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The Professional
20 February–18 May 2008
REVIEWED BY: David Mayernik
T'S HARD FOR US TODAY to imagine how Pompeo Batoni (1708–1787) must have seemed to his contemporaries. Apart from his evident appeal as a portraitist to the English milordi on the Grand Tour, what was it that so impressed his colleagues and rivals about his allegories and history paintings? To answer that question, we have to come to terms with an idea that perhaps seems absurd both in light of modern painting and the history of Painting (or the history of Taste): that there could be something like “perfect” painting, an optimum way of composing, defining, and coloring idealized forms on canvas. Not only that, but that this perfect way of painting could be achieved--to be sure assuming a degree of natural ability--by rational means, that is by patience, practice, study, and application. Therefore, it was theoretically available to almost any artist of ability, and so what distinguished the work of Pompeo Batoni was not that he did something different than his contemporaries, but that he did what they did better. So, what was it that Pompeo Batoni did better than everyone else? He was “discovered” first as a meticulous draftsman working on the Campidoglio, and certainly drawing had survived since the mid-fifteenth century as the foundation for all classical art, whether painting, sculpture, or architecture. What distinguished Batoni in the eighteenth century, and what makes him precisely part of that era, was his precision, a carefulness and gracefulness of contour, and subtle rendering combined with a real sense of volume, mass, and weight. The drawings do not form part of the show, but feature in the excellent catalogue. Drawing, or disegno in Italian, could also mean design, and Batoni took especial pride is his ability to design or compose novel interpretations of classic themes; to do this he, perhaps paradoxically to us, needed an exhaustive command of what others had already done in order to know how to distinguish himself. And this he apparently possessed in spades. Then, if there was a classic corollary to disegno, it was coloring; the former had been associated with the Florentine school, the latter with the Venetian. Since at least the mid-sixteenth century an ideal imagined for painting was the combination or resolution of these two tendencies, and it was the Caracci and the Bolognese generally who advanced a mode of resolution that obtained in Rome through to the eighteenth century; one can almost watch Pompeo Batoni attempting to invest his obvious gifts for disegno with a command of color—which would mean both color harmonies but also adventurous juxtapositions of potentially dissonant colors. On all these scores Batoni was not radically better than his contemporaries, but was at least their equal in each; and on these issues there was not much debate about their value in arriving at perfection. The final characteristic of “perfect” painting, though, elicited more partisan responses: this was “finish,” or the relative amount of evident brushstroke. Two camps existed, again related to the Florentine and Venetian positions: the former valued meticulous eradication of the evidence of the brush, while the latter celebrated it. In this case Batoni had to decide, and given his approach to drawing he naturally came down on the side of meticulousness (albeit with a certain bravura in representing various materials), or simply “finish.” Here, no doubt, is from whence his appeal to the milordi derived: a taste for brushstroke was cultivated by rarified connoisseurs, but meticulousness could be appreciated by anyone, and was especially necessary for those who wanted to “get their money’s worth.” Given that Pompeo Batoni became the artist for portraiture in Rome, he commanded very high prices; he was, in the end, a consummate professional, and expected to be paid as such. The show in the Sainsbury Wing at the National Gallery is impressive in scope, but not exhaustive; given the artist’s popularity with English patrons, the museum draws heavily on UK collections, but there are also choice works from abroad. To view the show as representative of the quest for perfect painting is to put oneself in the mind of Pompeo Batoni and his world, and one can argue with oneself about the specific choices he made; to ultimately judge whether he succeeded, however, one should climb the stairs to the permanent collection and trace the history of Renaissance painting through to the great works of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Because, in the end, the preference for Batoni over, say, Van Dyck, or Guercino, or Solimena is a matter of taste, and de gustibus non est disputandum. But it is in fact debatable whether the demise of Batoni’s quest in the last two centuries has been a loss for painting and culture generally.
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