History

The Marquises of Saluzzo were one of the most cultivated courts of late medieval Piedmont, positioned between the cultural worlds of France-Burgundy and Lombard Italy. Valerano di Saluzzo (1405–1416), natural son of Thomas III of Saluzzo, undertook the enlargement of the castle and almost certainly commissioned the fresco cycle in the Sala Baronale as part of a programme to project the Saluzzo court as a centre of chivalric culture. The thematic choice — the Nine Worthies, the Fountain of Youth — was a standard programme of International Gothic courtly decoration, documented in the same years at the courts of Berry, Burgundy, and the Visconti; the specific iconographic details (the naming of the Heroines, the landscape background, the fountain’s crowded narrative detail) suggest a painter who had worked in both French and Lombard court environments.

The Marquises of Saluzzo were absorbed by France in 1548 and by Savoy in 1601; the castle passed through various owners before ending in the hands of the Della Rovere and then the Saluzzo-Paesana family, who held it until 1990. The fresco conservation had been a problem for decades — damp and salt deposits had damaged sections of the painting — when the FAI purchased the castle and undertook a comprehensive restoration campaign that stabilised the surfaces and returned the colours to something approaching their 15th-century intensity.