Pietro Benvenuti
1769–1844 · Grand Duchy of Tuscany · Neoclassicism
The story
For an artist from Arezzo, the small Tuscan city of Petrarch and Vasari, the decisive turn came from France. In 1807 Elisa Bonaparte Baciocchi, Napoleon's sister and the ruler he had installed over Tuscany, named Pietro Benvenuti court painter and put him in charge of the Florentine Academy of Fine Arts.
Benvenuti had trained in Florence and then in Rome, where in the 1790s he shared an informal studio with the painters Vincenzo Camuccini and Luigi Sabatelli and absorbed the severe, sculptural manner of the French master Jacques-Louis David. That training suited the new regime. In 1809 Napoleon himself commissioned the picture Benvenuti is still known for, The Oath of the Saxons, a vast history painting now in the Palazzo Pitti in Florence.
He outlasted the empire that made him. Benvenuti kept running the Florence Academy under the returning grand dukes and went on shaping Tuscan painters for decades, dying in Florence in 1844 at 75.
