After the exhibitions of 'primitive' painters, that is of Giotto, the art of Florence during the age of Dante, Puccio di Simone and Lorenzo Monaco, the Galleria dell'Accademia in Florence pays tribute to a 'foreign' painter, Giovanni da Milano, a protagonist on the Florentine scene in the mid-fourteenth century.

These were years characterized by the terrible Black Plague of 1348. The 10th of June, the exhibition 'Giovanni da Milano. Gothic Masterpieces between Lombardy and Tuscany' opens.

A native of Caversaio, a town near Como, Giovanni began his work in Lombardy, a place dominated by the powerful Visconti family. Giotto stayed in the Visconti court in around 1335 and Petrarch did the same in 1353. Giovanni da Milano probably received his education in this cultivated and sophisticated climate. He knew how to harmonize the lessons of Giotto with the Trans-alpine gothic influences. The painter was mostly active in Florence, where in 1346 he was one of the foreign masters in the city.

He left his greatest masterpieces there, amongst which, the polyptych for the Ognissanti church, the frescoes in the Guidalotti-Rinuccini chapel in Santa Croce, and the Pietà signed and dated 1365 in the Galleria dell'Accademia. The first exhibition, dedicated to Giovanni da Milano, reconstructed, in the most exhaustive way possible, the artistic journey of the master whose catalogue contains about 25 works.

It familiarizes the public with the extraordinary gifts of the painter which are evident both in monumental works such as the Polyptych in the Civic Museum in Prato, and privately owned works. Pietro Toesca who put together the catalogue (1912) brought to light the nature of the Lombardian character of his language. Amongst others, Miklòs Boskovits (1966) and Mina Gregori (1980; 1995), there is an attempt to bring together fragments of polyptychs from different collections to provide the technical and stylistic proof of the hypothesis.

Galleria dell'Accademia
Until the 2nd of November

Author: Fabrizio Del Bimbo

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