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 and . 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 , the Senator , 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 (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.
