 He all but ceased painting, turning his energies instead to the Academy, pressing the "pensionnaires" to produce the "envoies" that were forwarded to Paris as proof of their progress and sending them out to draw in the countryside of the Roman campagna.He was ennobled in April 1753 and received the Order of Saint-Michel, an honour he had impatiently awaited, but he found himself out of sympathy with the new neoclassical style that was being developed by the Academy's pensionnaires.His own fresco of the "Apotheosis of Saint Louis" for the French national Church of San Luigi dei Francesi, 1754–1756, came in for criticism.