“Piu bravo Pittore che fosse in Vienna,” or Marcello Bacciarelli at the Habsburg Court and in Viennese Salons

Abstract

Marcello Bacciarelli (1731–1818), a Roman painter and draughtsman active in Dresden and Warsaw, was invited by Empress Maria Theresa to Vienna, where he stayed between April 1764 and October 1766. According to his son’s account of this time, Bacciarelli was to have painted a large-format portrait of the four archduchesses represented as three Muses and Apollo [sic] on the Parnassus. The author suggests that the painting in question corresponds to a composition displayed in Hofburg and attributed to Johann Franz Greipel. Bacciarelli’s letters, published here for the first time, shed light on the circle of his Viennese acquaintances and clients, which included two painters active at the court of Maria Theresa, Jean Baptiste Pillement and Joseph Rosa, the writer Pietro Metastasio as well as ambassadors, princes and erudites frequenting Viennese salons. New findings concerning Bacciarelli’s biography are interesting in the context of the social and salon nature of 18th-century artistic culture.