Stefano Pozzi Rome 1699 - 1768

These two mythological pictures by Stefano Pozzi are typical of the types of paintings being produced by artists belonging to the generation after Carlo Maratta; that is those working in Rome during the first half of the 18th century. Stefano Pozzi trained under Agostino Masucci, himself a pupil of Maratta’s, whom Lanzi believed he exceeded in both drawing and colouring.¹ Masucci was succeeded by Pozzi as the official painter of the papal palaces in 1758 and in his role as ‘custode delle pitture’ Pozzi was also employed to restore works of art in the Vatican collections. Under Pope Clement XIII he produced modelli for the tapestries in the Cappella Paolina and frescoed the Museo Profano in the Vatican. Other frescoed decoration includes the Sala degli Specchi in the Palazzo Doria Pamphilij, on which he worked in 1767-68 and for which four bozzetti survive.²

The subjects depicted here are taken from Torquato Tasso’s epic poem Gerusalemme Liberata. The scenes are commonly depicted in 17th- and 18th-century Italian painting and Pozzi’s representations conform to the rococo taste of the time. Motifs such as the curtain, putti and the predominance of landscape settings, are all characteristic of Pozzi’s work and are also reminiscent of contemporary painters in Rome, particularly Sebastiano Conca and Michele Rocca. Pozzi has set his figures within natural surroundings - the lovers Rinaldo and Armida sit in the shaded garden of a palace, Erminia and the shepherds are in a hilly landscape more suited to the pastoral setting of the scene - and a similar interest in landscape is present in Pozzi's pair of mythological paintings depicting Pan and Syrinx and Latona and the Shepherds, in a London private collection.³

We are grateful to John Somerville for bringing to our attention preparatory drawings for both compositions in the Kunstmuseum der Stadt, Düsseldorf, as well as a sketch relating to the seated putto in Rinaldo and Armido in the Cooper Hewitt Museum, New York.⁴ The drawings have been dated to the 1740s by Michel and Susinno (see Literature) and a similar dating may be proposed for the present pair of paintings.

1.  Luigi Lanzi wrote of Stefano Pozzi: “…più grandioso del maestro in disegno, più forte e più vero nel colorito”; cited in G. Sestieri, Repertorio della Pittura Romana della Fine del Seicento e del Settecento, vol. I, Turin 1994, p. 150.
2.  Bozzetti for the Four Elements are in the Lemme collection, Rome; reproduced in Sestieri, op. cit., vol. II, figs. 926-929.
3.  Reproduced in Sestieri, ibid., vol. II, figs. 916 and 917; and more recently in Michel & Susinno, under Literature, pp. 78-79, reproduced.
4.  For the drawings in the Kunstmuseum der Stadt, Düsseldorf, inv. nos. FP 3392 and FP 3409, see A. Pacia, in Michel & Susinno, op. cit., p. 161, cat. no. 59B, reproduced on p. 232.