GIUNTA PISANO

(b. ~1210 Pisa, d. ~1260 Pisa)

Giunta Pisano was, with Berlinghiero, one of the earliest Italian painters known to us as individuals. He is known from three surviving crucifixes in Assisi, Pisa and Bologna. He is also known to have painted a crucifix in Assisi, dated 1236 but now lost, and he may have painted the dramatic St Francis (Pisa). His style is more consciously realistic than that of Berlinghiero and In these paintings Christ is represented with his head leaning on one side with an expression of pain and his body bending forward in agony - conception (Christus patiens type of crucifix) differing from “the triumphant Christ” of the preceding age.

Crucifix

From the beginning of the 13th century the Berlinghieri, a family of painters (Berlinghiero and his sons Barone, Marco and Bonaventura), were working in Lucca. They were influenced by the new wave of Byzantinism which reached the peninsula after the capture of Constantinople by the crusaders. This courtly refined style had its first and greatest centre of expansion in Pisa. This was owing to the very strong links between this maritime republic and the East, and also to several remarkable artists such as Giunta Pisano, Enrico and Ugolini di Tedice and the anonymous painter now known as the Master of S. Martino. The element of pathos in the Byzantine style was given its most extreme expression in the crucifixes of Giunta. The one painted in 1236 (which is now lost) for Elias of Cortona, the founder of the basilica of S. Francesco at Assisi, was inspired, like all Giunta’s other crucifixes, by the Eastern iconography of the ‘Christus patient’, that is the Brother of Man in His suffering. Under the influence of the Franciscans this interpretation was definitely substituted for the heroic Christ, impassive, triumphing over death.

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