Virginia Vezzi was born in Velletri in 1601. Around 1610 her family moved to Rome, where she began the study of art, likely under her father, the painter Pompeo Vezzi, and then under the French painter Simon Vouet, ten years her senior, who taught life drawing on the street where the Vezzi family resided, the Strada Ferratina. Vouet became immensely successful in Rome, and in 1624 he was elected president of the prestigious Accademia di San Luca. In the same year or shortly thereafter, Virgnia was inducted as a member of the Accademia, a striking accomplishment for a painter of her youth and gender. She painted history paintings and miniatures, and also worked in pastel. The only certain autograph and datable painting by Virginia Vezzi is her Judith with the Head of Holofernes, engraved by Claude Mellan in 1626. This may have been the work that qualified her for admission to the Accademia di San Luca. The painting was auctioned at Christie's in 2006 for EUR 64,480. In 1626, Virginia Vezzi and Simon Vouet were married in the church of San Lorenzo in Lucina.
Other paintings attributed to Vezzi
A handful of other paintings have been attributed to Vezzi. All but one are roughly datable to her years in Rome. David Mandrella has suggested an attribution to Vezzi for another Judith, this one at the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, currently attributed to Simon Vouet, but Mandrella's argument "does not convince" longtime Vouet/Vezzi scholar Arnaud Brejon de Lavergnée. Consuelo Lollobrigida attributes two other paintings to Vezzi, Self-portrait or Muse in a French private collection, and an Allegory of Painting in an Italian private collection, which Lollobrigida believes to be a self-portrait of Vezzi in the act of painting the young Simon Vouet. In 1992, Vouet specialist William R. Crelly suggested that Vezzi may have painted the at the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin. Subsequently, a restoration of the painting uncovered a putto and an image of Jupiter that prompted the Blanton to attribute the Danaë to Jacques Blanchard. But as recently as 2013, art historian Guillaume Kazerouni has disputed the Blanchard attribution and repeated the suggestion that the Blanton Danaë may be by Virginia Vezzi. Another painting, of a woman in a red dress with a blue cloak and a cream shawl, has been attributed to Vezzi by Kazerouni and another art historian, Adeline Collange, who both believe it may be a self-portrait; however, Arnauld and Barbara Brejon de Lavergnée do not believe the painting depicts Virginia Vezzi. An oil on copperCrucifixion has been listed as "attributed to Virginia Vezzi" by the Matthiesen Gallery in London. .
Virginia married Simon Vouet in Rome in 1626 and the following year moved with him to his native France, where Simon, as Premier peintre du Roi, was given lodgings in the Louvre in Paris. Virginia was "known for her beauty...and she often served as the model for her husband's Magdalenes, Madonnas, and mythological heroines." She also "augmented the teaching activities of her husband by offering drawing lessons to young ladies of good family, thereby beginning a custom traditionally associated with the Louvre." The seventeenth-century French scholar Isaac Bullart described her as
...Dame Romaine d'une beauté singuliere, et si bien instruite en l'Art de peindre qu'elle eut souvent l'honneur de travailler en la présence du Roy & de recevoir de sa bouche les loüanges qui estoient deües aux ouvrages de sa belle main, que la France voit encore dans les curieuses estampes qu’on en a mises au jour.
It has been speculated that she may have played a role in her husband's atelier, but aside from the Self-Portrait or Muse attributed by Lollobrigida, there remains "a lack of evidence for her activity as a painter during her years in the French capital." Virginia and Simon had five children. She died in Paris in 1638.
