Inventive storytelling: the early subject pictures -- Batoni's British patrons and the grand tour -- Painter of princes and prince of painters -- Restorer of the Roman school: final years and reception -- Drawings, working methods, and studio practices.

"This meticulously researched catalogue presents an authoritative assessment of the works of Pompeo Batoni (1708-1787), one of the 18th century's most celebrated painters. Born in Lucca, Batoni established himself in Rome and received commissions from popes, princes, and British aristocrats on the Grand Tour. Batoni was highly sought after for his theatrical yet incisive--and often flattering--portraits. Connoisseurs and cognoscenti also prized his learned and technically brilliant allegorical, religious, and mythological compositions. With entries on more than 480 paintings and 250 drawings, this magnificent two-volume set provides the most complete examination to date of Batoni's entire oeuvre. Featuring beautiful, high-quality reproductions, the book provides thorough details on provenance and exhibition history as well as biographies of the portrait sitters. New analysis of the works, resulting from decades of research, reinterprets some of Batoni's iconography, identifies new textual and visual sources of his imagery, and reveals insights gleaned from unpublished archival materials"--

This volume represents the first move towards a comprehensive overview of the place of antiquity in Enlightenment Europe. Eschewing a narrow focus on any one theme, it seeks to understand eighteenth-century engagements with antiquity on their own terms, focusing on the contexts, questions, and agendas that led people to turn to the ancient past. The contributors show that a profound interest in antiquity permeated all spheres of intellectual and creative endeavour, from antiquarianism to political discourse, travel writing to portraiture, theology to education. They offer new perspectives on familiar figures, such as Rousseau and Hume, as well as insights into hitherto obscure antiquarians and scholars. What emerges is a richer, more textured understanding of the substantial eighteenth-century engagement with antiquity.

This catalogue looks at the Grand Tour, a vital aspect of European civilisation in the age of the Enlightenment, from the point of view of several countries and includes the work of foremost artists of the period.

"Explores the intersections between monarchy, gender, and art through an investigation of the visual and architectural culture of the eighteenth-century Habsburg empress Maria Theresa"--Provided by publisher.

As the Seven Years' War cut off Mengs's official source of income from the Elector of Saxony, he was probably grateful to be able to turn to the lucrative field of Grand Tour portraiture.

Do the moral lives of artists affect the aesthetic quality of their work? Is it morally permissible for us to engage with or enjoy that work? Should immoral artists and their work be "canceled"? Matthes employs the tools of philosophy to offer insight and clarity to these ethical questions. He argues that it doesn't matter whether we can separate the art from the artist, because we shouldn't