Salome with the Head of the Baptist (after Reni)

Salome with the Head of the Baptist (after Reni), painted in 1751 and held at Stourhead (National Trust), is a deliberate exercise in copying after a masterwork — specifically Guido Reni's celebrated Salome compositions, which were among the most famous pictures in seventeenth-century Europe. Making copies after celebrated works was both a training exercise and a collecting practice: wealthy Grand Tourists might commission a good copy of a famous picture they could not acquire in original. Batoni's copy after Reni demonstrates his deep engagement with the Bolognese tradition and his mastery of the grazia — the graceful beauty — that Reni had made his defining quality. Stourhead in Wiltshire, the Hoare family's landscape garden estate, was built on profits from banking and adorned with the spoils of Grand Tour collecting.

Oil on canvas requiring Batoni to subordinate his own style to Reni's distinctive manner — the pearly flesh tones, soft shadows, and ethereal grace of the Bolognese master. Salome's famously ambiguous expression — beautiful, composed, neither triumphant nor horrified — required particularly delicate handling of the face. The severed head of John the Baptist would be rendered with Reni's combination of dignity and pathos.