Giuseppe Vermiglio

[1] He spent the first two decades of the seventeenth century in Rome where, while training and working as an artist, he adopted a bohemian lifestyle with a tendency to become involved in brawls with fellow painters; for example, in 1604 he supported his master Adriano di Monteleone’s account of a dispute with two unknown artists which had led to Monteleone being wounded by his own wife.

The following year Vermiglio was arrested and imprisoned after being discovered at the Monte di Brianza hostel bearing an unlicensed sword.

Around 1620 he returned to northern Italy where he pursued his career as a painter in Piedmont (Novara and Alessandria) and in Lombardy (notably in Mantua and Milan).

Luigi Lanzi acclaimed the painting of Daniel among the Lions, in the library of the Passione in Milan, as his masterwork.

[2] Judgments of quality of his work have ranged from Alfred Moir’s ‘inconsequential craftsman’[3] to Lanzi's ‘the best painter in oils of which the ancient state of Piedmont could boast, and one of the best Italian artists of his times’ [4] Paintings by Vermiglio, or which have been attributed to him, include: