Agricola, Filippo

AGRICOLA, FILIPPO. - Painter, b. in Rome on 12 Apr. 1795 (according to some, in Urbino in 1776) to Luigi (himself a painter and author, among other things, of a St. Elizabeth for S. Antonino dei Portoghesi), d. there on 2 Dec. 1857. He was a pupil of Landi and of Camuccini at the Academy of St. Luke, of which in 1854 he became president. In 1812 he won the Napoleonic competition with a Marius on the Ruins of Carthage, and, although rigidly neoclassical, he indulged the Romantic taste with the well-known diptychs of the most famous lovers (Dante and Beatrice, Petrarch and Laura, etc.), celebrated by Monti in a canzone of his. Monti also celebrated in a sonnet the fine portrait, almost sixteenth-century in its composition, that A. painted of his daughter Costanza Monti Pertineri. While he held the post of director of the Vatican Mosaic Studio, he designed the cartoons which, completed by M. Consoni, were translated into mosaic for the facade of the basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls. For the same basilica he painted an Assumption, counted among his best works, today preserved in the adjoining monastery.