rococo. The Marriage of Cupid and Psyche, a characteristic mythology from the mid-1750s, quietly hymns the power of love. The work is set in a sober chamber of grey stone, the kind of room in which so many French painters of the later eighteenth century, from Greuze to Jacques-Louis David and beyond, would stage their own more impassioned dramas. A mild-mannered Venus, seated in a chariot of gold, instructs Hymen, god of marriage, as he presides over the union of Psyche and Cupid – played by a long-necked, impassive blonde and an adolescent boy who singularly lacks Cupid’s usual sense of mischief. The work is refined, elegant, rich in colour and subtle effects of sfumato. It is emotionally tepid, radiating a placid, drowsy sense of affectionate wellbeing. But that  may have been exactly what appealed to its first owner, King Frederick II of Prussia. He took it everywhere with him on his military campaigns during the Seven Years’ War – an image of peace, harmony and tranquillity to refresh a battle-weary monarch.

Batoni was originally from Tuscany. He trained as a goldsmith in his father’s workshop in the town of Lucca, where he showed such precocious talent that at the age of just eighteen he was entrusted with the precious commission to fashion a gold chalice for none other than Pope Benedict XIII. The young Batoni went to Rome to deliver this object of luxury, and he would never return home. A group of noblemen from his home town paid for his studies in painting, and he would spend the rest of his life in the Eternal City.

The first two rooms in the National Gallery are devoted to the pictures with which he set out to make his name. The Triumph of Venice, of 1737, is a spectacularly crowded allegorical picture in which a female personification of the Venetian Republic, improbably parking her lion-drawn chariot on an island in the middle of the Grand Canal, is accompanied by the Renaissance Doge Leonardo Loredan, a group of deities including Neptune, Mars, Fame and Mercury and a crowd of ancient philosophers among whom can be recognised both Plato ad Socrates. It is not hard to see, in this picture, the stamp of Batoni’s early training as a goldsmith. It might almost be the design for some fabulously ornate and gilded table ornament – a neo-Renaissance salt cellar of the kind Benvenuto Cellini had once created for the crowned heads of Europe, sparkling with jewels and crawling with symbolic detail.

Batoni was evidently a well-read painter, and just as evidently proud of his own learning, to judge by the various beetle-browed allegories he devised for the entertainment of his well-heeled Roman clientele. Time Orders Old Age to Destroy Beauty, of 1745-6, was a subject devised by Batoni himself, although this too is compromised by a goldsmiths’ preciousness. What could have been a drama is a mere ccollage of fgures – a colourful ornament and conversation piece, with Beauty’s porcelain skin set against the withered flesh of Old Age, and her salmon pink draperies pleasingly contrasted with Time’s ultramarine loincloth, but not much more. He boasted that another of his mythologies, Prometheus Fashioning Man From Clay, was a subject never previously treated in art. It is a work that demonstrates his delicacy of technique. At its centre, the goddess Minerva holds a butterfly – symbol of the human soul – delicately by its wings. Batoni shows one of her fingers through the membrane of a wing, a virtuoso flaunting his own ability to conjure up the most subtle effects of transparency. As it date of 1740-3 indicates, the painting took Batoni a long time to finish. He was a notorious perfectionist who often kept his patrons waiting many a year for delivery of their pictures.

Batoni’s religious works are beautifully crafted but distinctly saccharine essays in the late Baroque style. Guido Reni was a key influence on these paintings, as was the Renaissance master Raphael, whose calm and clear-skinned Madonnas Batoni often imitates. He takes a deep and sensual pleasure in colour for its own sake, fashioning endless chromatic harmonies from his palette of rich and saturated reds, golds, blues, pinks and greens. But it often seems as if all the emotion has been invested in the colour, leaving precious little for the protagonists themselves. Batoni can stretch to maternal affection, painting subjecvts such as the Madonna and Child with a sweet and gentle ease, but he struggles with scenes that require anything resembling the transports of religious awe. St Catherine, in Batoni’s The Ecstasy of Saint Catherine of Siena, is meant to be reeling backwards into the arms of angels as she receives the stigmata. But what she actual looks like is a young lady in fancy dress, fainting at some midnight masquerade because her stays have been tied too tight.

Batoni himself set the greatest store by his religious and subject pictures, charging considerably more for them than he ever charged for his portraits. But his portraits are by some distance his best pictures – and they succeed for the same reasons that Batoni’s straight allegories and altarpieces fail. He is such a worldly, urbane artist, so wedded to luxury, so narrow in his expressive range, that it is hard indeed to take him seriously as a reinterpreter of Ovid and Virgil, or an explorer of the mystic depths of the human soul. But the painter’s grand manner portraits, especially his pictures of milords abroad, are brilliantly entertaining precisely because they were never intended to be taken entirely seriously or entirely at face value.

What they effect, using all the tricks of allegory, all the grand devices of a bastardised Baroque, is a form of knowing, tongue-in-cheek sanctification of real, flesh-and-blood human beings. Colonel the Honourable William Gordon becomes, just for a moment, the  swaggering warrior prince he might dream of becoming as he reads his well-thumbed copy of the Iliad. Thomas Dundas, later 1^st Baron Dundas, prancing like a dancing master among the hallowed antique statues in the Cortile del Belvedere, perfectly embodies the Georgian dream of communing with the ancients. Richard Milles, resplendent in ermine-trimmed red velvet and spotless white silk, stares out at the world with an expression in which perfect hauteur and outrageous foppishness are perfectly intermingled.

The culminating galleries of the exhibition thronged with brilliant examples of Batoni’s work as a portrait painter. These are picture that tread a fine line between pretension and self-deprecation. The empire-building milords painted by Batoni genuinely believed that they were the true heirs to the splendour of ancient Rome. Yet they were also nervous enough about putting on airs and graces to play their assumed roles with at least a semblance of diffidence. They pose as the Apollo Belvedere, they play at being Caesar or Cicero, but they do so with a twinkle in their eye. Batoni cannot be entirely exhonerated from the charge of supine flattery that has so often, posthumously, been levelled at him. But at his best he was a truly outstanding painter of portraits, who created some of the most memorable images of the men and women of the eighteenth century.