Adam's HOMAN POTTERTON A LIFETIME OF COLLECTING 7th September 2021

87 www.adams.ie Homan Potterton | 7 th September 2021 Originally from Parma, where Correggio was a primary influence, Michele Rocca traveled to Rome in 1682 and trained under a follower of Pietro da Cortona. Five years later he was back in Parma, but by 1695 he had returned to Rome. Rome’s artistic environment provided Rocca with the major elements of his style. Under Sebastiano Conca’s influence, Rocca painted works that are often mistaken for Conca’s. Conca’s elegant, sweet manner also inspired Rocca; through him, Rocca may have met French painters working in Rome and by the 1720s Rocca’s paintings displayed the languorous eroticism and fashionable chic of the French Rococo. His Clemency of Scipio (c. 1720; Rome, Private Collection) relies heavily on Conca’s Antony and Cleopatra, while the shared dimensions of the two paintings (87×135 cm) have suggested to some that they were executed as pendants. In 1710 Rocca was elected to the Congregazione dei Virtuosi al Pantheon, and about the same time he executed two of his best-known paintings: the Toilet of Venus (Providence, Museum of Art) and the Finding of Moses (Uni- veristy of Chicago, Smart Museum of Art). These are among the finest of the small-scale, semi-precious cabinet pictures of mythological and hagiographical subjects that dominate Rocca’s oeuvre and gained for him the reputation of being a petit maître in early 18th-century Rome. Their decorative rarity, luminous pigmentation and rich painterly effects betray the fun- damentally sensual nature of Rocca’s style and clearly suggest that his artistic vision was in some ways more closely aligned with the emerging French Rococo than with the neo-Baroque style of his contemporary Roman colleagues. Works by Rocca are represented in the following collections: J Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; Louvre, Paris; Museu de Arte de Sao Paolo; Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, amongst others.