Portrait of Abbondio Rezzonico, Senator of Rome

In 1765 Pope Clement XIII made his nephew Abbondio Rezzonico, then in his early twenties, Senator of Rome. By the 18th century that title belonged to a single man, the highest civil magistrate of the papal city, with power of life and death in its courts and an official seat in the Palazzo Senatorio on the Capitol. Batoni painted him in 1766 for his solemn entry into that palace, on a canvas almost three metres tall, the kind of picture he himself called a state portrait with a story. Abbondio has just risen from his chair in red silk and gold, the ivory sceptre of his office in his hands. At his feet lie the sword and the fasces of justice, and a putto holds the scales with an olive branch, equity tempered by mercy. Behind him opens a view of the Capitol, and the statue of the goddess Roma stands at his back. Batoni signed the step in Latin, painted at Rome in the year 1766. Abbondio later became the great patron of the young sculptor Antonio Canova, and with his two brothers, both cardinals, he commissioned Canova's tomb for their uncle Clement XIII in Saint Peter's.