Director's Choice: Pompeo Batoni

Nicholas Penny, April 2008

The Director of the National Gallery selects a painting that fascinates him from the exhibition Pompeo Batoni (1708-1787).

Pompeo Batoni, 'The Death of Meleager', 1740-43. Private collection.
© Photo Courtesy Galleria Carlo Orsi, Milan.

In the second room of the exhibition we find Atalanta seated, waiting and weeping beside the wounded Meleager.

Most of the painting consists of drapery: the curtain, the sheets and cover of his bed, the cloak and dress she wears and the cloth she holds. But all this fabric serves as a foil for the perfect flesh of heroine and hero which (in accordance with convention) is contrasted in colour. Contact isn’t quite made; his limp hand is beside her bare breast; it is touching that the lovers don’t quite touch. In this silent scene the movement of the drapery, flowing, twisting, falling, has a musical quality, the piercing beauty of a lamentation aria by Handel.

The shadowed face of the fatally wounded hero on the left links in colour to the head of his favourite bitch on the right, alert and trembling as she watches him.

Colour is given a subtle metaphorical role as well as a dramatic one. The way that the eyelids and cheeks of Atalanta pick up the pink of her cloak encourages us to think of that colour as inflamed and flushed.

Clues to the story being referred to are not obvious at first. Dark blood trickles from the boar’s snout in the foreground and there is a fire in the background, from which a brand is snatched or into which a brand is thrust. Yet fire and blood, the forces of life, pervade the painting, draining slowly from the hero, stirred in the heroine.

This is an early masterpiece. A later treatment of a similar subject ('Cleopatra and the Dying Mark Anthony', 1763) is included in the fifth room of the exhibition. Meanwhile Batoni had become a successful portrait painter. He was it seems a highly accurate recorder of physiognomy, but the supernal elegance, the graceful actions, the delicate, devoted hounds, the exquisite hands, the perfect complexions, the flowing cloaks, the attendant gods (in the form of ancient sculpture) and the marble halls belong to a world as artificial as that of opera.

'Pompeo Batoni (1708-1787)' runs at the Gallery until 18 May 2008.

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