Giovanni da Rimini

A Name Recovered

Few reputations in the history of Italian painting depend as heavily on a single inscription as that of Giovanni da Rimini. Very little survives with his name on it: a short run of notarial records in the Riminese archives, most of them concerned with rents in kind and leases, and one painted cross in a small Franciscan church in the upper Metauro valley, signed Iohannes pictor. Yet modern scholarship now places him at the head of the school of painting that flourished in Rimini in the first half of the fourteenth century. It calls him the oldest and most refined of the painters who answered Giotto’s passage through the city, and a master whose achievement, in the words of one of his modern interpreters, makes even the label “Giottesque” seem reductive. To reach that assessment, twentieth-century criticism had to take apart an earlier identity. It had to separate Giovanni from a younger homonym and correct a misread date. Then it had to rebuild, from paintings with no documents at all, a body of work coherent enough to support a biography. This essay follows that reconstruction. It keeps four kinds of evidence apart throughout: archival fact, epigraphic evidence, stylistic attribution, and hypothesis.

Such care is needed because Giovanni’s literature has built up a crust of errors, some of them surprisingly durable. Encyclopaedic summaries still confuse him with Giovanni Baronzio, a painter active a generation later. They repeat that his signed cross is “dated 1309” as if the reading were beyond dispute. They list his brothers without distinguishing the documented ones from the conjectural. They date his death with a precision the documents do not allow. They credit him with works that more cautious criticism assigns to his brother Giuliano, or to anonymous masters of the second generation. None of these errors is trivial, because every judgement of Giovanni’s historical position depends on chronology. That position is often summed up as an extraordinarily early translation of Giotto’s revolution into an Adriatic idiom still steeped in Byzantine culture. If his crosses date from the 1340s, as was long believed, he is a provincial epigone. If they date from the first decade of the century, he is a protagonist of the earliest Giottesque diffusion in northern Italy. He then stands alongside, and perhaps ahead of, most of the painters who took up the new language outside Tuscany and Umbria.

Three modern scholars carry most of the weight of this story, and, with one exception explained below, they are the only ones named here. Cesare Brandi organised the Rimini exhibition of 1935, La pittura riminese del Trecento, which first set out the school as a subject of study. In 1937 he published the article that isolated a “Giovanni da Rimini” separate from Giovanni Baronzio. Carlo Volpe, in his monograph La pittura riminese del Trecento of 1965, recognised that the date on the Mercatello cross could not be a date of the 1340s. On that basis he rebuilt the whole chronology of the school. Daniele Benati curated the exhibition Il Trecento riminese. Maestri e botteghe tra Romagna e Marche (Rimini, 1995) and wrote the entry on Giovanni in the Enciclopedia dell’Arte Medievale. He has returned to the painter repeatedly, most recently as co-curator of the Rimini exhibition of 2021, L’oro di Giovanni, which marked the restoration of the Mercatello cross. Every other contribution, and there are many of great importance, is reported here without the author’s name. That is a convention of this essay, not a judgement on their weight. It admits one exception. The archival survey on which every document cited below depends is named with its author, because the documentary record cannot be discussed without it.

From Baronzio’s Shadow: The Historiography of an Invented and Rediscovered Painter

Giovanni’s modern history begins with a mistake. The Mercatello Crucifix was unknown to scholarship until it was published in the years just before the First World War. The national catalogue record gives 1915; the account in the 2021 catalogue gives 1913. By then it had been rescued from a state close to destruction. According to a report by the painter who restored it after its discovery, the cross had been “abandoned in a woodshed among logs and bundles and destined for fire,” probably since the Napoleonic suppressions of the religious orders. The scholar who published it read the date on its inscription as 1344. He gave the work to the only Riminese “Iohannes” then known to art history, Giovanni Baronzio. Baronzio’s signature, Johannes Barontius, appears on the polyptych from San Francesco at Macerata Feltria, now in the Galleria Nazionale delle Marche in Urbino, and he is documented in the 1340s. The biographical dictionary entry of 2001 gives 1343 to 1345. The encyclopaedia entry of 1995 says he is documented from 1343 and was dead by 1362. The two readings fitted together neatly. A cross signed “Iohannes” and dated 1344 seemed to belong naturally to a Giovanni documented in exactly those years. The Mercatello Crucifix therefore entered the literature as a late work of the Riminese school. It dragged with it every painting that could be compared with it.

The consequences showed at the 1935 exhibition, where the Mercatello Crucifix was shown under Baronzio’s name. So, with a question mark, was a cut-down painted cross then belonging to the Amsterdam dealer Jacques Goudstikker, which appeared in the catalogue as “Giovanni Baronzio (?)”. Brandi himself noted how archaic that cross looked. Given a date in the 1340s, its archaism could only be read as provincial conservatism. In the lectures he gave in 1934–35, another scholar had argued that the works grouped under the name of Baronzio could not all be by one man. He proposed separating an older and more refined painter from the author of the Macerata Feltria polyptych. Brandi accepted the division. In his article of 1937, “Giovanni da Rimini e Giovanni Baronzio,” published in La critica d’arte, he gathered a first nucleus of works under the name of Giovanni da Rimini: the Mercatello cross itself; a diptych wing then in the Palazzo Venezia in Rome, the panel now in Palazzo Barberini; the small Madonna and saints at Faenza; the cross then in the Diotallevi collection in Rimini; and the Goudstikker cross in Amsterdam.

Brandi’s separation of the two painters was sound, but it did not correct the date. The Mercatello inscription was still read as 1344 or 1345. Giovanni da Rimini therefore remained, in effect, a contemporary of Baronzio. He was a second painter of the 1340s, distinguished from his namesake by temperament rather than by generation. That is why Brandi, publishing the Diotallevi Crucifix in 1937, attributed it correctly to Giovanni and yet dated it close to 1345. The regional catalogue entry for the work notes that the scholars who mentioned the cross over the next quarter-century did the same. They accepted Giovanni’s name and the date of about 1345 together. The misreading also shaped how the Palazzo Barberini panel was received. Brandi dissented from its first attribution to Giovanni on the grounds that it showed a mature artist, poorly suited to the early phase of a painter whom he still believed to be working in mid-century.

The decisive turn came with Volpe’s monograph of 1965. His book remains the basis of all scholarly work on the subject, as the biographical dictionary entry on the painter acknowledges. Volpe saw that the style of the Mercatello cross could not be squared with a date in the 1340s. He placed the Diotallevi Crucifix within “the same historical fabric, woven during and not beyond the first quarter of the century.” In a postscript he recorded that the inscription should be read as 1309 or 1314 rather than 1345. The palaeographic confirmation was published only later, in the 1995 catalogue Neri da Rimini. Il Trecento riminese tra pittura e scrittura; as the Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani (vol. 56, 2001) reports, that study found that “la data iscritta venne sciolta in 1309 o, più difficilmente, 1314.”

The restoration of the cross after the Florentine flood of 1966 was held to support Volpe’s intuition. Volpe also did something that accounts differ in describing. One popular account of the Mercatello cross says he “discovered” documents of 1292. The encyclopaedia entry says instead that the new reading of the date allowed Volpe to attach to the author of the Mercatello cross a body of late-thirteenth-century documents already partly known to nineteenth-century Riminese antiquarians. The fuller archival picture came only with Oreste Delucca’s systematic survey of the Riminese notarial records, I pittori riminesi del Trecento nelle carte d’archivio, published in Rimini by Luisè in 1992. Keeping these steps in order matters. The 1292 documents were not “discovered” in 1965. What was new in 1965 was the realisation that they could belong to the painter of Mercatello.

After Volpe, the questions changed. Critics asked no longer whether Giovanni existed but how far his catalogue extended. From the late 1980s one line of criticism expanded it greatly. It absorbed into it the so-called Master of the Arengo, whom Volpe had isolated as a separate personality, and at times even the frescoes of the choir of Sant’Agostino. It also claimed for Giovanni the Crucifixion at Jesi and the painted cross at Sassoferrato. Another line kept a narrower corpus and assigned the Marchigian works to Giuliano da Rimini. The 1995 Rimini exhibition, Il Trecento riminese. Maestri e botteghe tra Romagna e Marche, curated by Benati, did not settle every dispute, and, as Benati himself recalled in 2021, the Mercatello cross, the one work bearing the painter’s signature and date, “non poté tuttavia essere presente” at it. It did produce a broad agreement on Giovanni’s role as the driving force in the elaboration of an autonomous Riminese language. Volpe’s phrase for that role was “almost the dorsal support and poetic sap of the whole school.” The 2017 exhibitions in London and Rome and the 2021 exhibition in Rimini refined the picture without overturning it.

The Documentary Record

What, exactly, do the documents say? Because so much secondary literature paraphrases them loosely, it is worth setting them out in sequence and in their own terms. They were assembled systematically in Delucca’s 1992 survey of Riminese painters in the archives. Both the 1995 encyclopaedia entry and the 2001 biographical dictionary entry summarise them, and the two summaries agree in substance while differing in detail.

The earliest is dated 22 March 1292. On that day “Iohannes pictor suo nomine et fratrum” — Giovanni the painter, in his own name and that of his brothers — paid the emphyteutic rent on a piece of land owned by the hospital of San Lazzaro, in the parish of Sant’Ermete. He paid with three pairs of capons, covering the current year and the two before it. The document is a record of a rent payment in kind. It is not a commission, it mentions no work of art, and it has nothing to do with Sant’Agostino or with any cross. It establishes three things. There was a painter named Giovanni in Rimini in March 1292.

He acted on behalf of brothers who are not named. He was of legal age and able to act for the family, which has led to the reasonable inference that he was born around 1270. That birth date is an inference, not a documented fact. On 15 December of the same year Giovanni appears as a witness to a concession of other lands in Sant’Ermete and San Paolo. On 26 December 1292 a “Zagnonus pictor de contrata Sancti Iohannis Evangeliste” delivered another pair of capons to the hospital of San Lazzaro for the same parcel.

Zagnonus is the Latinised form of a vernacular augmentative, “Giovannone,” and in a Riminese mouth something like “Zvanòn.” Identifying Zagnonus with Iohannes does not rest on the name, which in the Romagna of the time could be spelled in many ways, from Iohannes to Zohannes, Zanni or Zagnonus. It rests on patrimonial continuity: the same leaseholder of the same land, whose neighbours are specified. This is the only sound method for the problem of the scattered magister Zohannes and Zagnonus notices in Riminese records. Giovanni was so common a name that a notice can be tied to the painter only through the land he held, the contrada he lived in, or the relatives named with him, never through the name alone.

Further rent payments follow. One of 1295 was already known to nineteenth-century Riminese historiography. On 27 December 1299 the payment was made by a “Zanutius consanguineus Zagnoni pictoris,” a kinsman of Zagnonus the painter. The most informative document is dated 4 January 1300. On that day the abbot of the Benedictine¹ monastery of San Giuliano renewed a concession in favour of “magistro Iohanni pictori de contrata Sancti Iohannis Evangeliste civitatis Arimini.”

The concession concerned a house in the parish of Sant’Eufemia, and it was made in Giovanni’s own name “et fratrum [eius] Zangoli et Iuliani.” The two summaries describe the brothers’ role slightly differently. The encyclopaedia entry has the renewal made in the names of Giovanni and his brothers; the biographical dictionary says the brothers appear as witnesses to the deed. On either reading, this is the document that names the brothers, whom the 1292 notice mentions only as a group. It is also the first document to call Giovanni magister, a title that in this context marks a painter with an established professional standing. It places him, as all the documents do, in the contrada of San Giovanni Evangelista. That is the district of the church the Augustinian hermits² had held since the mid-thirteenth century. Rimini knew the church as Sant’Agostino, but its title remained San Giovanni Evangelista.

Who were Zangolo and Giuliano? Zangolo is certainly the “magistrum Zangolum pictorem filium quondam Martini” recorded in the Riminese archives from 1316. The biographical dictionary follows him to 1342, by which date he was dead. The encyclopaedia entry has him documented from 1316 to 1336. The discrepancy most likely reflects the difference between his last notice alive and the first notice of him as deceased, but the sources do not spell this out. On 9 April 1316 “Zangolus pictor de contrata Sancti Iohannis Evangeliste, suo nomine et nomine fratris sui Iuliani” paid a rent to the abbot of San Giuliano. The document names Giuliano as his brother and says nothing of Giovanni.

On 25 March 1323 a “Magister Iulianus depintor de contrata Sanctis Iohannis Evangeliste” paid an emphyteutic rent to the same monastery. A deed of 19 March 1346 mentions “Catalina … uxor quondam magistri Zuliani pictoris,” so Giuliano was dead by then. Putting these records together yields a family of painters, sons of a certain Martino, living in the same contrada and dealing with the same institutions. Their contracts link Giovanni, Zangolo and Giuliano across two decades. That Giuliano the brother is the Giuliano who signed the Boston dossal of 1307 is a very strong inference, but it is not a documented identity. The encyclopaedia entry puts it cautiously, as something “some clues in other registrations” allow one “to suggest.” The biographical dictionary puts it more firmly. The 1323 document’s “Magister Iulianus depintor” of the same contrada closes most of the gap, but no document says in so many words that Giovanni’s brother signed the dossal.

Two further claims need correcting. The first concerns a fourth brother. Several municipal and popular accounts state flatly that Giovanni “had three brothers who were painters: the eldest Foscolo and the younger Giuliano and Zangolo.” The biographical dictionary is more careful. It notes that the possibility of recognising Foscolo and his brothers, “also sons of a Martino not otherwise specified,” as members of the same family “appears less certain.” Zangolo and Giuliano are documented brothers of Giovanni. Foscolo is at most a possible one, and nothing is known of any work by him. No document gives the brothers’ ages, and nothing supports making Foscolo the eldest, since his place in the family is itself uncertain. That Giovanni was older than Giuliano and Zangolo is a different matter: it is an inference rather than a documented fact, but three indications converge on it. In 1292 he acts suo nomine et fratrum, in 1300 he is already a magister, and he is documented as a painter fifteen years before Giuliano signed the Boston dossal. The second claim is an older proposal, published in 1971, to assign to Giovanni himself the documents naming a painter Zangolo. The encyclopaedia entry dismisses it, because Zangolo is documented as Giovanni’s brother and outlived him. The phrase in the 1316 document, fratris sui Iuliani, disposes of it completely.

Nothing in the surviving documents records Giovanni’s death. The evidence is circumstantial. By 1316 his name no longer appears alongside his brothers’ in dealings with the monastery of San Giuliano. In 1338 the parcel at Sant’Ermete, which Giovanni had rented from the hospital of San Lazzaro since at least 1290, was let to someone else. The Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani (vol. 56, 2001) concludes: “G. morì probabilmente prima del 1338, quando il terreno in S. Ermete venne locato ad altri.”

The encyclopaedia entry suggests that his activity “did not perhaps extend beyond the middle of the second decade.” Some local accounts turn this into a death date of 1338, and even into a notional lifespan “c. 1270–1338.” Others shorten it to around 1316. Both go beyond the evidence. The 1338 notice gives only a terminus ante quem for the loss of the lease, and it says nothing about Giovanni. The 1316 silence is equally ambiguous, since a man may drop out of a family’s dealings with one monastery for many reasons. The prudent formula is therefore the one the National Gallery uses for the painter’s dates, “documented 1292–1309 or 1314/15.” Its upper limit is epigraphic, not archival, and it stays uncertain because the date on the Mercatello cross is uncertain. Some reference works write “active 1292–1336.” That formula seems to borrow the terminal date of his brother Zangolo, and it should not be used.

One more point about the documents concerns what they do not contain. None of the records collected in the 1992 survey, as summarised in the two encyclopaedia entries, is a painting contract, a payment for a work, or a mention of a specific painting by Giovanni. The documents make him a pictor, then a magister, a householder and leaseholder of the contrada of San Giovanni Evangelista, and the head of a family of painters. Some interpreters have therefore suggested that for a time he combined painting with managing a farm. That possibility follows from the rural rents, but it is not proven. Every attribution to him depends on the Mercatello signature, and on the assumption, which the National Gallery states plainly, that the Iohannes pictor of the cross is the same man as the Iohannes pictor of the Riminese records. The assumption is highly probable and universally accepted. It is still an assumption.

Rimini around 1300 and the Presence of Giotto

The city in which these documents were drawn up was an Adriatic port under the rising power of the Malatesta. Its commerce and liturgy tied it to the eastern Mediterranean. It had old links with Ravenna and, through Ravenna and Venice, with Byzantium. The 2017 London exhibition set Giovanni’s panel beside Byzantine ivory plaques of the tenth and twelfth centuries to make the point that his narrative verve and his lively draperies need not be credited only to Giotto. The spread of the Mendicant orders in the second half of the thirteenth century gave the city new and competitive patrons: Franciscans at San Francesco, Augustinian hermits at San Giovanni Evangelista, and the Servites³ and Poor Clares. The curator of the National Gallery’s exhibition Giovanni da Rimini: A 14th-Century Masterpiece Unveiled (14 June–8 October 2017) went further, as the Gallery’s press material and The Art Newspaper’s report of 1 June 2017 record. She argued that the surviving works show a unity of style across Riminese painting of the period, and suggested that the city’s small community of artists often worked together for a limited pool of patrons. The idea is attractive, but it rests on stylistic observation, not documents.

Giotto’s presence in Rimini is documented, if imprecisely. Riccobaldo of Ferrara’s Compilatio chronologica, datable to about 1312–13, names Giotto as a pictor eximius. It lists works of his in the Franciscan churches of Assisi, Rimini and Padua, and in the Arena Chapel⁴ and the Palazzo della Ragione at Padua. Since the passage belongs among Riccobaldo’s memories of his Paduan stay in 1306–08, those years may be a terminus ante quem for the works listed. Vasari⁵ adds that Giotto painted many pictures in San Francesco at Rimini which were destroyed when Sigismondo Malatesta rebuilt the church. What survives is the great painted Crucifix, 430 by 303 centimetres, still in the building now called the Tempio Malatestiano. It was attributed to Giotto after cleaning in 1934.

Its terminals are dispersed, and its cymatium with the blessing Redeemer has been identified in a London private collection. The date of Giotto’s stay has been argued over at length. Some scholars have placed it after Padua, around 1305 or later. Others, and in recent decades most, place it before Padua, around or even before 1300; an essay in the 1995 Neri da Rimini catalogue, as the Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani reports, anchored it “con un buon margine di sicurezza a una data intorno o anteriore al 1300.” That earlier date rests largely on Riminese works that already depend on the cross. The most important of these is a miniature by Neri da Rimini on a single antiphonary leaf, signed and dated 1300, now in the Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice (inv. 2030). In it the pose of Saint John seems already to follow Giotto’s Rimini cross. If that reading is right, Giotto’s cross stood in San Francesco by 1300. Giovanni, already a magister in January of that year, would then have met it as a painter formed in an older Byzantine tradition, probably more than a decade into his career.

This is the point at which the “Giottesque” label has to be qualified. Some critics have supposed that Giovanni trained in contact with Giotto even before Giotto worked in Rimini, and therefore at Assisi. They point to the direct borrowings from the Legend of Saint Francis in the Upper Church that appear in the Sant’Agostino frescoes and in the London and Rome panels. Others have wondered whether Giovanni worked in Giotto’s lost Franciscan cycle in Rimini. A few popular accounts go further and state as fact that Giovanni worked “at Assisi with Giotto himself.”

These are hypotheses of differing plausibility, and no document supports any of them. The line of criticism that Benati represents takes the opposite emphasis. It argues that Giovanni “must have been active at least from the late 1280s onward.” His older Byzantine formation “provided him with a yardstick by which to assess the scope of the language he was gradually embracing.” In this reading Giovanni was not Giotto’s pupil but his interpreter, a mature painter who chose. In the most arresting formulation of this view, his adherence to Giotto was “painfully critical,” set against the “enthusiastic and somewhat uncritical” Giottism of his brother Giuliano. That judgement is interpretive, but the chronology supports it. A painter documented as pictor in 1292 was not formed by a Florentine who reached Rimini around 1300.

One last point about the documentary context. Popular summaries such as the Italian Wikipedia entry on the painter report that “Vasari stesso lo citò tra i migliori seguaci di Giotto in assoluto, insieme ad Ottaviano da Faenza e Guglielmo da Forlì.” The claim should be treated with suspicion. Other summaries of the same tradition attribute to Vasari only the Romagnol names of Ottaviano and Guglielmo. And the whole historiography reviewed above shows that no distinct “Giovanni da Rimini” was known before the 1930s. If Vasari’s text did name a Riminese Giovanni, it could not have meant the personality modern criticism has reconstructed. Vasari should not be cited as early evidence for Giovanni’s reputation unless his text is checked directly.

The Mercatello Crucifix and the Problem of Its Date

The Crucifix in the church of San Francesco at Mercatello sul Metauro, in the Apennines of the Marche between Urbino and Sansepolcro, is the fixed point of the whole reconstruction. It is painted in tempera and gold on a shaped panel measuring 300 by 227 centimetres. It is the largest of the crosses given to Giovanni, and the only work that bears his name. Its iconography follows the Christus patiens type as Giotto had recast it. The long, slender body of Christ hangs close to the structure of the cross. The Virgin and Saint John appear in polylobed terminals at the ends of the arms, and the blessing Redeemer occupies the cymatium. The Italian Wikipedia entry on the cross names Mary Magdalene as one of the lateral mourners, placing “ai lati quelle della Maddalena e di San Giovanni Evangelista.” The published descriptions of the terminals identify the Virgin and Saint John. On the red tablet above Christ’s head the sacred name appears in the abbreviated Greek form, IC XC — the same christogram recorded on the Diotallevi cross — and the national catalogue registers no other inscription on the front of the panel beyond the signature plaque below. The point deserves stating plainly, because a contrast between Greek and Latin tituli has sometimes been used to order Giovanni’s crosses, and this cross offers no basis for that contrast.

The inscription runs on a plaque at the foot of the cross. The national catalogue record transcribes it as

IOHES PICTOR FECIT HOC OPUS / FR. TOBALDI (?) M CCC V (?) IIII.

The question marks are its own, and it adds that “the uncertain reading of the inscription does not make certain the dating to 1309 or to 1314.”

The fuller reading summarised in the encyclopaedia entry is

Iohannes pictor fecit hoc opus / fr. Tobaldi m. MCCCVIIII [o MCCCXIIII].

One account based on the 2021 catalogue prints the year as “CCCVIII,” with an alternative “XIII.” Taken literally, those numerals give 1308 and 1313. The same account states the date as 1309 or 1314, so this is almost certainly a transcription slip, and it should not be repeated. The inscription therefore tells us four things. It names the painter, Iohannes pictor. It says that he made the work, fecit hoc opus. It names the friar who commissioned or paid for it, a Brother Tobaldo, otherwise unknown and generally taken to be a Franciscan of the Mercatello convent. And it gives a year in which one numeral is damaged. Whether that letter is a V or an X is the whole difference between 1309 and 1314. The palaeographic reading, published in full only in 1995, favoured 1309 and treated 1314 as the harder reading. Neither reading has anything to do with 1344 or 1345, which arose from reading the date in the light of Baronzio’s documented years rather than from the marks on the panel.

Restoration has not settled the question, and after the events of the twentieth century it probably never will. After its rediscovery the cross was restored and put back in the church. It was still in poor condition when it came to Rimini in 1935. During the Second World War it was moved for safety to the storerooms of the Palazzo Ducale in Urbino. In 1965 a survey by the Marche superintendency documented its critical state, and in 1966 it was sent to Florence for treatment. The work was finished and the cross was ready to return when the Arno flood of 4 November 1966 hit the laboratories near the Uffizi.

According to the report of the director of the Florentine restoration workshop, it lost about fifteen per cent of its paint surface, in small losses spread across the panel. It was dried in the Limonaia of Palazzo Pitti until October 1967, restored again in the Pitti laboratories until 1971, and shown in Urbino in 1973. Woodworm damage made a new intervention necessary in 2020–21. It was carried out by the Gubbio firm Ikuvium R.C. and presented in the 2021 Rimini exhibition. This was the first thorough diagnostic campaign on the work. It identified maple for the panel and cypress for the crossbeams, and found a charcoal underdrawing “of surprising softness” in Saint John’s hair and tunic, the Redeemer’s book, and the Virgin’s face and hands. The pigments were cinnabar, azurite, lead white, earths and copper green, laid over a gesso ground. Yellowed varnish and discordant post-flood retouchings were removed. The account of the restoration says plainly that “it was not possible to shed light on the date given in the inscription: the flood damage was too heavy to resolve the question of the year of execution.” The formula “1309 or 1314” is therefore not scholarly indecision. It is the honest limit of what the object can now tell us. The common statement that the cross is “dated 1309” presents the preferred reading as though it were certain.

The cross’s original setting has been studied more recently. The 2021 catalogue argues that the cross originally stood on a beam at the entrance to the apse, in a triumphal position before the congregation. It was later hung on the counter-façade in 1840 and placed above the new back choir in 1910, in line with a Baronzio polyptych on the high altar. It has now been returned to a beam. For the stylistic reading of Giovanni’s career, the Mercatello cross marks the point at which he had moved furthest towards Giotto’s naturalism without giving up his own refinement. Christ’s face keeps what one critic calls a brushstroke “of still neo-Hellenistic taste,” which does not prevent a natural rendering of the profile. The loincloth is described as falling in supple, transparent folds. Saint John holds his fist covered beneath his cloak as a sign of mourning, a gesture of grief repeated throughout the Riminese school. The background textile is patterned with great delicacy. On one sequence the cross is the latest of Giovanni’s securely attributed works. On another only the Talamello cross is placed after it. Either way, Mercatello’s value as a fixed point lies in its date, not in its position in the sequence. Wherever the other works fall, they must fall before or around 1309 (or 1314), not around 1345.

The Signed Crucifix of San Francesco at Mercatello: Giovanni da Rimini’s Fixed Point

The great painted cross of San Francesco at Mercatello sul Metauro is the keystone of Giovanni da Rimini’s reconstructed identity: the only surviving work to carry his name, and the only one to carry a date. On a shaped panel three metres high, the painter set out the Christus patiens in the form that Giotto had established a few years earlier in Rimini itself — the dead Christ hanging vertically against the stipes, flanked at the ends of the arms by mourning half-figures in polylobed terminals, and surmounted by the blessing Redeemer in a mixtilinear cymatium. The moulded framing, which steps and folds around each terminal in a play of concave and convex profiles, gives the whole object the character of a piece of monumental goldsmith’s work, designed to be read from below, suspended on a beam at the threshold of the apse.

The body of Christ is the painting’s centre of gravity in every sense. It is long, slender and almost weightless, drawn down by death rather than by mass: the arms extend nearly horizontal along the crossbeam, barely sagging, while the head falls forward onto the right shoulder with the abandon that the patiens type demands. The anatomy is stated with restraint — a softly shaded torso, the ribcage lightly marked, the wound in the side touched in red — and the flesh is modelled in a pale, luminous tonality that stands out against the patterned cloth behind it. Nothing here strains for pathos; the drama is entrusted entirely to the silence of the pose.

The face of Christ concentrates the painter’s most refined attention. Framed by long brown hair that falls over the shoulders and by a short beard, it is rendered with the fluid, drawn-out brushstroke that criticism has described as still neo-Hellenistic in taste — a calligraphic inheritance from the Byzantine tradition in which Giovanni was formed — and yet the bowed profile and the lowered eyes are observed with a naturalism that belongs to the new Giottesque order. The gold halo behind the head holds the face within a disc of light and marks the point where the two arms of the composition intersect.

The loincloth is one of the passages by which Giovanni’s late manner is recognised. It is no longer the knotted cingulum of Duecento crosses but a supple length of white cloth wrapped about the hips in Giotto’s fashion and falling in broad, soft folds almost to the knees; the transparency that the literature describes in it cannot be judged from photographs. Below, the legs descend close together to feet set on a sloping blue footrest, the suppedaneum, and the shaft continues in blue down to a narrow reddish band at the base. This lowest zone is visibly abraded, and it bears witness, like the scattered losses elsewhere, to the panel’s near-destruction in the nineteenth century and to the Florentine flood of 1966.

At the ends of the crossbeam, the two traditional mourners occupy their polylobed frames like figures at grieving windows. On the left, the Virgin, wholly enveloped in a dark, almost black maphorion, bows her head and joins her hands at her breast in a gesture of contained sorrow; on the right, Saint John the Evangelist, in a rose mantle over a green tunic, bows his head against his raised hand — the canonical attitude of mourning that the Riminese school would repeat for a generation. Both busts are set against gold, and both are turned inward, so that their grief converges silently on the dead Christ between them.

The cymatium presents the Redeemer half-length, blessing with his right hand and holding the red-bound book of the Gospels against his breast, dressed in a red tunic and dark mantle against a gold ground. Below him, on the upper stipes, stands a red tablet; its inscription, which cannot be read in photographs, is recorded as the sacred name in its abbreviated Greek form, IC XC — the same christogram that appears on the Diotallevi and Goudstikker crosses.

The cross is painted in three distinct zones. The crossbeam and the upper stipes are dark, almost black; the lower shaft beneath the feet is blue; and behind the body, across the apron, hangs a rectangular cloth of honour, the drappo, painted in gold and ochre with a dense repeating pattern of small geometric and rosette motifs, framed by a narrow dark border. The body is therefore set not against darkness but against the light, precious ground of the textile, while the dark arms of the cross carry the extended hands out to the mourners. Here the scheme differs from the Diotallevi cross, whose Christ hangs against a dark field, and the delicacy of the patterning, legible even at monumental scale, is the panel-painter’s equivalent of the miniaturist’s touch admired in his small panels.

Historically, the Mercatello cross marks the furthest point of Giovanni’s measured approach to Giotto. The inscription at the foot names Iohannes pictor as its maker and a Brother Tobaldo, presumably a Franciscan of the convent, as its patron, and gives a year whose damaged numeral permits 1309 or, less probably, 1314 — a reading that the flood of 1966 has placed forever beyond final verification. Whichever year is right, the cross anchors the painter and his school firmly in the first years of the Trecento, refuting the old date of 1344 that once confused him with Baronzio, and it shows a master who could absorb the Florentine’s naturalism — the falling body, the softly draped cloth, the grave humanity of the mourners — without surrendering the lyrical refinement that remained his own.

The Diotallevi Crucifix and the Sequence of the Crosses

The smaller painted cross in the Museo della Città in Rimini takes its name from its former owner, the Marchese Adauto Diotallevi. It measures 185 by 179 centimetres, is painted in tempera and gold on panel, and carries the museum inventory number 11 PQ. According to the regional heritage catalogue, the Marchese left it to the Comune as a bequest, and in 1936 his heir handed it over to the Pinacoteca Comunale in accordance with the testator’s wishes, under a resolution of the Podestà, number 605 of 14 March 1936. The work follows the same general scheme as Mercatello, but its slender body of Christ hangs against a dark ground rather than a gold cloth of honour, and wears an extremely thin, transparent loincloth. The three lobed terminals show half-length figures of the Virgin, Saint John and the Redeemer on gold, and the tablet above Christ’s head bears the Greek christogram IC XC. Its surface has suffered. The catalogue records that it was weakened by a first incautious trial cleaning, though a recent intervention has brought it back to the best degree of legibility possible, showing exactly how much of the original paint still remains.

The Diotallevi cross is the clearest case of how the Mercatello misreading distorted Giovanni’s chronology. Brandi’s attribution of 1937 has never been seriously challenged, but his dating near 1345 was a direct result of the date then read on the Mercatello cross. The regional catalogue observes that the major surveys of the school passed over the work in silence, and that the few scholars who mentioned it between 1957 and 1963 accepted Giovanni’s name and the 1345 date together, until Volpe placed the cross “within the same historical fabric, woven during and not beyond the first quarter of the century.” Current specialist opinion places it around 1300–1305: the 2021 exhibition gave “c. 1305,” and the photographic archive record gives “1300–1305.” Most specialists now think it earlier than Mercatello and one of the earliest works we have by Giovanni.

The reasons, set out by Benati from 1986 onwards, are several. The cross depends closely on Giotto’s cross in the Tempio Malatestiano, even for the decoration of the background. Its mixtilinear terminals, which Giotto had introduced in place of the rectangular panels of the crosses of Giunta and Cimabue, are adopted immediately. The pose of Saint John can be compared with what survives of Giotto’s terminal and with Neri da Rimini’s miniature of 1300, which already depends on it. Some features point back to Byzantine usage, and they were later dropped. Chief among them is the triple knot of the loincloth at the waist, which recalls the cingulum of thirteenth-century crosses; the Greek christogram IC XC on the tablet, by contrast, cannot be counted among the features later set aside, since it recurs on the Mercatello cross itself. In Christ’s face, the hint of the thirteenth-century “fork” at the bridge of the slightly aquiline nose points the same way. Above all, Benati has stressed the stylistic identity between the cross and the frescoes of the chapel of the Virgin in Sant’Agostino. The diaphanous beauty of Christ’s tapering body, untouched by shadow, recurs in the figures of the chapel, “as if enclosed in a luminescent cocoon.”

It is on this stylistic identity, and on a document, that the widely repeated hypothesis rests that the Diotallevi cross came from Sant’Agostino. On 28 April 1303 a certain Omizolo di Neri (Umizolo in some transcriptions) made his will. Among its provisions for furnishing an altar of the Virgin in the church of San Giovanni Evangelista, it called for “unam crucem que debeat stari fieri in medio dicti altaris continue,” a cross to be made that should stand permanently in the middle of that altar. The will names no painter and does not describe the cross it calls for, and nothing traces the Diotallevi cross back to Sant’Agostino before it appears in the Diotallevi collection. The link is therefore a hypothesis. Its basis is the coincidence of an altar of the Virgin, a bequest for a cross, and a surviving cross whose style is close to the chapel frescoes. The 2021 exhibition put it cautiously: the cross “could come” from the chapel. Several tourist and popular sources have hardened this into “comes from Sant’Agostino,” and this essay does not follow them. The same caution applies to a related inference. Some writers have drawn a chronology for Giovanni’s Sant’Agostino frescoes from this will, and the section on Sant’Agostino below takes up that argument.

The Diotallevi cross cannot be discussed on its own, because its date depends on the sequence of four crosses. One is the cut-down cross formerly in the Goudstikker collection, now with the Moretti gallery, whose Florence and London seats appear variously in the sources. It measures 160.5 by 130 centimetres and has lost its terminals, cymatium and lateral aprons. At some early date it was reshaped around the contour of Christ’s hips and right leg. Its provenance is itself a document of the twentieth century. It was possibly in the Chiesa collection in Milan and was with Goudstikker by 1929. It was looted by the Nazi authorities in July 1940 and taken to Carinhall for Hermann Göring, recovered in 1945, and entrusted to the Netherlands state collection. It was deposited first at the Archiepiscopal Museum in Utrecht and later at the Bonnefantenmuseum in Maastricht. It was restituted to Goudstikker’s heir in 2006, sold at Christie’s in London in 2007, and offered again at Sotheby’s, New York, in 2015, in a sale held jointly with the Moretti gallery. The second is the Talamello cross, in the church of San Lorenzo at Talamello, first given to Giovanni by Volpe in 1965. It measures 230 by 160 centimetres and has a dark blue ground, with gilding confined to the haloes, and its commission is held to have been Augustinian. The third and fourth are the Diotallevi and Mercatello crosses.

Volpe proposed a sequence that began with Talamello. The Goudstikker and Diotallevi crosses followed, and he judged the latter contemporary with the Sant’Agostino frescoes. Mercatello came last. Talamello was placed first because of its rectangular terminals, an older form linked to Giotto’s cross in Santa Maria Novella. Criticism from the late 1980s refined the formal argument. It pointed out that a cross’s format was a matter on which patrons had a say. The rectangular terminals at Talamello therefore need not show an earlier date, and they may reflect the more conservative taste of an Augustinian commission. On this view, and on the evidence of the full, almost un-Byzantine volumes of Christ’s body and the half-closed eyes of the dead Christ, Talamello becomes the latest of the group. The 2021 exhibition dated it “after 1309,” and one account places it around 1315. It also suggested that a collaborator may have had a hand in it.

The early placement has not disappeared, however: the biographical dictionary still sets the Talamello Christ “at the beginning of the century,” and the photographic archive record dates it 1300–1305, so the two readings of this cross remain in open competition. The Goudstikker cross, for its part, has been placed by Benati between Diotallevi and Mercatello. It shares the Greek titulus and the subtle definition of Christ’s face with the former. It anticipates the latter in the naturalism of the torso, “described with an extremely fine and luminescent brushstroke,” and in the loincloth wrapped around the hips in Giotto’s manner. The 2021 exhibition catalogued it as “1309–14,” while also counting it among the oldest works because of its Greek inscriptions. The two statements do not sit easily together, and they are best read as a sign that its exact place remains open. The archaism argument for the early crosses therefore rests on their Byzantine repertoire — the Greek inscriptions the 2021 exhibition noted on the Goudstikker cross, the cingulum knot of the Diotallevi loincloth — together with the handling of the body and the comparisons with Sant’Agostino, and not on any contrast with the titulus at Mercatello, whose own tablet bears the same abbreviated christogram. It remains an inference from style, and so does the rival argument that makes the Talamello format a matter of patronage. Neither is proof.

Not every catalogue follows the now-prevalent order, and the dissent deserves to be reported in its own terms. The regional catalogue entry for the Diotallevi cross, compiled in 1997 on the basis of the local critical literature, takes the Mercatello date of 1309 as acquired and concludes that the Diotallevi silhouette, developed “in a more Gothic and certainly less archaic sense than that of Mercatello,” must be later than the signed cross; it therefore dates the work to around 1310, “or very little later.” That entry, incidentally, also treats Mercatello as “by now definitively dated to 1309” — an instance of the very overconfidence about the damaged numeral that this essay has warned against. This essay records the disagreement without resolving it. Anyone writing about Giovanni should avoid presenting any sequence of the four crosses as settled. What is settled, against the older literature, is that all four belong to the first decade and a half of the fourteenth century. Mercatello anchors the group at 1309 or 1314. The Diotallevi cross, whether it stands at the threshold of the century or a few years past the signed cross, cannot be a work of about 1345.

The Diotallevi Crucifix: The First Cross of the Riminese School

The painted cross known as the “Diotallevi” Crucifix, now in the Museo della Città of Rimini, is the work with which the story of the Riminese school may fairly be said to begin. It takes its name from its last private owner, the Marchese Adauto Diotallevi, by whose testamentary wish it passed to the Comune of Rimini in 1936, and it is the smallest and, in current opinion, the earliest of the four painted crosses attributed to Giovanni da Rimini. Its nearly square proportions — 185 by 179 centimetres — give it an intimacy quite unlike the triumphal scale of Mercatello: this is a cross made to stand close to an altar rather than to loom over a nave, a circumstance that lends weight to the hypothesis, discussed below, of its origin in the church of Sant’Agostino. In its every structural choice it declares its dependence on the great Crucifix that Giotto had painted for San Francesco in Rimini around 1300: the dead Christ of the Christus patiens type hung against a dark cross, the mourners and the Redeemer gathered into mixtilinear terminals — the new format Giotto had introduced in place of the rectangular panels of Giunta and Cimabue — and even the decorative scheme of the ground, which follows the Malatestian model. Giovanni adopted the revolution at once; what he made of it was his own.

The body of Christ is the painting’s marvel. Long, slender and almost fleshless, it hangs with the arms extended nearly horizontal along the crossbeam, sagging only at the last, while the head falls onto the right shoulder in the silence of death. Criticism has found its definitive description in the diaphanous beauty of this tapering body, untouched by shadow — the same quality that clothes the figures of the chapel of the Virgin in Sant’Agostino, as if each were enclosed in a luminescent cocoon. Modelling is achieved not by chiaroscuro but by gradations of pale light, so that the body seems to emit rather than receive illumination, standing out against the dark field like a taper in a dim chapel. The wound in the side releases its thin thread of blood; the anatomy is stated with the utmost economy, the ribcage a suggestion, the belly a soft hollow. Nothing in Duecento painting on the Adriatic prepares us for this weightlessness, and nothing in Giotto quite accounts for it either.

The face concentrates the painter’s double inheritance. The eyes are closed, the long hair parts over the shoulders, and the features are drawn with a fine, calligraphic brush that still remembers the Byzantine tradition in which Giovanni was formed: at the bridge of the slightly aquiline nose there survives the hint of the thirteenth-century “fork,” a residue of the old iconic schemata that the painter never entirely renounced. Yet the profile is observed, the abandonment of the head is natural, and the grief the face communicates belongs to the new order of feeling that Giotto had made possible. Around the head the cruciform halo, worked in the gold, holds the face at the exact crossing of the two arms, the geometric and spiritual centre of the whole object.

The loincloth is the passage on which the cross’s early date chiefly turns. It is a sottilissimo perizoma, a veil of cloth so thin as to be transparent, falling from the hips almost to the knees and leaving the legs legible beneath it — and at the waist it is gathered in the triple knot that recalls the cingulum of thirteenth-century crosses. That knot is a choice of Byzantine matrix, and Giovanni would later set it aside: on the Goudstikker cross and at Mercatello the cloth wraps the hips in Giotto’s manner, without the archaic binding. Below, the legs descend close together toward the lower stipes, where the paint surface is most damaged; streams of blood once ran down toward the foot of the cross, and the losses and abrasions here bear witness to the panel’s hard material history.

At the ends of the crossbeam the two mourners occupy their lobed frames on gold. The Virgin, at the left, is wholly wrapped in a dark maphorion from which only the pale oval of her face and one slender hand emerge, the fingers gathered in a gesture of contained grief; Saint John, at the right, in a rose mantle over a dark tunic, inclines his cheek toward his raised hand in the canonical attitude of mourning that Giovanni’s school would repeat for a generation, from Giuliano’s panels to the last followers. Both are drawn with the miniaturist’s delicacy that distinguishes Giovanni’s small figures, and both turn inward, so that their sorrow converges on the dead Christ without rhetoric or agitation.

The cymatium presents the Redeemer half-length: dressed in a red tunic and dark mantle, blessing with the right hand, the book of the Gospels held against the breast — the figure Giovanni derived from the now-dispersed cymatium of Giotto’s Rimini cross and repeated constantly, until it became canonical for the painters of the following generations. Below him, on the upper stipes, the red tablet bears the sacred name in its abbreviated Greek form, IC XC. The Greek inscriptions are among the features that place the cross at the head of Giovanni’s sequence, tokens of the living Byzantine culture of the Adriatic port; yet they were not simply archaisms to be outgrown, for the same christogram recurs on the tablet of the signed cross of Mercatello, at the end of the painter’s known career. The Diotallevi cross is Byzantine and Giottesque at once, and its refusal to choose is precisely its historical interest.

The dark cross itself is enlivened, in the apron behind Christ’s body, by a drappo whose decoration follows the scheme Giotto had used in the Tempio Malatestiano cross; gold is reserved for the terminals, the haloes and the framing mouldings. The surface has suffered: the catalogue records that the painting was weakened by a first incautious cleaning, which thinned the upper layers and accounts for the worn, almost watercolour transparency of some passages, though a more recent intervention has recovered as much legibility as the surviving original paint allows. What remains is nonetheless precious in its ornament and moving in its reading of the Passion, and the very thinness of the surviving paint lets the luminous preparation shine through the body of Christ in a way that, however accidental, accords strangely with the painter’s own poetics of light.

Historically, the Diotallevi Crucifix is the clearest victim, and the clearest beneficiary, of the vicissitudes of Giovanni’s rediscovery. Attributed to him by Cesare Brandi in 1937, it was long dated near 1345 under the influence of the misread date on the Mercatello cross, and only with Carlo Volpe’s re-reading of 1965 was it restored to the first years of the century; current opinion, following Daniele Benati, places it around 1300–1305, immediately in Giotto’s wake and contemporary with the frescoes of the chapel of the Virgin in Sant’Agostino, whose figures share its diaphanous light. From that stylistic kinship, and from the will of Omizolo di Neri of 28 April 1303 — which provided for “unam crucem que debeat stari fieri in medio dicti altaris continue” on the altar of the Virgin in San Giovanni Evangelista — comes the attractive but unproven hypothesis that this is that very cross; the prudent formula remains that it could come from Sant’Agostino. Whatever its first altar, the Diotallevi Crucifix stands at the origin of the Riminese Trecento: the first surviving statement of that luminous, lyrical reading of Giotto that Giovanni handed on to his brothers and to a school.

The Talamello Crucifix

Among the four painted crosses attributed to Giovanni da Rimini, the Crucifix in the church of San Lorenzo at Talamello, in the upper Valmarecchia on the Romagnol side of the Montefeltro, is the one that most resists a settled place in his career. It is a large work, 230 by 160 centimetres, painted in tempera on panel with a sobriety of means that immediately sets it apart from its companions: the ground of the cross is a deep blue, the gilding is confined to the haloes and the framing mouldings, and the terminals are not the polylobed stars of the Diotallevi and Mercatello crosses but plain rectangles with stepped notches — the older form of the painted cross, the form of Giotto’s Crucifix in Santa Maria Novella. Its commission is held to have been Augustinian, and everything about its design speaks of a deliberately austere devotional taste.

The cross entered the critical literature early but obliquely. An early survey of the Riminese school in the 1930s judged it very close to Giuliano da Rimini, if not by a master of his following; Cesare Brandi, in the catalogue of the 1935 Rimini exhibition, noted instead its affinity with the cut-down cross then in the Goudstikker collection; and a study of 1955 recognised in it the same hand as the painted cross of Sassoferrato. It was Carlo Volpe, in his monograph of 1965, who first gave the work to Giovanni da Rimini himself, and the attribution has held, with the single reservation, advanced at the 2021 Rimini exhibition, that certain passages may betray the hand of a collaborator.

Where scholars part company is the date, and here the Talamello cross has become the hinge of the whole problem of Giovanni’s sequence. Volpe placed it first, at the threshold of the painter’s known activity, precisely because of its rectangular terminals, read as an archaism preceding the polylobed format that Giotto’s Rimini cross had made available; the biographical dictionary maintains this position, setting the Talamello Christ “at the beginning of the century” and finding in it precociously Giottesque traits, and the photographic archive record dates it 1300–1305. Criticism from the late 1980s, taken up by the 2021 exhibition, reversed the reading: the format of a cross was a matter on which patrons had their say, the rectangular terminals may reflect nothing more than conservative Augustinian taste, and the full, almost un-Byzantine volumes of Christ’s body and his half-closed eyes point instead to a late work, “after 1309,” perhaps around 1315 — after the signed cross of Mercatello. The dispute remains genuinely open, and this page presents the work without pretending to close it.

Whichever reading one prefers, the Talamello cross stands at one end of Giovanni’s career, and at either end it ties him to Giotto’s Riminese legacy. The biographical dictionary has proposed that its terminals preserve a reflection of the now-dispersed terminals of Giotto’s cross in the Tempio Malatestiano, and that its cymatium repeats the blessing Redeemer of Giotto’s cymatium — identified in a London collection in 1957 — to which Giovanni “constantly held” in figure after figure, until the type became canonical for the painters of the following Riminese generations. First statement or final restatement, the Talamello Crucifix is the work in which Giovanni’s dialogue with Giotto’s Rimini cross is at its most literal, and its dark, unglittering gravity gives that dialogue a tone all its own.

The Talamello Crucifix: First or Last of Giovanni’s Crosses?

The structure of the cross declares its difference at first sight. Where the Diotallevi and Mercatello crosses fold their figures into polylobed stars of moulded gold, at Talamello each arm ends in a plain rectangular tablet with stepped corners, bordered by a simple gilt fillet; the silhouette is the old one of the Duecento tradition and of Giotto’s Florentine cross, and it encloses a field of deep blue rather than patterned darkness. Gold appears only where meaning requires it — in the haloes, in the framing — so that the whole object reads as night pierced by discs of light. Whether this economy is the archaism of a beginner or the restraint demanded by an austere Augustinian patron is, as the introduction explains, the whole question of the work.

Against this blue field the body of Christ hangs with a weight new to Giovanni’s crosses. The arms extend along the crossbeam and the body descends in a gentle sway, the hip breaking softly to the viewer’s left, and the volumes are full — the chest broad, the belly rounded, the thighs substantial — modelled in pale flesh tones that stand out against the dark ground with sculptural presence. It is on these ample, almost un-Byzantine volumes that the late dating chiefly rests: the diaphanous, weightless Christ of the Diotallevi cross has here become a body that hangs, and the light that once seemed to shine through the flesh now falls upon it.

The head inclines onto the right shoulder within its gold cruciform halo, and the face is rendered with the mimetic attention that the biographical dictionary singles out as constant in Giovanni: the eyes half-closed, the lids elongated within deep brow fissures, the beard and hair described with a lingering, naturalistic brush. The expression is neither the hieratic mask of the thirteenth century nor the open pathos of Giuliano’s Christs; it is the quiet of a sleep observed, and the half-closed eyes — lids not sealed but fallen — belong to the naturalism that one line of criticism reads as the fruit of long meditation on Giotto, and another as its precocious first grasp.

The loincloth is among the passages on which the early dating has been argued. It is an opaque white cloth, wrapped and bound about the hips in gathered, consistent folds — the perizoma fasciato in pieghe affastellate e consistenti of the biographical dictionary’s description — with a long fall of drapery descending beside the right thigh. Nothing here recalls the transparent veil and triple cingulum knot of the Diotallevi cross; the cloth behaves as cloth, with weight and body, in Giotto’s manner. For the early-dating camp this is a precocious Giottesque borrowing already present at the start; for the late-dating camp it is simply what Giovanni’s drapery had become by the second decade. The passage itself, remarkably, serves both arguments.

The mourners occupy their rectangular tablets at the ends of the crossbeam, half-length on the blue ground with plain gold discs for haloes. At the left the Virgin, wrapped in her dark maphorion, bows her head and draws her pale hand toward her breast; at the right Saint John, in a red mantle over his dark tunic, leans his cheek upon his raised hand in the canonical gesture of grief that runs through the whole Riminese school. Both figures are quieter than their counterparts at Mercatello — smaller within their fields, more withdrawn — and their sorrow reaches the beholder less through gesture than through the mere fact of their vigil at the edges of the dark.

The cymatium presents the blessing Redeemer half-length in a stepped rectangular tablet at the summit: dressed in red, the dark mantle over the shoulder, the right hand raised in benediction and the red-bound book of the Gospels held against the breast. This is the figure that the biographical dictionary traces to the cymatium of Giotto’s Rimini cross, to which Giovanni held constantly across his career; its recurrence here, almost identical to the Redeemers of the Diotallevi and Mercatello crosses, is one of the strongest internal threads binding the four works to a single mind. Below the Redeemer a red band crosses the upper stipes, the tablet of the sacred inscription; its text cannot be made out in the photographs available, and its wording is not recorded here until a closer examination allows a secure reading.

At the foot of the cross, in the lowest tablet, a skull appears against the dark ground: the skull of Adam, buried according to medieval legend beneath Golgotha, upon which the blood of the Crucified descends. The motif renders explicit what the blood streaming down the stipes of the Mercatello cross only implies — the doctrine of Christ as the new Adam, whose sacrifice redeems the first — and it gives the Talamello cross a distinct eschatological accent among Giovanni’s crucifixes. The compartment is not discussed in the literature consulted for this essay, and its state of preservation would repay inspection; but its iconography is entirely traditional, and its placement directly beneath the feet of Christ completes the vertical axis of the work from the blessing Redeemer above to death conquered below. The feet themselves rest side by side, each apparently transfixed separately, in the older scheme rather than the crossed, single-nail Gothic type.

Taken as a whole, the Talamello Crucifix is the most severe and the most debated of Giovanni’s crosses: a work whose archaic format and precocious naturalism, whose full volumes and quiet restraint, can be assembled with equal plausibility into a beginning or an ending. The 2021 exhibition, which set it beside the newly restored Mercatello cross, dated it after 1309 and detected a collaborator in some passages; the biographical dictionary and the photographic archive keep it at the century’s opening. What is not in dispute is its quality and its fidelity to the Giottesque model that Giovanni made the foundation of a school: on the beam of a quiet Valmarecchia church, the dark cross with its discs of gold remains one of the purest surviving statements of the Riminese meditation on Giotto’s Crucifix — whether its first word or its last.

The Goudstikker Crucifix

Of the four painted crosses gathered around the name of Giovanni da Rimini, the so-called Goudstikker Crucifix is at once the most damaged and the most travelled. What survives is only the figured core of a much larger object: the cross itself, sawn down to the silhouette of Christ’s body and the arms that carry it, stripped of the lateral terminals that once held the mourning Virgin and Saint John, of the upper tablet that presumably crowned it, and of whatever apron or footboard completed it below. Every other cross in the group — Mercatello, the Diotallevi cross in Rimini, Talamello — preserves at least part of its narrative frame; here the frame is gone entirely, and the Crucified hangs alone against the dark field of his cross as though the surrounding world had been cut away. The mutilation, almost certainly the work of a later age that wished to convert a liturgical furnishing into a collectable devotional image, paradoxically concentrates the eye on what Giovanni painted best: the body itself.

The panel’s modern history reads like a compressed chronicle of the twentieth century. Possibly identifiable in the Achillito Chiesa collection in Milan, and passing through the hands of Frederick Muller in Amsterdam and of Enrico Testa, it entered the stock of the Amsterdam dealer Jacques Goudstikker, who inventoried it as no. 2212 and exhibited it in 1929, in his own gallery and at the Rijksmuseum, under the name of Giuliano da Rimini. In July 1940, after the German invasion of the Netherlands and Goudstikker’s death while fleeing the country, the cross was seized with the rest of his stock and transferred by Walter Hofer to Carinhall for Hermann Göring’s collection. Recovered by the Allied Monuments officers in 1945, it passed through the Munich Central Collecting Point to the Dutch state, which held it for six decades under the inventory number NK1485, depositing it first at the Archiepiscopal Museum in Utrecht and later at the Bonnefantenmuseum in Maastricht. Only in February 2006 was it restituted to Goudstikker’s heir; sold at Christie’s in London on 5 July 2007, it was acquired by the Moretti gallery, was offered again at Sotheby’s, New York, in 2015, in a sale held jointly with the gallery, and remains today in the Moretti collection in London.

Its critical fortunes have been correspondingly unsettled. Exhibited in 1929 as Giuliano, later assigned to Baronzio in the era when that name still absorbed most of the school’s production, the cross was restored to Giovanni once Brandi’s separation of the two personalities in the 1930s and Volpe’s documentary reconstruction of 1965 had given the painter of the Mercatello cross an independent identity. That attribution now commands general assent, and the work figured as Giovanni’s in the Rimini exhibition of 2021, where it hung beside the Diotallevi and Talamello crosses in the fullest confrontation of the group ever staged. The dating proposed on that occasion, between 1309 and 1314 — that is, in the immediate orbit of the signed and dated Mercatello cross — reflects the current view that this is a mature work, later than the Diotallevi cross with its residual Byzantine conventions.

Among the four crosses, indeed, the Goudstikker cross is the one in which the naturalism of the body is pushed furthest. Benati has observed that the side and belly of Christ are described with “a very fine, opalescent brushstroke,” and that the loincloth is no longer the rolled, knotted cloth of the older tradition but a veil of transparent white through which the body remains visible — a motif that descends directly from the cross Giotto painted for San Francesco in Rimini around 1300. If the Diotallevi cross shows Giovanni translating Giotto’s revolution while still holding to thirteenth-century formulas, and Mercatello shows him at his signed and dated maturity, the Goudstikker cross shows how far the naturalistic lesson could be carried: a body observed rather than constructed, hanging in real weight against a field of near-darkness. It is the last of the four crosses presented here, an order of exposition rather than of chronology; on Benati’s sequence it stands between the Diotallevi and Mercatello crosses.

A Cross Without Mourners: The Goudstikker Crucifix

The object as it survives is a shaped panel of 160.5 by 130 centimetres, cut along the contour of the cross itself so that nothing remains beyond the dark green-black field on which Christ hangs. The reduction was drastic: the horizontal arms end abruptly just past Christ’s fingertips, where the terminals with the half-length mourners were removed, and the vertical shaft has lost whatever rose above the titulus and extended below the feet. A thin band of gold survives along the edges of the cross, the remnant of the ornamental border that once mediated between the figured field and the lost framing elements. What the amputation destroyed as an ensemble it preserved as an image: the essential relation of body to cross, figure to ground, is intact, and the panel reads today with the concentrated force of an icon.

The cross itself is painted a deep green so dark as to approach black, modulated toward the edges where the gold fillet catches the light. This dark field is not neutral: in the Riminese crosses it functions as the visual equivalent of the darkness that fell over the earth at the ninth hour, and against it the pallor of Christ’s flesh acquires an almost phosphorescent luminosity. Giovanni exploits the contrast deliberately. The body is the brightest thing on the panel, brighter even than the gold of the halo, and the eye is drawn first to the long diagonal of the torso and then outward along the extended arms, which span nearly the full width of the surviving panel in a single, unbroken horizontal.

At the summit, on a vermilion tablet, stands the titulus: not the Latin inscription of Pilate but the Greek christogram IC XC, the abbreviated “Jesus Christ” with its superscript bars, flanking a small cross. The choice is telling. The same Greek formula appears on the tablet of the signed Mercatello cross, and its recurrence here binds the two works together at the level of workshop practice: whatever naturalistic distance Giovanni travelled from his Byzantine inheritance, he retained the hieratic Greek naming of the Crucified, a deliberate archaism that placed his crosses in continuity with the venerated croci dipinte of the previous century. The white letters, carefully finished with their contraction marks, are original and legible — a small epigraphic survival on a panel that has lost so much else.

The halo is among the most refined passages of the work. Against the burnished gold disc, the arms of the inner cross are picked out in red panels ornamented with delicate white filigree — quatrefoils and foliate scrolls executed with a miniaturist’s precision. This cruciform halo with decorated red inserts descends from Giotto’s Riminese cross. Beneath it the head of Christ falls forward and to his right, the eyes closed, the brow smooth, the long auburn hair parting over the shoulder. The face is rendered without contortion: death is registered not as agony but as the cessation of effort, the features composed in the profound stillness that the Riminese painters made their particular study.

It is in the anatomy of the torso that the painter’s advance is most visible. The chest is broad and softly lit, the ribcage suggested rather than diagrammed, and the transition through the side and belly is achieved with those thin, opalescent glazes that Benati singled out — veils of colour through which the underlayers breathe, producing flesh that seems to have temperature as well as tone. Gone entirely is the Byzantine convention of the anatomical grid, the schematic division of thorax and abdomen that still lingers, however softened, in the Diotallevi cross. Here the body is modelled as a continuous substance, swelling and hollowing under a single fall of light, and the slight torsion of the hips — the pelvis swinging gently to the viewer’s left — is described as a fact of weight, not as a decorative curve.

The loincloth carries the same lesson into drapery. It is a sheer white veil, knotted low and falling in soft transparent folds through which the thighs remain fully visible, painted wet and thin so that the flesh tone reads through the white. This is the perizoma of Giotto’s Rimini cross, adopted whole: a motif that scandalizes the older tradition of the heavy, rolled cloth and declares allegiance to the new naturalism, in which even the modesty of the Crucified is subject to optical truth. Giovanni handles the transparency with remarkable delicacy — the hem drifting slightly at Christ’s left, the gathered folds at the waist catching small accents of white — and the passage alone would justify the dating of the cross to the painter’s full maturity.

The wounds are treated with the same economy that governs the whole. From the nailed hands, fine threads of blood descend along the forearms and fall in slender vertical trickles against the dark green field, where they read almost as calligraphy; the side wound emits its small burst of red strokes; the feet, placed side by side and pierced, bleed sparingly onto the shaft below. There is no accumulation of gore, no rhetorical amplification of suffering: the blood functions as sign rather than spectacle, punctuating the pallor of the body at the canonical points. In this restraint the Goudstikker cross stands with the whole Riminese group, whose pathos is meditative rather than expressionist — an art made for the long stare of monastic devotion, not for the shock of the crowd.

Seen last in this account, the cross clarifies what the group means. The Diotallevi cross, for all its Giottesque gravity, still negotiates with the thirteenth century; Mercatello, signed and dated, fixes the painter’s mature standard in 1309 (or 1314); Talamello raises the unresolved question of chronology and collaboration. The Goudstikker cross, datable with the 2021 exhibition to the years 1309–14, shows how far the development had gone by the years of the signed cross: a Christ whose body is observed with an attention to surface, weight, and light that has fully absorbed Giotto’s example while retaining, in the Greek titulus and the ornamented halo, the marks of the tradition from which it came. That such a work should have survived at all — cut down, exiled, looted, warehoused under a state inventory number for sixty years — and should now hang, restituted and reattributed, as a touchstone of the Riminese Trecento, is one of the quiet reversals of fortune that the history of this school keeps offering.

Salvation in Six Compartments: the Barberini Panel

Among the few securely attributed panel paintings by Giovanni da Rimini, the small rectangle of gilded poplar in the Gallerie Nazionali di Arte Antica at Palazzo Barberini is the one in which the painter’s narrative intelligence can be studied most closely. Measuring only 52.5 by 34.5 centimetres, it is divided by a cross of ornamented red bands into six compartments of equal size, which read from left to right and from top to bottom as a compressed Christological cycle: the Nativity with the first bath of the Child, the Crucifixion, the Lamentation over the dead Christ, the Descent into Limbo, the Resurrection with the Holy Women at the Tomb, and the Last Judgement. The engaged frame, the gold ground, and the fine red borders survive, though the gilding is traversed throughout by a dense network of craquelure that has become, for the modern viewer, part of the object’s physiognomy.

The panel has long been paired with a companion of almost identical format now in the National Gallery in London, acquired in 2015 with the support of Ronald S. Lauder, which presents the Ascension of Saint John the Evangelist, the Coronation of the Virgin, Saint Catherine of Alexandria before the Emperor Maxentius, and Saints Francis and John the Baptist. The two were for decades described as the wings of a single diptych, and the exhibition held at Palazzo Barberini in 2017–18 reunited them for direct comparison. That reconstruction is less secure than it appears: the two panels share dimensions, gilding, and ornament, but nothing proves they were hinged together, and it has been suggested that they may instead have belonged to a larger ensemble, possibly a triptych centred on a Madonna. The Rome panel entered the state collections through the Barberini–Sciarra line, not — as is sometimes repeated — from the Torlonia collection.

The attribution rests on the comparison with the Mercatello cross and with the frescoes of the chapel of the Virgin in Sant’Agostino at Rimini. Brandi’s separation of Giovanni from Baronzio in the 1930s made the grouping possible; Volpe’s monograph of 1965 set the panel firmly among Giovanni’s early works; and Benati, in the Riminese exhibitions of 1995 and 2021, confirmed both the attribution and a dating to the first years of the fourteenth century. The date of c. 1300–1305 places the work in the immediate aftermath of Giotto’s presence in Rimini, when the Franciscan church received its great painted cross, and before the Arena Chapel in Padua could have exerted any direct influence on the Adriatic school.

What makes the panel exceptional is the coexistence within it of two languages. Its technique is that of the miniaturist and the icon painter: tiny figures, chrysographic gold striations on the draperies, compartments crowded with incident, and iconographic formulas of Byzantine descent such as the bath of the newborn Christ and the Anastasis. Yet its figures possess a weight, a tenderness of gesture, and a capacity to occupy space that belong unmistakably to the new art learnt from Giotto. The six scenes that follow are therefore not merely a summary of salvation history but a document of transition, painted by an artist who could think in both idioms at once.

A Gospel in Miniature: Giovanni da Rimini’s Christological Panel

The Nativity and the First Bath

The upper left compartment opens the cycle with the Nativity, conceived according to the conflated narrative model that the Western tradition inherited from Byzantium. Within a single field the painter presents the Virgin reclining beside the manger, the ox and ass, the adoring angels, the annunciation to the shepherds, the pensive Joseph, and the bathing of the newborn Child by two midwives. The Child therefore appears twice — swaddled in the manger above and naked in the basin below — a device of continuous narration that the medieval viewer read not as contradiction but as a sequence of moments held together by a single meaning.

The composition is organised on two superimposed registers. Above, the Virgin lies diagonally across a steep rocky slope, her body framed by a bright vermilion mattress scattered with gold motifs; the wooden roof of the shelter projects over the manger, and the animals emerge from behind it. Below, on a narrow strip of greenish ground, the three figures of Joseph and the midwives form a frieze parallel to the picture plane. The upper group is iconic and devotional, the lower one domestic and anecdotal, and the transition between them is managed by the fall of the mountain rather than by any architectural division.

The Virgin is the emotional centre. Wrapped in a deep blue mantle traced with gold, she turns toward the manger and bends her head over the swaddled Child in a gesture of intimate contemplation rather than hieratic display. The Byzantine type of the Theotokos lying apart, turned away from her son, is here softened into a mother’s attentive leaning. It is precisely in such small inflections of posture that Giovanni’s Giottesque education reveals itself within a formula he otherwise preserves intact.

In the lower register Joseph sits at the left, wrapped in a rose mantle over a blue robe, his head resting on his hand in the traditional attitude of meditation or doubt. The midwives kneel on either side of a golden basin: one, in lilac, supports the haloed infant, while the other, in rose, pours water from a white jug. The episode, drawn from apocryphal sources, affirmed the full humanity of the newborn Christ; its gentle domesticity is rendered with small, carefully observed gestures of the hands.

The landscape is built from the angular, stepped rocks of the Byzantine tradition, painted in pale violet and grey and lit from the left so that their faceted planes read as volumes. On the right a shepherd, clad in a dark tunic, raises what appears to be a pipe or horn toward the angel who flies down over the roof of the shelter, while faint white sheep graze on the slope. A small tree crowns the summit. Three angels at the upper left lean forward in adoration, their bodies half hidden by the mountain in a manner that implies space behind the rock.

The colour is of remarkable richness for so small a surface. The vermilion of the mattress, the lapis blue of the Virgin’s mantle, the rose and lilac of the lower figures, and the cool mauves of the rocks are set against the burnished gold ground, which is left bare above the mountains and fills the sky. Gold striations on the Virgin’s mantle catch the light in the manner of icon painting, while the flesh is modelled in soft greenish underlayers warmed with pink, a technique that tempers the Byzantine linearity with a new sense of surface.

The iconographic model is ultimately Byzantine, transmitted through the Duecento panels and manuscripts of central Italy, and parallels are found in countless Nativities of the later thirteenth century. What distinguishes Giovanni’s version is not the scheme but the handling: the figures are more compact and more solid, their drapery falls in heavier folds, and their gestures are directed toward one another rather than toward the viewer. The formula is inherited; the tone is new.

As the opening of the cycle, the Nativity establishes the register of the whole panel: a narrative of salvation told at the scale of a miniature, yet with the psychological gravity of monumental painting. It also sets up a deliberate correspondence with the scenes below, for the naked body of the infant lowered into the basin anticipates the naked body of the dead Christ laid upon the tomb in the third compartment — a typological echo that the medieval devout would not have missed.

The Crucifixion

The upper right compartment presents the Crucifixion, placed at the head of the right-hand column, at whose foot stands the Last Judgement, so that the sacrifice and its final consequence frame that column. Christ hangs on a tall cross planted in a rocky mound, flanked by two small grieving angels in flight; beneath, the mourners are divided into two groups, the holy women on the left and Saint John with companions on the right. The scene is a reduction of the crowded Crucifixions of the Duecento to its essential participants.

The composition is rigorously symmetrical about the vertical of the cross, which divides the field almost exactly in half and extends from the upper frame to the ground. The horizontal arm, with its small titulus plaque, spans the upper third, and the two angels occupy the triangles of gold between the arms and the frame. The mourning groups are compressed into the lower half, their heads aligned roughly at the level of Christ’s knees, so that the body of the Crucified dominates the gold field in isolation.

Christ is represented dead, his head fallen onto his right shoulder, his body curved in a gentle arc and his feet nailed one above the other against the shaft. The anatomy is slender and softly modelled, and the loincloth is transparent — the veil through which the legs remain visible, as in Giotto’s cross for San Francesco and as in Giovanni’s own painted crosses. Blood runs from the hands, the side wound, and the feet down to the foot of the cross, where it stains the rocky mound. In miniature, the figure is effectively a small painted crucifix set within the narrative.

On the left the Virgin, in her deep blue mantle, swoons and is supported by the holy women who press around her, while behind them a figure in red — probably the Magdalene — flings her arms upward in a gesture of violent lament. The motif of the fainting Virgin, alien to the Byzantine tradition, which kept her upright and dignified, belongs to the affective piety of Franciscan devotion, and its presence here marks the panel as a work of the new century.

On the right Saint John, in a rose mantle over blue, gazes upward toward Christ with his hand raised to his chin, his whole body turning in a slow spiral of grief. Beside him stands a bearded figure in a blue mantle over a red tunic, perhaps the centurion or one of the faithful, and a further head is glimpsed at the edge of the field. The contrast between the turbulent, clustered women on the left and the more contemplative male group on the right introduces a rhythm of emotional modes that articulates the whole composition.

The ground is reduced to a strip of dark green, and the rock at the foot of the cross is a small pale mound, without the skull of Adam that often appears in this position. The two angels, painted in blue and flesh tones with flickering wings, twist in the air with a vivacity that recalls the lamenting angels in Giotto’s Assisi and Padua Crucifixions, though here they remain small and emblematic. Everything else is gold, and the gold isolates the figures like actors on an empty stage.

The draperies of the mourners are handled with the same chrysographic accents seen in the Nativity, but their folds fall more heavily and more naturally, and the figures stand firmly on the ground rather than hovering. Even at this scale the painter distinguishes the materials: the heavy wool of the mantles, the translucent linen of Christ’s loincloth, the metallic sheen of the halos incised into the gold. It is a demonstration of how much monumental thinking could be concentrated into a compartment a few centimetres high.

Within the panel the Crucifixion is the hinge of the narrative: the event toward which the Nativity points and from which the Lamentation, the Descent into Limbo, the Resurrection, and the Judgement proceed. Within Giovanni’s work, it offers an invaluable parallel to the painted crosses, confirming in miniature the same conception of the dead Christ — curved, pale, transparently veiled — that he developed on a monumental scale at Mercatello and Rimini.

The Lamentation over the Dead Christ

The central left compartment shows the body of Christ laid out upon a long rose-coloured tomb or anointing stone, surrounded by the mourners. The scene is often catalogued as the Entombment, but its emphasis falls less on the act of burial than on the lament over the body — the moment that Byzantine art knew as the Threnos and that Western painting was, in these very years, transforming into one of its most intensely emotional subjects.

The composition is dominated by the strong horizontal of the tomb, which extends across almost the entire width of the field and is seen slightly from above, so that its top plane recedes into space. On it lies Christ, rigid and parallel to the picture plane; behind and around him the mourners form a dense, irregular crown of heads and bodies. At the right a steep pale rock rises diagonally toward the upper corner, closing the scene and echoing the mountains of the Nativity above.

The Virgin, in her blue mantle, bends over the head of her son and presses her face against his, gathering him in her arms in the final embrace. The gesture, which Byzantine art had formulated in the Threnos and which Giotto made unforgettable at Padua, is here rendered with a tenderness that transforms the ritual lament into private grief. The dead Christ, his body pale and thin beneath a transparent veil, lies with closed eyes and slack limbs, his wounds marked by small touches of red.

Around them the holy women give voice to sorrow in varied attitudes: one, veiled in dark violet, leans in from the far left; another, in red, bends forward with her face close to the Virgin’s; a third, darkly veiled, raises her hands to her face. Saint John, in rose, stoops toward the body with an expression of quiet desolation, while at the right an old bearded man — Joseph of Arimathea or Nicodemus — contemplates the scene. At the foot of the tomb a figure in blue, seen from behind, bends low over the feet of Christ.

The figure seen from behind is a telling device. Placing a mourner with his or her back to the viewer, so that the observer seems to stand behind the grieving group, was one of Giotto’s most radical spatial inventions, and its adoption here, even in a small panel, shows how quickly the Riminese painters absorbed the lesson. The viewer is no longer outside the event but drawn into its circle, positioned among the mourners at the edge of the tomb.

The colour is dominated by the unexpected pink of the tomb, whose broad, luminous faces occupy much of the lower half of the field and give the scene a soft, almost muted brightness. Against it the blues, violets, and reds of the mourners’ garments are concentrated in the upper band, and the pale body of Christ lies precisely at the boundary between the two zones. The dark green ground below and the gold above complete a chromatic structure of great clarity.

The rock at the right plays both a spatial and a symbolic role. It closes the composition, pushing the eye back toward the centre, and it anticipates the sepulchre carved into the living rock, as well as the rock of the Anastasis in the adjacent compartment. The repetition of this pale, faceted form from scene to scene lends the panel a visual continuity that counterbalances its division into separate fields.

In the logic of the cycle the Lamentation is the narrative’s darkest moment, the moment of absolute death before the reversal of Limbo and the Resurrection. In the history of Riminese painting it is one of the earliest testimonies of the school’s affective intensity — the capacity, which Giovanni’s successors would develop in their fresco cycles, to render grief as something shared, bodily, and immediate.

The Descent into Limbo

The central right compartment presents the Descent into Limbo, the Anastasis of Byzantine tradition, in which Christ, between his death and resurrection, breaks the gates of the underworld and frees the righteous of the Old Testament. It is the most dynamic scene of the panel, and the only one in which the principal figure moves decisively through space.

The composition is organised around a strong diagonal. A great pale rock rises from the lower left to the upper right, its face forming the backdrop to the action, and at its right edge opens the dark mouth of Limbo, a cave from which the patriarchs emerge. Christ strides from left to right across the field, bridging the royal figures standing at the left and the captives in the cave, so that the movement of the scene runs across the whole width of the compartment.

Christ, dressed in a pale robe shot with lilac and white, holds a long processional cross in his left hand and extends his right to seize the wrist of the old, white-bearded Adam, who kneels at the entrance of the cave with his arms outstretched. The movement is one of forward thrust and upward pull at once: Christ leans slightly back as he raises Adam, and his garment swings with the momentum of his stride. Behind Adam other figures crowd in the darkness, their faces turned toward the Redeemer.

Beneath Christ’s feet lie the shattered doors of Hell, rendered as brick-red panels cast down at oblique angles, together with a small key or lock — the traditional signs of the broken power of death. The detail, drawn from the Byzantine formula, is represented with a naturalistic concern for the thickness and weight of the fallen leaves, which project toward the viewer and establish the foreground plane of the scene.

On the left stand three crowned figures in rich garments of red and blue, the royal ancestors of Christ among whom David and Solomon are traditionally recognised. They do not participate in the action but witness it, their gestures quiet and their gaze turned toward the centre, and their stately presence balances the urgency of the rescue at the right. The contrast between the calm of the witnesses and the dramatic grasp of Adam’s wrist is the scene’s central expressive device.

The chromatic structure is dominated by the pale, almost luminous rock and by Christ’s white-lilac robe, which make this the brightest compartment of the panel. The deep blue, crimson, and rose of the kings, the dark void of the cave, and the brick red of the fallen doors are distributed around this luminous core. The effect is that of a revelation: light entering darkness, visually translated into the confrontation of the pale figure of Christ with the black mouth of Limbo.

The iconography descends directly from Byzantine art, where the Anastasis served as the principal image of the Resurrection, and the scheme — Christ with the cross-staff, Adam raised by the wrist, the broken doors, the kings as witnesses — would have been familiar to Giovanni from Adriatic and Venetian models. Yet the handling of movement and the physical plausibility of Christ’s stride reveal the painter’s new concern with the body as an agent in space, a concern the Byzantine tradition rarely allowed.

Placed immediately beside the Lamentation, the Descent into Limbo turns the narrative from death toward redemption: the body mourned in the tomb is now seen in triumphant action beyond it. The juxtaposition, deliberately exploited by the grid of the panel, invites the viewer to read across the two scenes as a single movement from grief to deliverance.

The Resurrection and the Holy Women at the Tomb

The lower left compartment combines two moments that the Gospels narrate separately: the Resurrection itself and the visit of the Holy Women to the empty tomb. The angel sits upon the sarcophagus announcing that Christ is risen, while the Risen Christ himself appears behind it, and the soldiers who guarded the tomb lie asleep in the foreground. The conflation allows the painter to show both the event and its first proclamation within a single field.

The composition is built around the rose-coloured sarcophagus, set obliquely in the centre of the field and repeating the colour of the tomb in the Lamentation above. On its lid sits the angel, dominating the scene with immense outspread wings; at the left stand the three Holy Women in a compact vertical group; at the right, behind the sarcophagus, rises the figure of Christ; and in front, at the base, the soldiers lie tumbled in sleep. Each group occupies its own zone, and the angel binds them together.

The angel is the most monumental figure of the panel. Seated frontally in a dark mantle traced with dense gold striations, the head inclined and turned toward the women, it spreads two vast wings of deep blue-black that rise almost to the upper border and fill much of the gold ground. The dramatic scale of the wings, far exceeding naturalistic proportion, gives the scene a solemn, almost heraldic grandeur, and their dark silhouette against the gold is among the most striking passages of the whole work.

Behind the angel, on the right, stands the Risen Christ in a white garment, bearing the banner of the Resurrection with its red cross, the wound in his side clearly visible. His presence converts the scene from an announcement into a manifestation: the viewer sees what the women have not yet understood. His calm frontality contrasts with the movement of the angel’s wings and with the heaped bodies of the sleepers below.

The three Holy Women, wrapped in dark mantles of violet, blue, and near-black, stand closely together at the left, their heads bowed and veiled, holding the vessels of ointment they had brought to anoint the body. Their subdued tonality and restrained poses make them a quiet counterpoint to the angel. In the foreground the soldiers — one in a red tunic, one in a checkered blue garment, others in dark caps — lie crumpled against the base of the tomb, oblivious to the event taking place above them.

The palette is darker and more concentrated than in the scenes above, dominated by the blacks and deep blues of the wings and of the women’s mantles, relieved by the rose of the sarcophagus, the white of Christ’s robe, and the red accents of the banner and of the soldiers’ clothing. The gold ground, left largely bare in the upper part, sets off the great dark wings and gives the whole compartment a nocturnal gravity appropriate to the dawn of Easter.

Iconographically, the combination of the Marys at the Tomb with the figure of the Risen Christ and the sleeping guards reflects the progressive Western development of the Resurrection image, which Byzantium had represented chiefly through the Anastasis and the Myrophores. Giovanni’s version stands at the meeting point of the two traditions, retaining the angel and the women of the Eastern type while introducing the visible, triumphant Christ that the West would make canonical.

In the sequence of the panel, the scene answers directly to the Lamentation above: the same rose-coloured tomb, once bearing the dead body, now stands empty, occupied by the angel of the announcement. The vertical reading of the left column — Nativity, Lamentation, Resurrection — thus traces the full arc of Christ’s earthly body, from birth through death to its glorified return.

The Last Judgement

The lower right compartment concludes the cycle with the Last Judgement, the end of history toward which the whole narrative tends. Christ appears enthroned in glory at the centre, surrounded by the Virgin and the apostles seated on thrones; below, in a separate strip, angels sound the trumpets while the dead rise from their tombs. The entire eschatological drama is compressed into a field no larger than the other five.

The composition is divided into two registers. The upper, larger zone presents the heavenly court as a symmetrical assembly: Christ in the centre within a pointed dark blue mandorla, flanked on either side by enthroned figures and by rows of haloed heads that rise in tiers toward the upper border. The lower strip, much narrower, is occupied by the resurrection of the dead, with angels hovering above rows of pink sarcophagi. The division corresponds to the traditional separation of heaven and earth.

Christ sits frontally on a red throne within the deep blue mandorla, dressed in a dark mantle heavily striated with gold, his arms extended and his hands turned outward to display the wounds, while the wound in his side is exposed through the opening of the garment. The gesture of the ostentatio vulnerum — the showing of the wounds — links the Judge to the Crucified of the upper right compartment and makes the Passion the criterion of the final judgement.

At his right, on the viewer’s left, sits the Virgin in her blue mantle, turned toward him in intercession; beside her is an elderly apostle, probably Peter, and further figures crowd behind. On the opposite side a bearded figure with long hair, perhaps John the Baptist, completes the intercessory pair, and beyond him sits an apostle with a dark beard and high forehead, in the type traditionally given to Paul. The rows of haloes behind suggest the multitude of the apostolic college and the saints.

In the lower strip the resurrection of the dead unfolds with miniature precision. Two angels, one on each side, sound long trumpets, while at the centre a third angel holds a cross and a white cloth — instruments of the Passion displayed at the end of time. Beneath them the dead rise from pink sarcophagi arranged in rows, tiny figures emerging to face judgement. The scale of these figures, far smaller than the heavenly court above, dramatises the distance between humanity and its Judge.

The colour concentrates the composition around its central axis: the deep blue of the mandorla, the red of the throne, and the gold-striated dark mantle of Christ form a luminous core, while the saints’ garments of blue, rose, and crimson are distributed symmetrically around it. The use of chrysography is here at its most intense, giving Christ’s garment an almost metallic radiance that separates him from the surrounding figures.

The scene invites comparison with the large Last Judgement in the church of Sant’Agostino at Rimini, generally held to be a probable work of Giovanni, and the panel preserves in miniature the same hierarchical conception — an enthroned Christ displaying the wounds, an intercessory court, the resurrection of the dead below — that the fresco developed on a monumental scale. Whatever the precise relationship between the two works, the Judgement of the Barberini panel is precious evidence of how the Riminese painters conceived this subject in the first years of the century.

As the final scene, the Last Judgement closes the cycle at the point of greatest theological density. Placed diagonally opposite the Nativity and directly beneath the Descent into Limbo, it completes a history of salvation that begins with the humility of the manger and ends with the majesty of the throne. The viewer who has followed the six compartments has traversed, in a panel smaller than a page, the whole span of Christian time.

Heaven Above, Saints Below: Giovanni da Rimini’s London Panel

The panel acquired by the National Gallery in 2015 is the companion of the Barberini Scenes from the Life of Christ, and in some respects the more surprising of the two. Where the Rome panel divides its surface into six equal compartments, the London panel departs from that regularity. Two tall scenes occupy the upper two-thirds, each spanning what would otherwise be two fields. Below them, a broad scene and a narrower one share the lower register. The National Gallery has described this uneven arrangement of scenes as unique in early Italian painting. The same red borders with blue and white ornament, the same engaged frame, and the same burnished gold ground bind the two panels together as products of a single conception.

The subjects are as unusual as their layout. At the upper left, mourners bow toward the tomb of Saint John the Evangelist, while far above them the saint is received into heaven by Christ, the Virgin, angels, and saints. This is the ascension of the Evangelist, an image practically unknown in Western art. At the upper right, the Coronation of the Virgin is watched by a host of angels who crane their necks from below. In the lower register, Saint Catherine of Alexandria confronts the Emperor Maxentius, and in a rocky landscape Saint Francis⁶ receives the stigmata beside a standing Saint John the Baptist. The choice of saints, and above all the prominence of the Evangelist, points toward a specific patron and place.

That place was probably Sant’Agostino in Rimini. The Augustinian hermits settled there in the mid-thirteenth century, but the church had previously been dedicated to Saint John the Evangelist, and after their arrival it was dedicated to both saints. The link with Sant’Agostino connects the panel to the church whose chapel of the Virgin preserves Giovanni’s frescoes. The panel’s modern history is short and well documented. It was in the collection of the Dukes of Northumberland at Alnwick Castle from 1853 until its sale at auction in July 2014. A temporary export bar then allowed a British institution to match the price, and Ronald S. Lauder provided the funding that brought it to Trafalgar Square in 2015.

The relationship with the Barberini panel has been clarified by technical examination. It is unlikely that the two formed a diptych, since there is no evidence of holes for connecting hinges, but they were very probably made as a pair for private contemplation. The National Gallery’s exhibition of 2017 and the Barberini exhibition of 2017–18 reunited them in turn. Seen together, the two panels show Giovanni’s capacity to adapt the language of the late Byzantine icon: precious scale, chrysographic draperies, rare Eastern iconographies. He handles it through the new corporeal and emotional idiom he had learnt from Giotto in Rimini.

The Evangelist’s Ascension and Other Rarities: Scenes from the Lives of the Virgin and Saints

The Ascension of Saint John the Evangelist

The tall scene on the upper left represents the end of Saint John the Evangelist’s earthly life as the Eastern tradition recounted it. The legend, transmitted in the apocryphal Acts of John and later popularised in the West through the Golden Legend⁷, tells how the aged apostle, after celebrating the liturgy at Ephesus, had a grave dug beside the altar and descended into it. There he was enveloped in a blinding light, and when the light faded his body had vanished. Giovanni divides this narrative vertically. Below, the earthly witnesses gather at the tomb; above, the saint is received into the glory his body has already reached.

The lower zone is dominated by an extraordinary piece of painted architecture. A hexagonal ciborium with slender columns, a projecting cornice, and a steep blue tiled roof rises over an altar covered with a richly patterned cloth. This monumental canopy marks the tomb as an altar-grave within a church, as the legend requires. The structure is drawn in convincing perspective, its receding cornices and diagonal struts constructing a real space in miniature. Few passages in early Riminese painting show more clearly the ambition to build three-dimensional architecture on a gold ground.

Around the altar the witnesses respond to the miracle. At the left a figure bends deeply, bowing toward the empty tomb in a gesture of reverence. At the right a crowd of men and women presses forward, among them a small child, their bodies inclined toward the altar in wonder and devotion. The varied postures and the inclusion of the child give the gathering the character of a real congregation. The event is witnessed by a community rather than by a formal assembly of saints.

In the upper zone the heavenly reception is staged as a courtly assembly against the gold. A compact group of haloed figures, among them the Evangelist received by Christ and the Virgin, is flanked by angels whose tall wings rise in dark, feathered spikes. Their robes are painted in alternating reds, blues, and rose tones, with golden striations catching the light. The group is closely packed, the heads arranged in overlapping rows, and the whole ensemble floats above the ciborium without any intervening clouds or frame.

The relationship between the two zones is the scene’s central idea. Between the ciborium and the heavenly group stretches an expanse of bare gold, and this empty field is the visual equivalent of the saint’s vanished body. The eye moves from the empty grave below to the glorified figure above, reading the ascent in the gap itself. The absence of any dividing border makes the transition continuous. This formal solution is as original as the iconography, and it gives the scene its peculiar tension.

The colour structure follows the same vertical logic. The lower zone is warm and earthy, with the reddish floor, the patterned altar cloth, and the rose and blue garments of the witnesses. The upper zone is more precious and brighter, its reds and blues enriched by gold. The blue of the ciborium roof forms a chromatic hinge between them, pointing upward like an arrow toward the heavenly court.

The iconography is essentially Byzantine. The Metastasis of John, his translation from the tomb, was a familiar subject in the East, but it was practically unknown in the West. Its appearance here reflects Rimini’s close commercial and cultural links with the Byzantine world, which brought icons, ivories, and illuminated manuscripts into the Adriatic port. Giovanni evidently had access to such models. His achievement was to translate an Eastern narrative into the spatial and emotional language of the new Italian painting.

The prominence of this scene, placed first and given a double field, is the strongest argument for the panel’s destination. A work that opens with the glorification of Saint John the Evangelist was presumably made for patrons attached to his cult. In Rimini, that means the church of Sant’Agostino, which had long been dedicated to him. The scene thus carries not only the panel’s rarest iconography but also the key to its original setting.

The Coronation of the Virgin

The tall scene on the upper right is the Coronation of the Virgin, the celestial culmination of her life and the natural complement to the Evangelist’s reception in heaven. The two upper scenes together present glorification after death: the disciple whom Jesus loved, and the mother entrusted to him at the foot of the cross. That relationship, established in the Gospel of John, gives the pairing a theological coherence that a devout viewer in Sant’Agostino would have recognised immediately.

The composition is again divided vertically. Above, Christ and the Virgin sit side by side on a single wide throne. Below, a dense host of angels fills the lower field, their faces turned upward toward the event. The throne rests on a narrow platform whose edge marks the boundary between the two zones. The arrangement repeats, in mirror image, the structure of the scene to the left, with heaven above and witnesses below, and it ensures that the two upper scenes read as a matched pair.

The throne is a remarkable piece of Gothic furniture. Its high back rises into three gabled and cusped arches crowned with finials, and its surfaces are covered with a dense brocade pattern in gold and dark tones. This is a very early instance in Riminese painting of Gothic architectural forms applied to the celestial throne. It offers a significant contrast to the more traditional round-arched thrones of the Byzantine type, and it suggests the painter’s awareness of the new Gothic vocabulary spreading through Italy around 1300.

The Virgin sits on the left, turned toward her son and bowing her crowned head in humility, her hands crossed on her breast. She wears a deep blue mantle traced with gold over a darker robe. Christ, on the right, leans toward her and extends his arm to set the crown upon her head. The gesture is intimate and gentle, not ceremonial. The two figures incline toward each other so that their haloes nearly touch, and the heavy folds of their mantles pool at their feet on the platform.

Below, the host of angels forms one of the most striking passages of the panel. Arranged in overlapping tiers, their haloed heads rise toward the upper border of the lower field, and their bodies are painted in soft blues, roses, and pale golds. The angels crane their necks to watch the coronation above, and this upward movement of many heads animates the whole mass. It creates a vivid sense of beholding. The heavenly court watches just as the congregation below does in the adjacent scene.

The colour is concentrated in the upper zone, where the deep blue of the Virgin’s mantle, the dark garment of Christ, and the patterned throne are set against the gold. The lower zone is lighter and more varied, a shimmering field of pastel robes and golden haloes. The effect is of a precious object set on a luminous base, with the throne as the jewel and the angels as its setting.

The Coronation of the Virgin was a relatively new subject in Italian painting around 1300, developed in the later thirteenth century from French Gothic sculpture and from the mosaic apses of Rome. Its appearance here, in a small devotional panel, shows how quickly the theme entered the repertory of private devotion. The combination of a Western subject, a Gothic throne, and Byzantine chrysography is characteristic of Giovanni’s synthesis.

Within the panel, the Coronation balances the Ascension of the Evangelist in size, structure, and meaning, and together the two scenes form a heavenly register above the earthly saints below. The Virgin’s presence here may also connect the panel with the chapel of the Virgin in Sant’Agostino, where Giovanni painted the stories of her life. Whatever the precise link, the coronation of Mary and the glorification of John frame the devotional world of the panel’s patron.

Saint Catherine of Alexandria before the Emperor Maxentius

The broad scene in the lower left represents Saint Catherine of Alexandria confronting the Emperor Maxentius. According to her legend, the learned princess of Alexandria challenged the emperor for his persecution of Christians. Maxentius summoned fifty philosophers to refute her, and she converted them all through her eloquence, and the emperor had them put to death for their conversion. Catherine was eventually martyred herself. Giovanni chooses the episode of her disputation and preaching, the moment in which her wisdom triumphs over pagan learning.

The composition is organised as a confrontation across the width of the field. On the left Catherine stands elevated at a wooden pulpit reached by steps. On the right the emperor sits enthroned beneath a small Gothic canopy. Between them, at a lower level, the philosophers gather in agitation. The two principal figures face each other from opposite ends, their outstretched arms creating a strong horizontal line of address across the scene.

Catherine is shown crowned, as befits her royal birth, and dressed in a rich mantle of red and blue. She stands at the pulpit and points emphatically with her right arm toward the emperor and the philosophers. Her figure is slender and upright, taller than those around her by virtue of the raised pulpit, and her gesture carries the authority of a preacher. The image of a woman speaking from a pulpit was unusual and bold, and it presents Catherine as a model of wisdom and of faith defended by the word.

The philosophers occupy the centre in a closely knit group. One kneels in pink in the foreground, his head bowed, while the others, bearded and wrapped in blue and brown mantles, raise their hands in gestures of astonishment or submission. Their varied reactions narrate the progress of the dispute. Some are still arguing, while others are already overcome. The group gives the scene its dramatic core, the moment at which pagan learning yields to Christian truth.

The emperor sits on the right, crowned and dressed in red, beneath an elaborate little aedicule with a pointed gable and slender supports. He gestures toward Catherine with one arm extended, and his pose combines command with a hint of uncertainty. His tabernacle echoes the Gothic throne of the Coronation above. It creates a pointed contrast between the earthly throne of the persecutor and the heavenly throne of Christ and the Virgin.

The architectural elements, the pulpit with its steps and the emperor’s canopy, are drawn with the same interest in constructed space seen in the ciborium above. They are placed obliquely, their receding planes suggesting depth, and they frame the figures like wings of a stage. The ground is a narrow brown strip, and the rest is gold, so the scene reads as a clear, legible dialogue of figures and furniture against a luminous field.

The colour is strong and warm. The red of Catherine’s mantle and of the emperor’s robe form two chromatic poles at either end of the composition, and the pinks, blues, and browns of the philosophers fill the space between. The repetition of red at the two extremes reinforces the structure of confrontation. The gold striations on the draperies maintain the precious quality common to the whole panel.

Catherine’s inclusion suggests the devotional preferences of the panel’s owner. She was widely venerated as a patron of learning, of preachers, and of young women. Her presence in a work probably connected with an Augustinian church fits the order’s intellectual and preaching vocation. The scene extends the panel’s theme of glorification, since here it is the triumph of wisdom and faith on earth that anticipates the heavenly rewards shown above.

Saint Francis Receiving the Stigmata, with Saint John the Baptist

The narrower scene at the lower right combines two saints in a single rocky landscape. On the left Saint Francis kneels to receive the stigmata, wounds identical to those of Christ, from a winged seraph in the sky. On the right Saint John the Baptist stands in his rough garment, gesturing. The pairing is not narrative but devotional: two ascetic saints, both men of the wilderness, are brought together in a landscape that recalls both the desert of the Baptist and the mountain of La Verna.

The landscape is the most developed in the panel. Dark, stepped rocks in greenish and brown tones rise steeply from the lower edge toward the upper right, forming a great slope against the gold. The rocks are faceted and lit from the side in the Byzantine manner, but their mass is considerable. They fill most of the field, creating an enclosed, secluded space appropriate to the solitary experience of the two saints. This landscape anticipates the dark rocky settings that later Riminese painters would use.

Saint Francis kneels on a ledge of rock at the left, wearing the brown habit of his order, his hands raised before him. He looks upward toward the vision, his face composed in awe. His figure is small within the landscape, emphasising the solitude of the event. The treatment follows the formula established by Giotto in the Assisi frescoes and in the Louvre panel, in which the saint kneels in a mountain setting and turns toward a seraph.

The seraph floats at the top of the field against the gold. It is painted in red, with six wings spread in a cruciform arrangement and dark feathered tips, and within the wings appears the form of the crucified Christ. It is from this vision that the wounds are transmitted to Francis. The small seraph is rendered with vivid energy, and its red wings are the brightest accent in the scene, drawing the eye upward from the kneeling saint.

On the right stands John the Baptist, gaunt and bearded, his long hair falling to his shoulders, dressed in the rough camel-hair garment of the desert. He gestures with his right hand, a sign of his role as herald and witness. His emaciated figure and sharp features convey the asceticism of the prophet. He stands apart from the stigmatization, participating not in the event but in the meaning it shares with his own life of renunciation.

The colour is darker and more subdued than in any other scene of the panel. The browns and greens of the rocks, the brown of Francis’s habit, and the dun of the Baptist’s garment create a sombre, earthy harmony, broken only by the red seraph and the golden haloes. The restrained palette suits the ascetic character of both saints and makes the scene a quiet counterpart to the courtly splendour of the Coronation above.

The pairing of Francis and the Baptist has several possible explanations. Both were models of penitence and poverty, both lived in desolate places, and the Baptist, as the precursor of Christ, formed a natural pair with Francis, who was often called an alter Christus because of the stigmata. The inclusion of Francis in a panel probably destined for an Augustinian setting also shows how widely his cult had spread by 1300 beyond his own order.

As the final scene, it completes the panel’s gallery of saints with two images of holiness achieved through renunciation. Read with the scene of Catherine to its left, it shows two paths to sanctity, eloquent wisdom and ascetic contemplation. Read with the heavenly scenes above, it grounds the promise of glorification in the lives of saints who followed Christ on earth. The whole panel thus moves from heaven to earth, the counterpart of the Barberini panel’s journey through the life of Christ.

Whether the two panels formed a diptych is now doubted. They have long been called one. The National Gallery’s entry states that “it’s unlikely the two formed a diptych since there is no evidence of holes for connecting hinges,” though it is “highly likely they were made as a pair and used for private contemplation.” The Italian state catalogue likewise notes that the diptych hypothesis is “today questioned on technical and iconographic grounds.” One alternative, proposed in 1996, makes them the wings of a triptych. At its centre would be the small panel in the Pinacoteca Comunale of Faenza with the Madonna and Child, two angels and Saints Francis, Michael, Augustine⁸, Catherine of Alexandria and Clare⁹.

That panel similarly pairs Franciscan saints with Saint Augustine. The hypothesis is attractive but unproven. Its difficulties begin with the Faenza panel’s dimensions, which are published inconsistently. The Pinacoteca gives 50 by 35 centimetres with an 11-centimetre frame, while the London exhibition listed it as 39 by 49. Its inventory number is also given differently, as 92 in the museum’s own listing and 134 in the biographical dictionary. Some of this may reflect different catalogue series. The Faenza panel is itself a key work for Giovanni’s formation. Its Virgin follows a Byzantine type, variously identified as the Pelagonitissa (in the Russian scholarly tradition the Vzygranie Mladentsa, the “Playing of the Child”, the name used by Emanuele Zappasodi in 2021) or the Glykophilousa.

It is divided horizontally in two in the thirteenth-century manner, and its saints stand frontally on a single plane, with only Francis and Clare turned slightly at the ends. It was traditionally given to Bitino da Faenza. It was first placed near Giovanni by comparison with the Barberini panel and then attributed to him outright. The only certain fact of its history is its purchase in 1899 by a Faenza veterinarian, Filippo Fabbri. Its suggested origin in the Clarissan convent of Faenza is an inference from the Franciscan saints. The prominence of John the Evangelist in the London panel led the National Gallery to suggest that it “might link it to the church of Sant Agostino in Rimini.” The formula is careful, and it is a good model. The panels were “perhaps” connected with the Augustinian convent, as the Rome exhibition put it. Their original location is, in the words of the state catalogue, “unknown.”

The Playing Child: Giovanni da Rimini’s Pelagonitissa in Faenza

The small panel in the Pinacoteca Comunale of Faenza, measuring only 50 by 35 centimetres, is generally regarded as one of Giovanni da Rimini’s earliest surviving works and one of the first testimonies of the Riminese school formed in Giotto’s wake. It is divided horizontally into two registers, following a thirteenth-century tradition. Above, the Virgin holds the Child in the rare Byzantine type known as the Pelagonitissa, while two angels hold a rich cloth of honour behind her. Below, five full-length saints stand in a row against the gold ground. The panel is dated by the museum to 1300–1305, placing it at the very threshold of Giovanni’s career, earlier in date than the crosses and the narrative panels discussed above.

Almost nothing is known of its origins. The only certain information dates from 1899, when the Pinacoteca acquired it for 100 lire from the collection of Filippo Fabbri, a Faenza veterinarian. The presence of Saints Francis and Clare has suggested an origin in a Franciscan friary or a convent of Poor Clares, perhaps the Clarisse of Faenza itself, but no document confirms this. The attributions that followed its acquisition trace the slow emergence of the Riminese school as a critical category. The panel was first given to the local painter Bitino da Faenza, then associated with the school or the culture of Cavallini, until in the 1930s it was recognised as the work of the same Iohannes who signed the Mercatello cross.

The original structure of the panel has been much debated. Volpe proposed in 1965 that it was one leaf of a diptych, whose missing half might have shown the Agony in the Garden, as in a comparable panel by the Master of Forlì in the Hermitage. A later hypothesis made the Faenza panel the centre of a low dossal or triptych flanked by the Barberini and London panels, citing the shared combination of Franciscan and Augustinian saints and the compatible measurements. The museum’s own catalogue, following Benati in 2021, rejects that reconstruction. There are differences in the dividing frames and in the ornament of the haloes, and the more developed Giottesque compositions of the Rome and London panels might even place them somewhat later, around 1310. On present evidence Volpe’s diptych remains the more plausible reading.

What gives the panel its importance is the encounter it stages between two worlds. Its Virgin derives from a Byzantine type whose earliest known example is a thirteenth-century Serbian miniature from the region of Prizren. The name “Pelagonitissa” appears in inscriptions in Macedonian churches such as Staro Nagoričino, painted in 1316–18. The Byzantine archangel with globe and cross, and the paratactic row of saints, belong to the same Eastern repertory. Yet in the angels’ hands sunk into the heavy folds of the cloth, and in the first attempts to render the volume of bodies beneath drapery, Giovanni shows his early curiosity about Giotto, who was then at work in San Francesco in Rimini. As Benati put it, the painter here rereads Giotto’s solutions in the light of convictions that were already firmly pro-Byzantine.

Between Constantinople and Rimini: The Faenza Virgin and Child with Saints

The Virgin and Child with Two Angels

The upper register presents the Virgin and Child as a half-length group set against a broad cloth of honour, flanked by two angels. The group occupies the centre and most of the height of the register, rising almost to the upper edge of the panel. The angels stand at either side, their bodies partly hidden by the ends of the cloth. A narrow dark red ledge closes the register below and separates it from the saints. The scheme is compact and hieratic, but within it the painter introduces a striking intimacy of gesture.

The Virgin’s type is the Pelagonitissa, a variation of the Eleousa or Virgin of Tenderness. In it the Child is shown in a restless, playful movement rather than in calm embrace, and the type is sometimes called the Vzygranye, or “playing” Child. The Virgin bends her head sharply toward her son and presses her cheek against his. Her face, with its long nose, small mouth, and almond eyes, is Byzantine in type, but her inclination is so pronounced that the whole upper body seems to curve around the Child in a gesture of protection and grief.

The Child is the most unusual element of the composition. Unlike the canonical Pelagonitissa, in which he faces the viewer, here Jesus turns his back to the beholder and twists upward toward his mother. He throws his head back against her cheek, reaches up to her face, and lets his legs dangle and kick. The same variant appears in the Hermitage icon attributed to the Master of Forlì, and the rarity of the type in Italy has suggested the existence of a lost Byzantine prototype already present in Romagna by the late thirteenth century. Archival evidence confirms that Greek icons were common in Riminese houses in later centuries.

The Virgin’s hands complete the movement. One supports the Child’s body from below and holds his small hand, the other cups his foot, so that the child’s squirming weight is felt as a real burden. The theological meaning of the type is traditionally linked to the Passion. The Child’s agitated pose, like that of an infant startled by a premonition, anticipates the suffering to come. The Virgin’s melancholy tenderness gives that foreknowledge a human voice.

The Virgin wears the dark blue-black maphorion of Byzantine tradition, with a small gold star on her shoulder, over a garment that shows red at the border of the veil. The Child wears a reddish-brown tunic, and his flesh is painted in pale, softly modelled tones. The halo of the Virgin is incised in the gold with fine ornament. Much of the surface is now abraded and crossed by heavy craquelure, and small losses appear in the gold of the upper field, but the essential design remains fully legible.

The cloth of honour behind the group is a dark, purplish textile that spreads across nearly the whole width of the register, its ends curving outward. It functions as the back of a throne, although no throne is otherwise visible, and it isolates the sacred figures against a field of colour. Its surface is treated with fine linear patterning, and its dark tone makes the pale faces of mother and child stand out with particular clarity.

The two angels are the passage in which Giovanni’s knowledge of Giotto is most evident. Dressed in white garments trimmed with gold, their dark wings folded at their sides, they turn their faces upward toward the Virgin. Their hands are plunged into the folds of the cloth, so that the fabric seems to sag under its own weight, and their far arms disappear behind it. The device suggests space behind the group and gives volume to the textile. It is a small detail, but it announces the new naturalism that Giotto had brought to Rimini.

The register therefore contains in miniature the whole problem of Giovanni’s early art. Its type is Eastern and its emotional register is that of the Byzantine icon of tenderness, yet its angels and its cloth begin to occupy real space. It is this double allegiance, rather than any simple progression from one style to the other, that defines the painter at the start of his career, and it explains why the panel was long attributed to local or Cavallinian painters before its Riminese identity was recognised.

The Five Saints

The lower register presents five full-length saints standing in a row against the gold. From left to right they are Saint Francis, Saint Michael the Archangel, a bishop saint identified as Augustine, Saint Catherine of Alexandria, and Saint Clare. The figures are evenly spaced and nearly equal in height, and they stand on the lower edge of the panel without any indication of ground. The arrangement is paratactic in the Byzantine manner, each figure isolated and complete, forming a sequence of individual devotional images rather than a narrative.

Within this apparent regularity the painter introduces a subtle variation. The three central figures are shown frontally, while Francis and Clare at the two ends are slightly turned toward the centre in a gentle three-quarter view. The effect is to close the row at both ends and to direct attention inward toward the bishop at the centre. The slight foreshortening of the outer figures is also one of the panel’s modest experiments with space, and it creates the impression of a semicircle of saints rather than a flat frieze.

Saint Francis stands at the left in the brown habit of his order, his hood drawn up and his face bearded and gaunt. He holds a red book in one hand, and the wound of the stigmata is visible on his hand. His figure is simple and austere, a portrait-like image of the founder that recalls the early Franciscan icons of the thirteenth century. Paired with Clare at the opposite end, he frames the row with the two founders of the Franciscan family.

Beside him stands the Archangel Michael, with large dark wings spreading behind him. In one hand he holds a staff, and in the other a globe marked with a cross. This attribute is Byzantine: in Eastern art the archangels carry the orb as bearers of divine sovereignty, and its presence here is another sign of the painter’s familiarity with Greek models. Michael’s youthful face and long hair contrast with the bearded figures around him, and his wings introduce a dark, feathered mass into the row.

At the centre stands the bishop saint, wearing a white mitre and a dark red cope over his vestments, holding a crozier and raising his hand in blessing. His long grey beard and venerable face are painted with care, and his central position gives him the role of the panel’s principal saint. His identification as Augustine is traditional but not certain, and the museum records it with a question mark. If he is Augustine, his presence beside the Franciscan saints suggests a connection with an Augustinian church, perhaps the one dedicated to him in Faenza.

To his right stands Saint Catherine of Alexandria, crowned and wearing a red mantle over a dark blue gown with a white lining. She raises her hands before her breast in a gesture of devotion. Her regal figure, with its tall crown and symmetrical drapery, balances Michael on the other side of the bishop, so that the central three form a triad of frontal figures. Catherine was venerated as a patron of learning, and her presence would have suited an Augustinian community devoted to study and preaching.

Saint Clare closes the row at the right. She wears the black veil and dark habit of her order, holds a book, and raises her hand in a gesture of speech or witness, turning slightly toward the centre. Her austere figure mirrors Francis at the opposite end, and the two dark-habited founders frame the more colourful central saints. Her presence has encouraged the hypothesis that the panel was made for a convent of Poor Clares, though the evidence is only iconographic.

The combination of Franciscan and Augustinian saints is the panel’s most distinctive feature and the basis of the debates about its destination and structure. It links the work to the same devotional world as the Barberini and London panels, even if the reconstruction that unites the three is no longer accepted. In the lower register as in the upper, Giovanni works within a Byzantine framework, but the figures are given a new substance. Their draperies begin to fall with weight, and their bodies are felt beneath the cloth. The five saints stand, still iconic, at the beginning of the change that the painter’s later works would carry much further.

Sant’Agostino: The Chapel of the Virgin

The chapel at the base of the campanile of Sant’Agostino in Rimini, placed a cornu epistolae at the right of the main chapel, preserves the only mural paintings that almost all critics accept as the work of Giovanni da Rimini. The church, recorded as the oratory of San Giovanni Evangelista in 1069 and given to the Augustinian hermits in 1256, lies in the contrada where Giovanni and his brothers lived. Its Trecento decoration disappeared beneath Baroque plaster and an early eighteenth-century ceiling, and it came back to light only after the earthquakes of 1916, when the later plaster fell away. What emerged in the campanile chapel was a cycle of the Life of the Virgin, accompanied by Augustinian saints and two female donors. Although it is badly damaged, it remains the fullest surviving testimony of Giovanni as a fresco painter.

Accounts differ over who first recognised Giovanni’s hand in the cycle, whether in the lectures of 1934–35 or in a study of the great Riminese fresco cycles published in 1958. In either case the attribution rests on stylistic comparison with the painted crosses, and it has held. The one serious alternative, a study of 1961 that gave the frescoes to Giuliano, has not been followed. The date depends on two external anchors. The first is Giuliano da Rimini’s dossal of 1307 in Boston, whose Saint John the Baptist and Saint Catherine repeat, at a lower level of quality, respectively the Simeon and the prophetess Anna of the chapel’s Presentation in the Temple. If Giuliano borrowed from his brother, as most scholars assume, the cycle predates 1307. The second is the will of Omizolo di Neri, of 28 April 1303, which made provision for the altar of the Virgin in San Giovanni without mentioning any painting. Benati read that silence as evidence that the frescoes were already finished. The argument is ingenious but rests on silence, and the prudent formula is that the cycle dates before 1307 and possibly before 1303.

The cycle’s Giottesque ambition is explicit in its painted architecture. Consoles projecting in perspective carry a frieze along the top of each wall, and robust twisted columns frame the scenes at the sides. The system repeats the illusionistic framing of the Legend of Saint Francis in the Upper Church at Assisi, and the architecture was painted in soft pink tones, as if in a rosy ivory, adorned with garlands. Individual scenes quote Assisi directly: the columns of the Presentation recall the Healing of the Man of Lérida, and the women bathing the Child in the Nativity initiate a repertory of stooping figures that Riminese painters would copy for decades. Yet Giotto’s heavy volumes are lightened by a fluid handling and a precious colour, and the draperies take on a polished smoothness that has been compared to classical sculpture.

The state of the paintings imposes great caution on any reading. The frescoes survived centuries under plaster, and the fall of that plaster in 1916 and its later removal tore away much of the paint surface. Large lacunae interrupt every scene, and the azurite of the skies and of many garments has been lost, leaving the dark underlayer exposed. The Dormition of the Virgin, which crowns one of the walls of the chapel, is perhaps the most eloquent example of both loss and survival. Its lower third has almost entirely vanished, and its upper zone is scattered with losses, yet the central group of Christ receiving his mother’s soul remains among the most beautiful passages of the whole cycle.

The Soul Held Like a Child: Giovanni da Rimini’s Dormition in Sant’Agostino

The scene represents the Dormition or Koimesis of the Virgin: the moment of Mary’s death, when the apostles, miraculously gathered from the ends of the earth, surround her deathbed, and Christ appears to receive her soul into heaven. The subject was the culminating image of Marian cycles in both the Byzantine and the Western traditions. Its prominent place in a chapel dedicated to the Virgin, and its large field at the top of the wall, confirm its role as the climax of the cycle. The composition fills the whole width between the twisted columns, and it is set above a pointed arch that opens in the wall below, whose curve now interrupts the lower part of the painted surface.

The composition follows the Byzantine scheme, organised around a long horizontal bier that crosses the scene at mid-height. The Virgin’s body lies on the bier, which was covered with a dark cloth. Above and behind it rises the standing figure of Christ, at the exact centre of the composition. On either side the apostles and other mourners crowd in two dense groups, their haloed heads arranged in overlapping tiers that rise toward the upper edge. The strong horizontal of the bier and the vertical of Christ form a cross-shaped structure on which the whole crowd is ordered, and the symmetry gives the scene a solemn, ceremonial stability.

Christ stands behind the bier in a red mantle, his head bowed toward the small figure he holds in his arms. This figure is the Virgin’s soul, represented according to the Byzantine convention as a small person wrapped in white, held like an infant. The motif reverses the image of the Madonna and Child: the mother who once held her son now rests in his arms, and the tenderness of the gesture turns the theological doctrine into an intimate scene. The white drapery of the soul, preserved with remarkable clarity, falls in soft, luminous folds against Christ’s red mantle, making this group the brightest and best-preserved passage of the whole fresco.

The Virgin’s body lies on the bier, her head resting at the right end. Her pale face, turned upward with closed eyes, is still legible, and her arm and hand can be traced along the edge of the bier. An apostle bends close over her head, probably Peter or John, the two apostles traditionally placed at the head and foot of the deathbed. At the opposite end, at the far left, another apostle leans over the foot of the bier in a mirroring gesture. Between them the long surface of the bier is now largely reduced to a dark field scattered with losses, and the drapery that once covered it survives only in fragments.

The apostles on either side are differentiated with care despite the damage. In the upper row, to the right of Christ, bearded elders with lined faces alternate with younger figures, and one holds an object that may be a book or a censer. The left group includes several young, beardless figures in pale garments, who may be angels attending Christ, although no wings are now clearly visible. In the lower tiers, other apostles lean forward or bow their heads, and at the right a large figure in a violet mantle stands in profile, his bulk defined by heavy vertical folds. The variety of ages, types, and attitudes gives the crowd a sense of individual participation within the overall order.

Several faces show the refinement of Giovanni’s art. The young figures near Christ have smooth oval faces, delicate features, and softly waved hair framed by broad golden haloes. The bearded apostles on the right are modelled with firm, clear planes and sharp, observant eyes. The handling of the flesh is luminous and fluid, and the transitions between light and shadow are gradual. These qualities recall the heads of the painted crosses and of the Barberini panel, and they offer the most direct stylistic bridge between the chapel and the rest of Giovanni’s catalogue.

The losses have transformed the colour of the scene. The dark field that now dominates the background and the bier was originally covered with blue, probably azurite applied a secco, which has fallen away to leave the dark underlayer exposed. The warm reds, pinks, and violets of the garments survive better, as does the white of the soul, and the gold-toned haloes still ring the heads in regular rows. Much of the lower third of the painting is lost entirely, replaced by bare plaster, and the arch cut into the wall below further truncates the composition. What remains must therefore be read as a partial image, whose original richness can only be imagined.

The iconography belongs fully to the Byzantine Koimesis, which had been adopted in Italy through icons, mosaics, and manuscripts long before Giovanni’s time. Its central motifs are the horizontal bier, Christ with the Virgin’s soul, and the apostles at head and foot. Giovanni’s contribution lies not in the scheme but in the way he inhabits it. The figures are solid and occupy space in depth, the groups overlap convincingly, and the emotional register is one of quiet, collective grief. The painted columns that frame the scene draw it into the illusionistic architecture of the chapel. Even in its ruined state, the Dormition shows how the painter who had absorbed Giotto’s lesson in Rimini could renew a Byzantine formula from within, giving it weight, warmth, and a new human presence.

Disputed Works and the Boundary with Giuliano

Giuliano’s career, documented from 1307 to 1324, overlaps the last years of Giovanni’s documented activity, and the family records of 1292 and 1300 bind the two brothers together from much earlier. The brothers seem to have shared a household and probably a workshop. It is therefore no surprise that the boundary between their works has proved unstable. Giuliano’s securely documented oeuvre is small. It comprises the Boston dossal of 1307, and a polyptych for the Eremitani¹⁰ at Padua, now lost, which according to a sixteenth-century transcription was signed in 1324 by “Iuliani et Petrucii de Arimino.” The works now attributed to him rest on stylistic comparison with the dossal. Chief among them are the Crucifixion from the chapter house of San Pellegrino at Forlì, the Madonna frescoed in the Carmine at Urbania, and the triptych with the Coronation of the Virgin formerly belonging to the Duke of Norfolk at Carlton Towers. Its original church is disputed: San Cataldo, the Dominican church of Rimini, is the proposal most often repeated, but Santa Colomba and San Giorgio in Foro have also been suggested. It later passed through the Diotallevi collection. The Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Rimini later acquired it, and it now hangs in the Museo della Città. The biographical dictionary notes that tables and frescoes now given to Giuliano sometimes show traces of Giovanni’s hand. The Carlton Towers triptych itself “maintains non-casual tangencies” with Giovanni’s style.

The great Last Judgement painted on the triumphal arch of Sant’Agostino stands closer to the core, but it is not secure. Volpe gave it to an anonymous personality, the so-called Master of the Arengo, named after the hall of the Palazzo dell’Arengo where the detached fresco was long displayed; the line of criticism that from the late 1980s widened Giovanni’s catalogue reassigned it to him, and that view is now widely shared. It is usually dated shortly before 1318, when the Augustinian general chapter met in Rimini, and it is now shown in the Museo della Città. If it is Giovanni’s, it shows him turning toward the more dramatic and volumetric manner of the second decade; the attribution nonetheless remains a judgement of style, and this essay treats it as probable rather than certain.

Two works in the Marche show how uncertain the boundary is. The first is the large fresco of the Crucifixion in the apse of San Marco at Jesi. Attributions of the San Marco murals have swung widely: the older literature gave them to Fabrianese painters, to followers of Assisi and to others. After their restoration, the commune’s own description concludes that they are of Riminese origin, divided among Giuliano, Giovanni and artists from the Fabriano circle. An article of 1988 gave the Crucifixion to Giovanni. The encyclopaedia entries on both Giovanni and Giuliano, following other studies of 1988 and 1994, find it “better comparable with the work of Giuliano.” They see in it solutions devised in the first years of the century, “somewhat impoverished.” They read the harsh expressiveness of certain figures as belonging to the more dramatic turn of Riminese painting between the second and third decades. On this view it is a late Giuliano, of about 1310–20, and the Volpe photographic archive dates it the same way. The encyclopaedia entry itself admits that the brothers’ closeness “would justify the attributive oscillations” the fresco has met. The biographical dictionary refers to the Crucifixion “frescoed in San Marco at Osimo,” which is evidently a slip for Jesi, and it should not be repeated.

The painted cross in San Francesco at Sassoferrato is even less stable. It has been given to the Master of the Choir of Sant’Agostino (Volpe, 1965), to Giovanni (1988) and to Giuliano (1988). The encyclopaedia entry on Giuliano calls it “a qualitatively higher edition of the Jesi Crucifixion” and thus assigns it to him. A local photograph caption in the church also names Giuliano. An auction catalogue of 2015, on the other hand, counts it without qualification as the “fourth” cross by Giovanni, alongside Mercatello, Diotallevi and Talamello. An annotation in a photographic archive records a 1955 opinion that the Talamello and Sassoferrato crosses are by the same hand. Here the attributive fluctuation is not simply error. It reflects a real difficulty, arising from a workshop in which models, cartoons and perhaps hands were shared across a family. Still, anyone writing on Giovanni should know that including Sassoferrato and Jesi in his corpus is a minority position. The more cautious consensus gives both to Giuliano, and presenting them as Giovanni’s without comment turns one side of the debate into a fact.

Several lesser works belong to the same penumbra. A Madonna del Latte formerly in the Paolini collection in Rome has been proposed for Giovanni. A badly damaged Saint Apollonia in a niche in the cloister of San Francesco at Ravenna has been given to him, but it is too ruined for a firm judgement. The heavily damaged cross formerly in San Francesco at Sassocorvaro, now in the civic collections of the Rocca Ubaldinesca, has been linked to his workshop, and the biographical dictionary regards this as the most plausible of these proposals. The badly preserved cross in the Utrecht and Maastricht museum context, mentioned in the encyclopaedia entry as “hard to judge” and “shaped at a later period,” is the Goudstikker cross already discussed. Its appearance under different collection names in different sources has sometimes made it look like two works.

One more boundary needs policing, and it is the boundary of a name. The Riminese “Giovanni” has at least two homonyms who have caused confusion. One is Giovanni Baronzio, whom one widely consulted English-language encyclopaedia still describes as “also known as Giovanni da Rimini.” That usage revives the pre-1937 conflation and should be dropped. The other is Giovanni Francesco da Rimini (c. 1420–1469), a fifteenth-century painter documented in Padua and Bologna, once known as the Master of the Scenes from the Life of the Virgin. He has no connection with the Trecento master beyond his birthplace, and a careless search engine can blur the two. In the documents, “Giovanni da Rimini” is simply “Iohannes pictor” or “Zagnonus pictor” of the contrada of San Giovanni Evangelista. Those are the only names the sources give him, and “Giovanni da Rimini” is best treated as a modern convention.

Style, Technique, and the Miniaturist’s Touch

The small panels suggest a comparison with manuscript illumination that goes back to their earliest critical fortune. Their faces and details are so finely worked that they have been likened to illumination, and they were once linked to Neri da Rimini. Neri was the illuminator whose signed and dated works, beginning with the Cini leaf of 1300 and continuing with the gradual of 1303 now in San Miniato and choir books of the following decade, give the Riminese school its only continuous chronology of dated works. The comparison is useful if kept in proportion. Nothing documents Giovanni as an illuminator, and the argument that busy artists crossed media, which the 2017 exhibition put forward, is a general hypothesis. What the panels do show is a painter working in a miniaturist’s register. The Virgin’s robe in the London Coronation is striated with gold leaf that follows the folds and makes her seem to glow. The blood on Francis’s hands is rendered in carefully graded reds. Faces, even in the smallest compartments, are individually characterised as “puzzled, amazed, devout or serious.” The lectures of 1934–35 described the figures as “inspired by the finest Byzantine ivories.” The biographical dictionary notes that partial wear of the surface is partly responsible for their “painting in impressionistic touches.” Beneath that wear they “appear gently swathed in cocoons of luminous matter.” In the biographical dictionary’s account they lead stylistically to the frayed handling and slow rhythms of the Rimini and Mercatello crucifixes, which in Volpe’s phrase are “equal to the purity of the most arcane Duccesque recoveries.”

That phrase points to what may be the most distinctive quality of Giovanni’s art: a luminous, almost disembodied modelling. Giotto’s mass is kept, but it is dissolved in light. The Diotallevi Christ is “untouched by shadow.” The figures of the Sant’Agostino chapel are “enclosed in a luminescent cocoon.” Benati’s description of the Goudstikker torso, “a very fine, opalescent brushstroke,” names the same quality. The technical evidence from the 2021 restoration fits these descriptions. It found a softly drawn charcoal underdrawing and a palette of cinnabar, azurite, lead white and copper green laid on gesso. Lead white was used for the lights and earths for the darks. That is standard materials for a Trecento panel, handled with unusual delicacy. The Greek inscriptions of the early crosses, the Byzantine Virgin types, the ivory-like figures and the gold striations all belong, as the London exhibition stressed, to a living exchange with the Byzantine world through the Adriatic port. They are not archaisms in a provincial sense. This exchange also shows in Giovanni’s iconography. The Ascension of John the Evangelist and the Descent into Limbo belong to an eastern visual and liturgical tradition. The Mendicant orders, with their special devotion to John as preacher and visionary, gave them a new and western setting.

Giovanni’s use of Giotto was, for all that, precise and far from superficial. The twisted columns on consoles, the angel seen from behind, which makes the viewer a participant, the partial haloes that suggest depth, the Assisi tyrant reused for Maxentius, the stooping bath-women and the polylobed terminals of the crosses are specific borrowings. They show an artist who had studied the Upper Church at Assisi or its Riminese equivalent with close attention. What sets him apart from Giuliano, whose dossal transfers Giotto’s monumental twisted columns into the incongruous setting of a panel’s saint compartments with “the zeal of a neophyte,” is the judgement with which he adapted them. In the formulation of the 2021 catalogue, Giovanni’s greatness lies in “this ability to weigh the various options open to him … and to choose with reason the one that appeared most convincing to him.” The Byzantine substratum was never simply overlaid. It remained the measure against which the new language was tested.

Legacy and Place in the Riminese School

Giovanni’s historical importance rests on three things that the evidence now supports reasonably well. The first is chronology. With the Mercatello date read as 1309 or 1314, the Diotallevi cross around 1305, and the Sant’Agostino chapel probably before 1307, Giovanni becomes one of the earliest painters outside Giotto’s own circle to take up his language systematically, perhaps within a few years of Giotto’s work in Rimini. The Riminese school has been described as the first flowering of Giottism in northern Italy. Its origins are therefore not in the 1320s and 1330s, as the older chronology implied, but in the decade around 1300. Giovanni stands at the head of that school because he is the oldest identifiable personality within it. He was documented as a painter eight years before the 1300 date on Neri’s leaf, and fifteen years before Giuliano’s dossal.

The second is transmission. The biographical dictionary describes a family workshop that took in Giuliano and probably Zangolo. Within it motifs and formal solutions were handed on “along several generations of artists.” It proposes that Giovanni was its driving personality. The encyclopaedia entry on Giuliano calls Giovanni “the leading personality of the first phase of Riminese Giottism.” The evidence for his influence is visible in the works themselves. It shows in Giuliano’s borrowings from the Sant’Agostino Presentation, in the stooping figures that run from the Sant’Agostino Nativity to Pietro da Rimini, and in the Redeemer of Giotto’s cymatium, which Giovanni repeated and which became canonical for later Riminese painters. The Rome exhibition of 2017 showed Baronzio’s Stories of the Passion of about 1330–35 beside Giovanni’s panels. The point was that the older master’s model still governed the small narrative panel a generation later. If the Last Judgement is Giovanni’s, as most now accept, then the more dramatic, volumetric and chiaroscural turn of the second decade, which the Master of the Choir and Pietro da Rimini carried further, also began in his work.

The third is quality, and here the judgement is necessarily critical and not documentary. Recent writers have called Giovanni a master “not inferior in quality to Giotto,” “raffinatissimo, commovente, aristocratico, spirituale,” and one of the highest protagonists “of the entire Italian Gothic.” Such phrases belong to exhibition rhetoric and should be read as such. Still, they respond to something real in the London panel, the Diotallevi and Mercatello crosses, and the ruined chapel of the Virgin. Giovanni took from Giotto a new language of bodies in space and narrative engagement. He put it into an idiom whose luminosity, preciousness and lyric restraint were formed by the Byzantine culture of the Adriatic. The result was not a compromise between two traditions but a third thing. It became the founding idiom of the Scuola riminese, a school that spread its production from the Marche to Padua and, according to the Museo della Città, even to Dalmatia, before its most authentic vein ran out by the middle of the century.

The school’s recovery has been slow, and its scholarship is now mature enough to bear a verdict. Giovanni is a painter reconstructed from one signature and a few rent receipts. Around that small core stands a group of attributions of varying security: the Diotallevi cross, the two small panels in London and Rome, the Faenza Madonna and the chapel of the Virgin are strongly accepted. The Goudstikker and Talamello crosses are generally accepted. The Last Judgement is probable but contested. The choir, Jesi and Sassoferrato remain in dispute, with the balance of recent opinion against Giovanni for the last two. The chronology that places him at the very beginning of the century is now secure in outline, though not in detail. Whether the Mercatello cross dates from 1309 or 1314, whether the Talamello cross precedes or follows it, and whether the Sant’Agostino chapel predates Omizolo di Neri’s will of 1303 all remain open. They are unlikely to be settled without new documents. Brandi, Volpe and Benati began a work of historical recovery, and the painter who has emerged from it was no provincial follower of Giotto. He was one of the first and most discerning readers of Giotto’s work, and he turned what he read into the idiom of a school.

Conclusion

This essay began with a reputation that rests on a single inscription, and it ends with the same inscription. Everything said about Giovanni da Rimini depends on the plaque at the foot of the Mercatello cross, which names Iohannes pictor, a Brother Tobaldo and a year with one damaged numeral. It also depends on a short run of Riminese notarial records concerned with capons, leases and a house in the parish of Sant’Eufemia. From these materials twentieth-century criticism built a painter, a chronology and a school. The reconstruction is persuasive, but it holds up only if its layers are kept apart. That is why this essay has separated four kinds of evidence throughout: archival fact, epigraphic evidence, stylistic attribution and hypothesis. The Conclusion takes them in turn, because what can responsibly be said about Giovanni depends on which of the four is speaking.

The archival facts are few and plain. A painter named Giovanni was active in Rimini by March 1292, acting for brothers not named there. By January 1300 he was a magister, living like the rest of his family in the contrada of San Giovanni Evangelista, the district of the Augustinian church later called Sant’Agostino. His brothers Zangolo and Giuliano are documented, and the records give their father’s name as Martino. A fourth brother, Foscolo, is possible but unproven. No document records a commission, a payment for a painting or the title of a single work, and none records Giovanni’s death. The re-letting of the Sant’Ermete parcel in 1338 and his absence from the dealings of 1316 are circumstantial. They allow a guess, but they do not supply a date. The formula “documented 1292–1309 or 1314/15” says only what the evidence allows, and it should replace both the invented lifespan “c. 1270–1338” and the borrowed terminal date of 1336.

The epigraphic evidence is a single, damaged text. The Mercatello inscription gives the painter’s name and a year that can be read as 1309 or, with more difficulty, 1314. The flood of 1966 ended any hope of settling the question on the panel itself, and the diagnostic campaign of 2020–21, the most thorough the cross has received, confirmed that the numeral cannot now be resolved. The one certainty the plaque does give is negative, and it matters a great deal: whichever reading is right, the cross cannot date from 1344 or 1345. Everything else follows from that correction. The link between the signature and the archives, the assumption that the Iohannes pictor of the cross is the Iohannes pictor of the rent receipts, is highly probable and universally accepted. It is still an assumption, and a biography of Giovanni sits on it.

The stylistic attributions are where the painter becomes visible, and where the evidence becomes most open to judgement. Around the signed cross stands a core of works that most critics now accept: the Diotallevi cross, the panels in Rome and London, the Faenza Madonna and the chapel of the Virgin in Sant’Agostino. Further out come the Goudstikker and Talamello crosses, then the Last Judgement, and finally the disputed Marchigian works at Jesi and Sassoferrato, which the more cautious consensus gives to Giuliano. The instability at the edges is not simply a failure of connoisseurship. Giovanni worked within a family that shared a contrada, probably a workshop, and certainly a repertory of models. The boundary between the brothers was probably never sharp in their own day, and it is unlikely to become sharp in ours. What can be asked of anyone writing on Giovanni is that a disputed attribution be presented as disputed.

The hypotheses are many, and some of them are attractive. The Diotallevi cross may be the cross that Omizolo di Neri’s will of 1303 called for on the altar of the Virgin. The Sant’Agostino frescoes may have been finished before that will was drawn up. The Rome and London panels may have been made for Sant’Agostino, and may once have flanked the Faenza Madonna. Giovanni may have seen Assisi, or worked beside Giotto in San Francesco at Rimini. The Talamello cross may be his first surviving cross or his last. None of these ideas is foolish, and several may prove true. But none is documented, and the literature on Giovanni shows how easily a “could” in one catalogue becomes a flat statement in the next. Keeping these hypotheses marked as hypotheses does not diminish the painter. It keeps the reconstruction honest enough to be corrected when new evidence appears.

Beneath these distinctions lies the artist whom the evidence, taken together, allows us to see. Giovanni was already a trained painter when Giotto’s great cross arrived in San Francesco, and he met it as a master formed in the Byzantine culture of an Adriatic port, not as a pupil. What he took from Giotto was exact: the Christus patiens on its dark cross, the polylobed terminals, the transparent loincloth, the illusionistic architecture of Assisi and the figure seen from behind. What he made of it was his own. His bodies keep Giotto’s mass but dissolve it in light. His small panels have the precision of illumination and the gold striations of the icon. His iconography draws on Eastern subjects, such as the Ascension of the Evangelist and the Pelagonitissa, that the West barely knew. The Greek christogram runs from the Diotallevi cross to the signed cross at Mercatello, and it shows that the Byzantine tradition was not a residue he outgrew. It remained the measure by which he judged the new language, which is why his adherence to Giotto could be called “painfully critical.”

The historical consequences of this picture are considerable. With the Mercatello date read correctly, the beginnings of the Riminese school move from the 1320s and 1330s to the decade around 1300, and Giovanni becomes one of the first painters outside Giotto’s own circle to take up his language systematically. Through Giuliano, through the stooping figures and the Redeemer type handed down to Pietro da Rimini and Baronzio, and through the small narrative panel that still governed Riminese practice a generation later, his solutions became the common property of a school. That school reached from the Marche to Padua before its most authentic vein ran out by mid-century. The survival of the evidence has been fragile. The Mercatello cross was found in a woodshed awaiting the fire, and it was later damaged by the flood. The Goudstikker cross was cut down, looted and held under a state inventory number for sixty years. The Sant’Agostino frescoes emerged only because an earthquake brought down the plaster that covered them. Giovanni’s reputation has been rebuilt from works that came close to being lost.

What remains open will probably stay open unless new documents are found: the year on the Mercatello plaque, the order of the four crosses, the date of the chapel of the Virgin and the exact line between Giovanni and Giuliano. A new notarial record, a legible reading of a damaged numeral or a painting contract could still change the picture, and the history reviewed here suggests that such changes are possible. Even “Giovanni da Rimini” is a modern convention: to his contemporaries he was Iohannes pictor or Zagnonus pictor of the contrada of San Giovanni Evangelista. The outline, however, is secure. Brandi separated him from Baronzio, Volpe restored him to the first years of the century, and Benati gave him a history and a school. What has emerged from their work is not a provincial epigone of the 1340s but one of the earliest and most discerning readers of Giotto, a painter who used an older tradition to weigh the new one and built from the two a language others would follow.