Self-Portrait as Saint Catherine of Alexandria is a rediscovered painting by Virginia Vezzi, also known as Virginia da Vezzo, whose story is a typical one for a female artist in the early years of the 1600s. Despite her success as a painter in Rome and Paris, her reputation was ignored by contemporary chroniclers and then ultimately lost to the writers of art history in the centuries that followed. Only recently have the biographical details of her life been uncovered, and along with them, her artistic accomplishments.
Born in Velletri, a town to the southeast of Rome, Vezzi’s first years of painting were guided by her painter-father, Pompeo Vezzi. Her talent was recognized early on and is often given as the reason for her family’s relocation to Rome by 1611. She soon entered the prodigious workshop of the French painter Simon Vouet, and in 1624 was accepted into the newly established Accademia di San Luca in Rome, an honor given to only a select number of female artists at that time.
Her proximity to Vouet eventually blossomed into a marriage, and the two painters moved to Paris in the late 1620s after Vouet was appointed painter to the king. Vezzi continued to paint and teach at the Louvre, where the couple and their four surviving children were housed, but little documentary evidence survives from this time about her. Once in France, her identity seems to have been subsumed by her husband’s enormous success and her early death in 1638.
Dr. Consuelo Lollobrigida, the Vezzi scholar who has authenticated this painting, dates it to around 1624–26, in the years following Vezzi’s induction into the Roman academy. At that time, many of the painters in Rome were under the spell of Caravaggio, with his strong lighting effects and dramatic compositions. Vezzi, too, began in that realm, but slowly moved to develop her own, more personal style. Her facility with a brush is on display in Self-Portrait as Saint Catherine of Alexandria in the translucent white cloth that rests on the saint’s shoulders, the sparkle of the jewels on her neckline, and the billow of her gold dress. This subdued presentation of the saint, drawn from her own visage, embraces the tradition of female painters using their own features in representations of powerful mythological and biblical women.
For LACMA, the painting has a very special resonance: we also possess Simon Vouet’s characteristically theatrical painting Virginia da Vezzo, the Artist’s Wife, as the Magdalen (c. 1627), for which Virginia Vezzi is the model.
During our 39th annual Collectors Committee Weekend (April 26–27, 2025), members of LACMA's Collectors Committee generously helped the museum acquire six works of art spanning a breadth of eras and cultures. Read more about all the acquisitions.