Stefano Pozzi
Born Rome, 9 Nov 1699; died Rome, 11 June 1768.
Italian painter and draughtsman. His father, Giovanni Pozzi (1672–1752), arrived in Rome c. 1690 as an innkeeper and became a renowned ivory carver. He had four sons, all artists: Rocco (1701–74), an engraver; Andrea (1718–69), an ivory carver; Giuseppe (1723–65), a painter, and Stefano, the eldest, who became a pupil of the two best followers of Carlo Maratti: Andrea Procaccini until he left for Spain in 1720, then Agostino Masucci. In 1732 Stefano was admitted to the Congregazione dei Virtuosi al Pantheon (of which he was Reggente in 1739) and in 1736 to the Accademia di S Luca. He worked primarily for churches, painting, for example, eight ovals (c. 1736) for S Silvestro al Quirinale, Rome (in situ), and the Death of St Joseph (1742; in situ) for S Nome di Maria, Rome. In 1744 he was summoned to Naples by Cardinal Spinelli to decorate the apse of the cathedral restored by Paolo Posi; for the right wall he painted the large oil of SS Januarius and Agrippino Driving out the Saracens (in situ) and on the vault a fresco of a Choir of Angels (in situ). In subsequent commissions he was linked with the architect Luigi Vanvitelli: in 1744 he produced two paintings for the Montemorcino monastery that Vanvitelli had just built for the Olivetans at Perugia (now the Palazzo dell’ Università): an Annunciation (in situ) and the Blessed Bernardino Tolomei among the Plague-stricken (Rome, S Francesca Romana). For the library that Vanvitelli designed for the Palazzo Sciarra–Colonna in Rome, he painted Allegories of the Signs of the Zodiac (in situ).
Pozzi’s reputation from then on was sustained by papal patronage. Benedict XIV commissioned him to decorate the vaulting of Sant’Apollinare (1746) in Rome, and when he founded the Accademia del Nudo in 1754, he made Pozzi its first director. In 1756 the Pope commissioned frescoes for the ceiling of the Museo Sacro, Vatican, where Pozzi painted the Theological Virtues and the Triumph of the Church (both in situ). The patronage of Girolamo II, Cardinal Colonna resulted in numerous decorations for the Palazzo Colonna on the Piazza dei SS Apostoli in Rome, the most famous being the trompe l’oeil in the Turkish Room (1758; in situ), which he executed in collaboration with his brother Giuseppe and the decorative painter Giovanni Angeloni (1725–95).
In 1758, the year Pope Clement XIII was elected, Pozzi succeeded Agostino Masucci in the post of Custode delle Pitture di Raffaello, which made him the official painter of the papal palaces, responsible for the conservation and restoration of paintings. He saved the 16th- and 17th-century frescoes in the Sala di Carlo Magno in the Vatican Palace from ruin, but from the start of his appointment he had to continue Daniele da Volterra’s work of covering up the nudities in Michelangelo’s fresco of the Last Judgement in the Sistine Chapel. In 1759 he finished a copy (Rome, St Peter’s, Loggia delle Benedizioni) of Raphael’s Transfiguration (Rome, Pin. Vaticana), owned at that time by S Pietro in Montorio, Rome, for production as a mosaic (Rome, St Peter’s). Ordered by Clement XIII to renew the tapestries of the Pauline Chapel, he had seven new ones made (1759–67; Rome, Mnmt. Musei & Gal. Pont.; Rome, Vatican, Col. Pont.), after the most famous paintings in Rome and drawings by the great masters, by the workshop of S Michele a Ripa, directed by Pietro Ferloni (d 1770). For these he painted the modelli himself in oil and made the cartoons (Assumption of the Virgin, bozzetto, Rome, Pal. Quirinale). In 1766 the Pope founded the Museo Profano, Vatican, and Pozzi decorated its vaults with the fresco Minerva Defying Time (1767; in situ).
Such commissions did not stop Pozzi from working for other patrons: he made one tapestry cartoon for Ferdinand I, King of Naples and Sicily (Allegory of Justice and Peace, 1763; untraced) and assisted in the fresco decoration (1767) of the Gabinetto degli Specchi at the Palazzo Doria-Pamphili in Rome. His appointment in 1765 as assessor of paintings to the Commissioner for Antiquities, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, completed his rise to a position of power. Stylistically, during his career he developed from a Rococo manner full of graceful pastel tones to a severe, slightly cold, classicism.
Olivier Michel. "Pozzi, Stefano." In Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/subscriber/article/grove/art/T069148 (accessed April 11, 2012).
