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Monday 7 July 2008

Roman souvenir

Laura Gascoigne follows in the footsteps of the 18th-century Grand Tourist

If not as a painter, Batoni deserves to be remembered as the only person to have ever succeeded in making the Englishman abroad look good. Following a mid-career snub by St Peter’s in 1757, he turned from Church commissions to the milordi market, painting history paintings and portraits — 175 of them — for British Grand Tourists in his studio on the Via Borgognona, now a Versace store. Like Versace, he created a look: the long figure-hugging silk waistcoat with lacy jabot and casually unstrung solitaire, topped with the scarlet coat or fur-trimmed cape over tight-fitting breeches — or, in the case of Colonel the Hon. William Gordon, swathes of Huntly tartan taffeta worn like a toga and teamed with tartan kilt socks (not a look to try at the Oban Ball). The poses were classical, the drapery Baroque — elegantly agitato ma non troppo — and the whole effect immaculately contrived to make the uncomfortably overdressed look stylishly relaxed.

Batoni had a large family to support and he ran a tight operation, starting as many jobs as he could take down payments for. Faces were knocked out on canvas in a couple of sittings, and the rest completed after — often long after — the sitter’s departure. His charge of 20 guineas for a half-length in the 1770s was expensive by Italian standards but cheaper than Reynolds, and compared favourably with the cost of a course on Roman antiquities by the Scottish cicerone James Byres, which took six weeks and was famously hard work. For an additional charge he would include examples of antique statuary or background views of the Temple of Vesta at Tivoli or the Colosseum — just to prove to snotty Frenchmen that you knew where it was. With statues, as with flesh-and-blood figures, you got what you paid for. Thomas Dundas went for the full set of Belvedere marbles, but not all Batoni’s sitters were that fussed. Alexander Gordon, 4th Duke of Gordon, who could afford to hire the Prefect of the Papal Antiquities Johann Winckelmann as his cicerone but was reputedly too bored to get out of his carriage, preferred to be pictured in the company of his horse, his hunting dogs and a pair of dead hares — though Batoni slyly placed him in the pose of an antique statue of a hunter with a hare.

For Grand Tourists lacking the means or the motivation to ship back 96 cases of works of art, as Henry, 3rd Duke of Beaufort had in 1728, a Batoni portrait was the perfect souvenir, a framed certificate that you had been there and done that — and that in your distant youth you were once that debonair. Most were delivered safely to their destinations, though Francis Basset’s finished up in the Prado, bought by King Charles III of Spain from a Malaga sale of a shipload of Grand Tour souvenirs seized by the French off Livorno in 1778. Fourteen years later, the outbreak of the French Revolutionary War closed this brilliant but all too brief chapter in travel history when the British tourist, thanks to Batoni, had style.

Pompeo Batoni 1708–1787 is at the National Gallery from 20 February to 18 May.

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