Pompeo Batoni (Lucca 1708–Rome 1787) was one of eighteenth-century Europe’s most famous artists, lionized by popes, princes, and connoisseurs who saw his poetic and technically dazzling art as the acme of Italian painting and wore a path to his studio in one of Rome’s most fashionable districts. That simple fact bears stating, given how far Batoni’s star would sink among later generations; Sir Joshua Reynolds’s prediction that the artist would soon fall into near oblivion seems justified by the sale of a distinguished painting in 1928 for just £2. Few of his pictures were on view to the general public in eighteenth- or nineteenth-century Britain, while those papering its stately homes remained the preserve of cognoscenti. To the extent that Batoni was remembered it was for his Grand Tour portraits, suave images of British milordi that have occasioned more gossip than analysis, rather than the secular and sacred compositions on which he staked his reputation. Over the past half century that injustice has been redressed by a dedicated team of scholars including Isa Belli Barsali, Anthony M. Clark, Edgar Peters Bowron, Christopher Johns,[1] and now Peter Björn Kerber, who have gradually given Batoni the attention he deserves. Museums have followed...