Fortunato Duranti

Who was Fortunato Duranti?

Fortunato Duranti was an Italian painter and collector.

Durant was born at Montefortino, in what are now the Marche, then part of the Papal States. His father was a shoemaker of limited means. In Rome he befriended Nicola Consoni and Tommaso Minardi. He was influenced by the neoclassic painter Felice Giani. In 1807, he traveled to Rome to study in the school of Domenico Conti, who had trained with Giuseppe Bazzani and Pompeo Batoni. Under the patronage in Rome of cardinal Bernardino Honorati, he was influenced by Camuccini, Pelagio Palagi, Felice Giani, and Bartolomeo Pinelli. When the cardinal died, he became an antiquarian. On a planned trip to Germany in 1815, he was arrested and his works confiscated. In the 1820s, he became mainly a printmaker, acquiring an expressive graphic style of works influenced by the works of Henry Fuseli and Francisco Goya, but still with an Italianate religious thematic. He is now best known for his etchings and drawings. He painted little, but thousands of his drawings are conserved by the Commune of Montefortino or were collected Giovan Batiste Carducci from Fermo.

Never married, and despite his often precarious economic well-being, Fortunato often donated hundreds of items of art and furniture he had collected to the town of Montefortino, including paintings attributed to Piero della Francesca, Domenico Ghirlandaio, Carlo Crivelli, Corrado Giaquinto, Pietro da Cortona, Jacopo da Bassano, Cristopher Unterberger, Pietro Perugino, Carlo Maratta, Cunx Taddeo, Rosa da Tivoli, Annibale Carracci, Carlo Dolci, Anton Raphael Mengs, Pierre Subleyras, Placido Costanzi, Raffaellino da Reggio, and Giuseppe Ghezzi. The remainder of the collection is presently displayed in a pinacoteca. A catalogue of the collection can be found at Pinacoteca Civica Fortunato Duranti.