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Podesti, Francesco
(b Ancona, 21 March 1800; d Rome, 10 Feb 1895). Italian painter. In 1815, under the protection of Marchese Carlo Bourbon del Monte, he went to Rome to study at the Accademia Nazionale di S Luca, first under Gaspare Landi and then with Vincenzo Camuccini, for whom he also worked as a studio assistant. His early works (e.g. Eteocles and Polynices, 1824; Ancona, Pin. Com.), were influenced by Camuccini. From the 1820s his patrons were largely ecclesiastical, and his first important religious commission, the Martyrdom of St Lawrence (original destr. 1944; version, Ancona Cathedral), done in 1826 for the cathedral in Ancona, shows stylistic similarities to the work of Tommaso Minardi and his followers. Podesti’s literary and historical subjects also display this influence, and one of them, Tasso Reading his ‘Gerusalemme liberata’ to the Court at Ferrara (1841/2; Rome, Col. Giuliano Briganti), was bought by Alessandro Torlonia (1800–86). Podesti had little interest in classical subjects as themes and rendered them only as part of decorative frescowork, as in his paintings (c. 1830s; destr. 1902) for the Palazzo Torlonia (destr. 1902) in Rome. In 1836 Charles-Albert, King of Sardinia (reg 1831–49), commissioned him to paint the Judgement of Solomon (Turin, Pal. Reale) and, impressed with the painting, offered him the directorship of the Accademia Albertina di Belle Arti, which he refused. The painting was exhibited in 1842 at the Pinacoteca di Brera where it was widely praised, except by the critic Pietro Selvatico, who found the composition theatrical and derivative of Raphael (see 1980 exh. cat.).
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