Giacomo Vighi
1573 · Duchy of Ferrara, Duchy of Savoy · Mannerism
The story
In 1561 a portrait painter from Ferrara arrived in Turin bringing a gift from the house of Este, a set of portraits of its princes for the court of Savoy. Giacomo Vighi, called l'Argenta after the town near Ferrara where he was born around 1510, had painted for Duke Ercole II d'Este, and now he entered the service of Emmanuel Philibert, Duke of Savoy. Within months he was on the road again. That same year he went to France to paint the queen mother, Catherine de' Medici, and then to Spain, where he painted Philip II, his queen Elisabeth of Valois and the heir, Don Carlos.
Travel was the heart of the job. A court portraitist carried likenesses of his own masters abroad and came home with likenesses of foreign princes. In the mid-1560s Vighi was sent to Florence to draw the triumphal arches and statues prepared for a Medici wedding, and he painted Cosimo I, the Duke of Florence. In 1569 Emmanuel Philibert named him court painter by patent, with the fiefs of Casalborgone and Altessano and 60 lire a month, and in 1571 he sent him to the imperial court.
Vighi died in Turin in 1573, and his family refused the inheritance. Besides his portrait of the duke, the Musei Reali in Turin keep his portrait of the young Charles Emmanuel, signed Jacobus Argenta.
