At the turning point from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, Giacomo Jaquerio, between Turin, Geneva and the Duchy of Savoy, mainly creates murals in the Gothic style, which are impressive both for their technical mastery and their originality. With his delicate colors, he stands out from his Italian contemporaries and establishes a tradition that was to be followed by numerous students.
Giacomo probably learned from his father Giovanni, also a Turin painter, and his brother Matteo. Together they ran a versatile workshop that, in addition to polychrome work on sculptures, repairs to paintings, apparatuses and designs, produced above all a large number of highly appreciated murals. Already at the Last Judgment for the Dominican monastery Plain-Palais in Geneva meets Giacomo Jaquerio 1401 as a master. In 1416-1418 he was court painter for the Achaia family, and in 1426-1427 for Amadeus VIII of Savoy, later Pope Felix V. The sources identify him as married, father of two daughters and a "cautious man". In 1440 we find him attested as "clavarius" of the city of Turin. In 1447 he was very ill and in economic difficulties. Apparently, around this time, his brother Matteo, who had already replaced him as court painter of Achaia in 1418, took over the sole management of the workshop, where he was succeeded by his seven sons.
Nothing of the documented works, especially of the ducal commission, has survived; the Last Judgment for the Dominican monastery Plain-Palais in Geneva, for example, was destroyed in 1535. The only one among the surviving works that can be attributed with certainty to Giacomo Jaquerio by signature is the decoration of the left wall in the presbytery of Sant'Antonio di Ranverso with the enthroned Madonna and Child among saints and a row of prophets, commissioned by Jean de Polley and dated between 1413 and 1415. Stylistic features, however, reveal his hand in other works, such as the Music-making Angels (ca. 1410 - 1415) in the Maccabees Chapel of St. Peter's Cathedral in Geneva, now fragmentary in the Musée d'Art et d'Histoire there, and a series of frescoes from Sant'Antonio in Ranverso (from ca. 1410). Also attributed to Jaquerio are two panels depicting the stories of St. Peter in the Museo Civico d'Arte Antica in Turin (c. 1410) and a miniature of the Crucifixion (c. 1420) in the Aosta Cathedral Museum.
By the mid-14th century, mural painting had experienced a fusion of tradition and innovation: bright, opaque lime paint, daring experiments with dry technique of international taste, and Italian fresco painting with its refined transparency. These currents, which were felt in Turin, had a formative effect on the workshop of Giacomo Jaquerio, whose technique and style of mural painting were to set the tone in the Savoy territories for half a century.
At the turning point from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, Giacomo Jaquerio, between Turin, Geneva and the Duchy of Savoy, mainly creates murals in the Gothic style, which are impressive both for their technical mastery and their originality. With his delicate colors, he stands out from his Italian contemporaries and establishes a tradition that was to be followed by numerous students.
Giacomo probably learned from his father Giovanni, also a Turin painter, and his brother Matteo. Together they ran a versatile workshop that, in addition to polychrome work on sculptures, repairs to paintings, apparatuses and designs, produced above all a large number of highly appreciated murals. Already at the Last Judgment for the Dominican monastery Plain-Palais in Geneva meets Giacomo Jaquerio 1401 as a master. In 1416-1418 he was court painter for the Achaia family, and in 1426-1427 for Amadeus VIII of Savoy, later Pope Felix V. The sources identify him as married, father of two daughters and a "cautious man". In 1440 we find him attested as "clavarius" of the city of Turin. In 1447 he was very ill and in economic difficulties. Apparently, around this time, his brother Matteo, who had already replaced him as court painter of Achaia in 1418, took over the sole management of the workshop, where he was succeeded by his seven sons.
Nothing of the documented works, especially of the ducal commission, has survived; the Last Judgment for the Dominican monastery Plain-Palais in Geneva, for example, was destroyed in 1535. The only one among the surviving works that can be attributed with certainty to Giacomo Jaquerio by signature is the decoration of the left wall in the presbytery of Sant'Antonio di Ranverso with the enthroned Madonna and Child among saints and a row of prophets, commissioned by Jean de Polley and dated between 1413 and 1415. Stylistic features, however, reveal his hand in other works, such as the Music-making Angels (ca. 1410 - 1415) in the Maccabees Chapel of St. Peter's Cathedral in Geneva, now fragmentary in the Musée d'Art et d'Histoire there, and a series of frescoes from Sant'Antonio in Ranverso (from ca. 1410). Also attributed to Jaquerio are two panels depicting the stories of St. Peter in the Museo Civico d'Arte Antica in Turin (c. 1410) and a miniature of the Crucifixion (c. 1420) in the Aosta Cathedral Museum.
By the mid-14th century, mural painting had experienced a fusion of tradition and innovation: bright, opaque lime paint, daring experiments with dry technique of international taste, and Italian fresco painting with its refined transparency. These currents, which were felt in Turin, had a formative effect on the workshop of Giacomo Jaquerio, whose technique and style of mural painting were to set the tone in the Savoy territories for half a century.
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