This biography from the Archives of AskART:
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 Luigi
Sabatelli was an Italian painter, printmaker and draughtsman. After
training in Florence in the Neo-classical tradition, he won a
scholarship and settled in Rome between 1789 and 1794. His patron
Tommaso Puccini was an intellectual and connoisseur who later became
Director of the Gallerie Fiorentine. He was first attracted to the
constructive rigour of François-Guillaume Ménageot, who taught at the
Académie de France, but later he became interested in a more
contemporary classicism in the style of David, and in particular in the
rather austere variant represented by such pupils of David’s in Rome as
François-Xavier Fabre. Sabatelli borrowed explicitly from Classical
works, as can be seen in his reconstruction of the furnishings, clothing
and hairstyles of the Roman period, and in his use of a type of drawing
practised by the followers of David.
His borrowings were more from the
style of Classical art than from its philology, yet his paintings were
nonetheless clearly liberated from tradition. There was an emphasis on
severity and intensity, sparse, angular, compositions and pronounced
contrasts. After a stay in Venice, he returned to Florence in 1795 and
began to introduce into his painting elements borrowed from Antoine-Jean
Gros and animated his compositions and altered the figures in his
style. From Gros, Sabatelli learnt to admire Rubens and also to absorb
the emphasis on colour that was characteristic of the Venetian
Renaissance and that he had avidly studied in 1794–5. Under Gros’s
influence he also learnt to draw on such aspects of contemporary English
painting as the representation of the Sublime, absorbing the particular
inventions and the ‘terrible’ poses as in the works of Benjamin West,
Alexander Runciman and John Flaxman. Sabatelli’s paintings of the 1790s
and early 1800s, for example the Florentine Plaque (1801), the Plague Victims of Jaffa
and the large-scale battles painted for Tommaso Puccini, are closely
related to the Napoleonic ‘battle’ scenes of Gros and Anne-Louis
Girodet. Although Sabatelli’s interest in West is evident in the
frescoes he executed
at Doccia in 1802, he interpreted the sublime tone not so much in the
sense of the ‘terrible’ common to the English but more in the manner of
the profound and incisive mental rigour and the stylistic integrity
inspired by Neo-classicism.
In
1808 Sabatelli moved to Milan to become a professor of painting at the
Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera. He produced a series of engravings on
the theme of the Apocalypse and executed large mural paintings in Milan, Novara, Cremona and Valmadrera (e.g. Vision of the Apocalypse;
Valmadrera, S Antonio; in situ). Despite the success and importance of
these large decorative cycles, his fame began to diminish after 1810,
when the new ideals of the Restoration rejected an emotional abandonment
to the Sublime in favour of Truth and Beauty, concepts that were
closely bound up with the moral, social and religious values of
Restoration society.
However, he did not lack for patrons even in the
following decades: particularly significant commissions, for example,
were the frescoes representing the Council of the Gods and various subjects from the Iliad
in the Sala dell’Iliade, Palazzo Pitti, Florence (all 1820–25; in
situ), the decoration (1840) of Niccolò Puccini’s villa in Pistoia and
paintings of Astronomy and Mathematics (1841) for the Tribuna in the Palazzo della Specola (now the Museo Zoologico ‘la Specola’) in Florence.
Source:
Sphinx Fine Art
http://www.sphinxfineart.com/Sabatelli-Luigi-Desktop
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