Italian painter
Giancarlo Dughetti (1931 – 1986) was an Italian miniature painter.
Biography.
Miniature painter and elder brother of the engraver Roberto Dughetti (1938 - 2006) was born in Florence on 10 March 1931. When he was 14 years old he entered in the atelier of Pietro Annigoni (1910 - 1988) together with Romano Stefanelli and Riccardo Guarneri. In the first years he painted some copies from Annigoni and famous classic masters. In 1954, at the age of 23, he held his first personal exhibition at the International Association of Lyceum Clubs in Florence and achieved immediate success. In 1962 he married Anna Romagnoli who was his favorite muse and model. His daughter Simonetta was born in 1965. From those years onwards his notoriety spread in Italy and abroad for miniature and pastel portraits for well-known personalities, among which, we can remember: the Prince of Belgium Frederic de Merode, the textile industrialist Carlo Mantero and his wife Mirta Clerici Mantero, the Commendator Gino Alfonso Sada , the Senator Giulio Maier, Amintore Fanfani, the Count Mario Tripcovich, the Countess Marie Henriette Zouboff de la Rochefocauld In 1964 he portrayed the last Shah of Persia Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (1919 - 1980) and his family. Dughetti exhibited his works in New York, London, New Zealand, Australia, while in Italy he held exhibitions in Florence, Milan, Rome, Pisa, Verona, Mestre and Montecatini Terme. Between 1966 and 1979 he painted some female portraits, nudes and female heads. In the same period he also began to paint on alternative surfaces such as small wooden tablets not only portrait miniatures but also still life and landscapes always of great value and sometimes with a faster and more gestural technique. Between 1979 and 1980, under commission of Camerata dei Poeti in Florence, chaired by Adolfo Oxilia (1899 - 1992), he drew some studies for the "Portrait of Pope John Paul II " made the following year in a large miniature on ivory now in the Pontifical Collections at the Apostolic Palace. Dughetti, the greatest Italian miniaturist of the 20th century, died of a cerebral stroke in Vignola at the age of only 54 on 16 February 1986.
Artwork.
The miniatures painted in the 1950s and early 1960s are of very high quality. It is sufficient to think about the play of delicate chiaroscuro in the "Portrait of Maria Ricciarda Annigoni" or the very delicate nuance that shapes the pearly complexion of "Sleeping Beauty", or the apogee of technical perfection in the portrait of "The father of eng. Giuseppe Voi". Between 1966 and 1968 he created three splendid miniature portraits of the art collector Mirta Clerici Mantero (1920 - 2005) who had already been portrayed by Gregorio Sciltian (1900 - 1985). The first depicts her in the guise of Iphigenia in Tauris inspired by a painting by Anselm Feuerbach (1829 - 1880), the second as Eve in the earthly paradise and the third, dressed by flowers, in a park on the shores of Lake Como. Works painted with a great technique in rendering the sitter with delicate passages of light and soft shades that are a tribute to the beauty, elegance, culture and refined tastes of the client. In 1969 he painted a spectacular miniature inspired by the mythical queen "Nefertiti" (Thebes, 1366 BC - Akhetaton, 1338 BC) where the hypnotic fixity of the gaze with almost transparent eyes projects us into an almost enchanted and exotic atmosphere made of divine light. The same spirituality that can be admired in the "Prayer" also from 1969, with a female figure, inspired by the beauty of his wife Anna, who turns her intense and luminous gaze to the sky in a silent conversation with God where the words thought by the protagonist rise to a universal feeling of Love. In 1973 another important work, the miniature entitled "In the stable" where in a little surface the author offers a lenticular image of the milking. A work of profound realism that shows two farmers, one working and the other in a pause for rest and reflection that rises to the archetype of the simplicity and frankness of the rural world as "The Tuscan factor" painted only four years earlier. Between 1974 and 1979 a series of female portraits and nudes among which: "La siesta" in 1974, "Woman who reads" in 1978 and the portrait of Ruth Baiter " in 1979. All works of innocent sensuality realized with a perfect technique that aimed to render the softness of the complexions through the use of warm and diffused sunlight., As regards still life production, which runs throughout the course of Dughetti's career from the 1950s to the 1980s,it's necessary a separate mention for the very high results achieved in attention to detail, splendor of colors and rendering of volumes. Images that seem to evoke, in their perfection, smells, flavors and tactile sensations in a universe of simple everyday objects, fruits, vegetables, flowers, fish and crustaceans painted in a dimension of lucid optical reality that projects us into a lyrical atmosphere of remembrance.
References.
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