Francesco Bartolozzi

Born in Italy, Francesco Bartolozzi moved to England in 1764 and worked as the official engraver to King George III. He co-founded the Royal Academy in 1768. Bartolozzi engraved the paintings of many of the foremost artists of the time and also created prints after the Old Masters. Bartolozzi ran a prolific workshop that employed many students and assistants. In 1802, he was appointed as director of the Academy at Lisbon.

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Born, Florence, 1727; died Lisbon, 7 March 1815.

Printmaker, draughtsman and painter, active also in England. He was the son of Gaetano Bartolozzi, a goldsmith, with whom he trained before entering the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence. There he studied under Giovanni Domenico Ferretti and Ignazio Hugford. He also extended his knowledge of the Antique with a short trip to Rome. He is said to have become an adept painter of miniatures, watercolours and pastels, and an accomplished draughtsman; but he soon concentrated on engraving. Works identified as from his Florentine period include the series of plates after Domenichino’s frescoes in the abbey of Grottaferrata and those of religious paintings by Anton Domenico Gabbiani.

In 1745 Bartolozzi left Florence for Venice, where he joined the flourishing shop of the engraver and print-seller Joseph Wagner (1706–80). A fine engraving of Giovanni Battista Piazzetta’s Madonna del Casentino, among others, bears both their names. Bartolozzi is also credited with the engravings of Ferretti’s four Harlequinades (de Vesme and Calabi, nos 1338–41), published by Wagner. From this time may date many of Bartolozzi’s works after contemporary Venetian painters, such as Sebastiano Ricci and Marco Ricci, Francesco Zuccarelli, Jacopo Amigoni and Pietro Longhi, and probably some of his prints after Old Master paintings, for instance works by Veronese, Cortona and Castiglione. Specifically datable is his frontispiece portrait (dv–c 825) for an edition of the poems of Count Gasparo Gozzi (Venice, 1758); from the same period is his portrait of Lodovico Rezzonico (dv–c 894) after Bartolommeo Nazari (1699–1758).

Both Bartolozzi’s subject-matter and his style appealed to English patrons in Venice. His style, based on the so-called crayon manner, had been developed to imitate the subtleties of Renaissance and Baroque chalk drawings and reached its fullest development in the technique of stipple-engraving. Bartolozzi applied it effectively to an unusual and important commission, to reproduce the drawings of Guercino in Venetian collections (dv–c 2111–22), including those of Anton Maria Zanetti (i), Giambattista Tiepolo and the Venetian counsel, Joseph Smith. The resulting works, close to the sensuous tonalities of Guercino’s graphic manner, led to Bartolozzi being invited to England to engrave the remarkable range of Guercino drawings in the Royal Collection. He arrived in Britain in 1764, with the position (and pension) of engraver to the King. The commission was handled by George III’s librarian, Richard Dalton, and eventually led to the production of 81 ravishing plates.

One of Bartolozzi’s first private commissions in England was to contribute to the engraved illustrations of Robert Adam’s Ruins of the Palace of the Emperor Diocletian at Spalato (London, 1764) (dv–c 2421–32; 2532–9). His acceptance into the London art world was underlined by his becoming one of the founders of the Royal Academy, for which, in 1768, he engraved the diploma (dv–c 1981). The original design for the diploma was by giovanni battista Cipriani, whom Bartolozzi had known in Italy. Bartolozzi’s earliest figurative works in London, such as those after Marcantonio Franceschini’s two Bacchanals of Putti (1765; dv–c 1255–6), show a transitional combination of lines and dotted marks and may well have been created in Italy. He soon developed a fully stippled manner, the smooth charm of which contributed to the immense popularity of his prints, though this popularity was equally due to the subjects as to the style. Bartolozzi rarely tried print-selling himself and was therefore at the mercy of his publishers. It seems clear that his favoured subjects were the works of great Italian masters, as evidenced, for example, by his celebrated prints after Annibale Carracci’s Silence (the Virgin and Child with St John; dv–c 122) and Clytie (dv–c 382). The means sometimes considered necessary to bring such subjects before a paying public are demonstrated by the fact that his etching, after a Guercino drawing of Bolognese girls in country dress was entitled, quite unjustifiably, Guercino’s Daughters (the painter never married and had no children).

Bartolozzi’s engraved illustrations for an edition of Ariosto’s Orlando furioso (1773; dv–c 1638–47) again brought him into contact with Cipriani. Their subsequent collaboration encompassed such ephemera as entrance tickets to balls and concerts but consisted chiefly in the production of a vast number of prints of mythological subjects and female allegorical figures, which Cipriani produced with graceful facility. Bartolozzi engraved similar subjects by such painters as Angelica Kauffman. Possibly the departure of Cipriani and Kauffman from London in 1781 caused Bartolozzi to attempt such designs himself. A figure of Charity and the Origin of Painting (1787), attributed to him, reveal a style of draughtsmanship hardly distinguishable by their somewhat insipid Neo-classicism.

During the 1780s Bartolozzi’s output was dominated by an enormous range of portrait engravings after the most distinguished English practitioners of the day, including Reynolds, Gainsborough, George Romney and Richard Cosway, and a variety of foreigners from Rosalba Carriera to John Singleton Copley. His own portrait, together with those of his assistant Peltro William Tomkins and the painter William Hamilton, graced the engraving of Hamilton’s allegorical composition of The Seasons (c. 1790; dv–c 1794), honouring James Thomson—a microcosm of late 18th-century taste. Bartolozzi also engraved scenes of ancient and modern history by Hamilton, and by John Hamilton Mortimer and Copley. His royal appointment presumably inspired his Imitations of …Holbein (1792; dv–c 1122–207) after drawings in the King’s collection. Bartolozzi’s prints of a number of other drawings from the same source, chiefly by Leonardo (dv–c 2085–101) and the Carracci (dv–c 2102–9), appeared in 1796 and 1806–7; a volume of them was published in 1812. In 1802 he left London for Portugal to become director of the Academia de Belas Artes in Lisbon. No works from his Portuguese sojourn have been identified, although new prints bearing his signature continued to be published in London until his death.

Bartolozzi’s huge production required the services, at one time, of up to 50 assistants and pupils, among them, as well as his son (2) Gaetano Bartolozzi and Tomkins, the Italian Luigi Schiavonetti. The German engraver Heinrich Sintzenich (1752–1812) and the French engraver L. C. Ruotte (1754–1806) were also among those who studied the technique of stipple-engraving with Bartolozzi and afterwards popularized it in their respective countries. It is clear that some plates from Bartolozzi received only his final flourishes, though they bear his name. In his own hands the stipple style was always subtly delicate and charming, while in others’ it was all too often characterless and dull. It might be said that the Bartolozzi studio, which did so much to popularize stipple-engraving in England, also contributed directly to its demise.

"Bartolozzi." In Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/subscriber/article/grove/art/T006646pg1 (accessed March 22, 2012).