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Sacro Cuore di Gesù
Pompeo Batoni (1708–1787) was born in the Tuscan city of Lucca. His father, a distinguished local goldsmith, initially opposed his son's ambition to paint. He finally relented, and in 1727 Batoni arrived in Rome to study painting and printmaking. There he became celebrated for his portraits in which he placed his subject in allegorical and historical settings. His style was rococo shading over to neo-classicism. He seemed to have had a good life. He married twice and fathered twelve children. Contemporaries described him as a charming man who laughed and cried easily. In his heyday, visiting Batoni’s studio for a portrait adorned with antiquities and ruins was a must stop for 18th century British aristocrats on the Grand Tour. One English correspondent complained “Italian artists…thought of nothing, looked at nothing, but the work of Pompeo Batoni”; another gushed that “he was the best portrait painter in the world.” Fashions change, and today Antoine Watteau (1684–1721), Thomas Gainsborough (1727–1788), and Jacques Lewis David (1748–1825) have been elevated into the Pantheon of rococo and neo-classical painters, while Batoni is routinely relegated to a short paragraph or two in print and web encyclopedias. In fact, neither of his two most recognized paintings is one of his pittore istorico. Rather they are his The Ecstasy of Saint Catherine of Siena, in which the saint is seen thrown into a mystical swoon by rays emanating from a crucified Jesus, and this Sacro Cuore di Gesù, which is his most reproduced and copied painting. It was commissioned by the Jesuits for their mother church in Rome, Il Gesù, where it can be admired by modern travelers on the Grand Tour.
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