Giovanni da Rimini

The earliest mention of Giovanni da Rimini, who signed himself either “Iohannes” or “Zagnonus”, reveals that he lived in the neighbourhood of San Giovanni Evangelista in Rimini from 1292. The documents in question record his payments on a lease for land in Sant’Ermete, whence his family is likely to have hailed. The first mention in the archive tells us that in the two previous years he had been working in the same house. A payment for the house in the Sant’Eufemia neighbourhood dated 4 January 1300 lists not only “magister Iohannes” but also his brothers Zangolo and Giuliano (in O. Delucca, I pittori riminesi del trecento nelle carte d’archivio, Rimini 1992, pp.49-50). They shared the house with him until at least 1316, after which date the painter is no longer mentioned, suggesting that he must have died at around this time. Two years earlier, however, he was apparently still working, judging by his only signed and dated work, a painted crucifix from the church of San Francesco in Mercatello sul Metauro, on which it is possible to make out a date interpreted by Augusto Campana as 1309 or 1314.

At an exhibition held in Rimini in 2021, the Mercatello sul Metauro crucifix was displayed alongside Giovanni da Rimini’s other three crosses in an effort to map out the artist’s stylistic development.

Embarking on his career with a style still heavily influenced by Byzantine culture, as in the Faenza panel (inv. no. 91, c. 1300) with its variation on the theme of the Pelagonitissa Virgin, Giovanni gradually began to draw inspiration from the art of Giotto, who was working in the church of San Francesco in Rimini even before 1300. This embryonic interest in the great master’s early style can be intuited in Giovanni’s own early works such as Faenza panel, which was followed by his frescoes with Stories from the Life of the Virgin in the first fresco campaign in the church of Sant’Agostino (former church of San Giovanni Evangelista) in Rimini c. 1303. Giovanni adopted the same twisted columns and the same cornices supported by protruding corbels that Giotto had painted in Assisi (and which were probably also to be seen in his lost cycle in the church of San Francesco in Rimini, now the Tempio Malatestiano). Giovanni da Rimini’s taste for narrative had already grown by 1315, when he painted the Last Judgment (previously attributed to the Master of the Arengo by Carlo Volpe) at the top of the church’s triumphal arch. It is thought that his first painted cross, known as the Diotallevi Crucifix after the Marquis of Rimini who donated it to the city (inv. no. 11PQ), also came from the church of Sant’Agostino. It emulates the form of Giotto’s Rimini cross with the addition of tondos in the corners and mixtilinear panels at the edges (in Giotto’s cross these have unfortunately been sawn off). This search for greater naturalism can be glimpsed thereafter in Giovanni’s other crosses, for example in a cross formerly in the gallery of the antique dealer Moretti ¹ , in the cross from San Francesco in Mercatello sul Metauro (1309 or 1314) and in the cross from the church of San Lorenzo in Talamello (c. 1315). In the latter cross, the body of Christ emerges from the blue background with a strong sense of volume, marking Giovanni da Rimini’s loftiest achievement in the naturalistic modelling of a body.

1. c. 1305.

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