The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (40 page)

(1708–87).
Italian painter, the last great Italian personality in the history of painting at Rome. He carried out prestigious church commissions and painted numerous fine mythological canvases, many for eminent foreign patrons, but he is famous above all as a portraitist. After
Mengs
left Rome for Madrid in 1761 his pre-eminence in this field was unchallenged, and he was particularly favoured by foreign visitors making the
Grand Tour
, whom he often portrayed in an
antique
setting. His style was a polished and learned distillation from the
antique
, the works of
Raphael
, academic French painting, and the teaching of his master Sebastiano
Conca
. His characterization is not profound, but it is usually vivid, and he presented his sitters with dignity and
élan
. Batoni was also an outstanding draughtsman, his drawings after the antique being particularly memorable. He was curator of the papal collections and his house was a social, intellectual, and artistic centre,
Winckelmann
being among his friends.

 
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Battistello
.

See
CARACCIOLO
.

 
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(1873–1958).
French
naïve
painter. He was a market gardener before the First World War and did not begin painting until 1919, when he was demobilized after war service (in the army he had shown a talent for drawing and had been trained as a map-maker). In 1921 his work was shown at the
Salon d'Automne
, and he became one of the best-known painters of his type, promoted by Wilhelm
Uhde
and numbering among his admirers
Diaghilev
,
Le Corbusier
,
Lipchitz
, and
Ozenfant
. His favourite subjects were history and mythology, for which he found inspiration in old illustrated books (
Greek Dance in a Landscape
, Tate, London, 1937). His style was meticulously detailed.

 
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(1821–67).
French poet and critic. As well as being a major poet, Baudelaire was one of the foremost art critics of his day. He held that there is no absolute and universal beauty but a different beauty for different peoples and cultures. Moreover, the individuality of the artist is essential to the creation of beauty and if it is suppressed or regimented, art becomes banal: ‘the beautiful is always bizarre’ was a favourite maxim. Baudelaire resisted the claims that art should serve social or moral purposes and was one of the leaders of the ‘art for art's sake’ school (see
AESTHETICISM
). He sought to assess the stature of an artist by his ability to portray the ‘heroism’ of modern life.
Delacroix
, to whom he devoted some of his most perceptive essays, he found unsuitable owing to his predilection for
Romantic
and exotic subject-matter.
Courbet
seemed to him too materialistic and he finally chose the relatively minor painter Constantin
Guys
as the representative
par excellence
of contemporary society, and wrote a long appreciation of his work entitled
Le Peintre de la vie moderne
(1863). He was a friend and supporter of
Manet
and he is one of the persons depicted in Manet's
Music in the Tuileries Gardens
(NG, London, 1863) as well as in Courbet's
The Painter's Studio
(Musée d'Orsay, Paris, 1854–5). His writings later had great influence on the
Symbolists
.

 
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(
c.
1610–63).
French painter, active in Paris. He painted religious works and has earned the nickname ‘Le Petit Guide’ (Little Guido) because he was strongly influenced by Guido
Reni
. This suggests that he visited Italy, but there is no firm evidence. A small group of strikingly austere still lifes, signed simply ‘Baugin’ (examples are in the Louvre), has also been attributed to him, although there is little in common between these pictures and the religious works.

 
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