Sacred Heart of Jesus (Batoni)

The work depicts Christ wearing a red tunic symbolising his blood, martyrdom and humanity; and a blue mantle which symbolises heaven and his divinity. Batoni gave Jesus long hair and a sparse beard, while in his left hand is his heart aflame, with a crown of thorns and topped by a cross. Batoni's painting became the most popular devotional image for the Sacred Heart of Jesus.^[1]

Batoni was born 18 years after Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque died, the Visitadine nun whose visions of Jesus and his Sacred Heart inform any depictions.^[2] These apparitions were said to have begun as she prayed to Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament on 27 December 1673 – the feast of Saint John the Evangelist.

She described his Sacred Heart as follows: "The Divine Heart was presented to me in a throne of flames, more resplendent than a sun, transparent as crystal, with this adorable wound. And it was surrounded with a crown of thorns, signifying the punctures made in it by our sins, and a cross above signifying that from the first instant of His Incarnation, [...] the cross was implanted into it [...]."^[1]

The Batoni portrait remains an altarpiece in the northern side chapel of the Jesuits’ Church of the Gesù in Rome.^[2]

Batoni was later commissioned by Maria I of Portugal in the 1780s to create a larger series of paintings on the same subject for the Basilica of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in Lisbon.^[3]