Tag Archive for Pompeo Batoni

EVCS: Mark Shepheard, ‘Pompeo Batoni and his Roman Sitters: Portraits of the Sforza Cesarini’

Pompeo Batoni, Portrait of Duke Gaetano II Sforza Cesarini. National Gallery of Victoria.

Mark Shepheard ‘Pompeo Batoni and his Roman Sitters: Portraits of the Sforza Cesarini.’   This paper examines Pompeo Batoni’s two portraits of members of the Sforza Cesarini family: the portrait of Duke Gaetano II in Melbourne and that of a woman traditionally identified as Gaetano’s wife, which hangs today in Birmingham. It readdresses the question of the identity of the sitter in the Birmingham portrait, and explores the social function of portraiture within the Sforza Cesarini’s extensive art collection and the likely place of Batoni’s two portraits within that collection.The…