John of Milan

JOHN OF MILAN. - Giovanni di Jacopo di Guido da Caverzaio (today Caversaggio) in the territory of Como, painter; in 1350 he was in Florence, where he was enrolled as a foreigner in the Painters' Guild. In 1363 he became a member of the Guild of Physicians and Apothecaries. Two years later he had already been for some time occupied in working on the frescoes of the Rinuccini chapel in S. Croce and obtained an extension for their completion.

In 1366 he obtained Florentine citizenship for himself and his sons. In July 1369 he was in Rome, employed in the Vatican together with the other masters summoned there by Urban. The supposed activity of Giotto in Milan in 1334 in the service of the Visconti, of which Villani speaks, and the frescoes of Giottino at Chiaravalle in Milan could have influenced the initial formation of the master's figurative culture, a culture in which the Lombard painting school of the first half of the century certainly participated as a fundamental element. It is certain that when in 1350 G. da M. was in Florence he already had a well-defined style of his own minated. It appears very clearly in his earliest work, the polyptych signed and dated 1354 in the Gallery of Prato, where the images, constructed with crystalline precision of contour, have their volumes decisively revealed with strong accents of a soft and pasty sfumato of distinctly Lombard stamp. These characteristics, though evidently compromised by contacts with Florentine art and Sienese chromaticism, are found again in the frescoes of the Rinuccini chapel, which are considered his major work. Other works of his are some parts of a polyptych and a very beautiful Pietà of 1365, in the Uffizi, an Annunciation in the Gallery of Pisa and a small panel with several compartments in the Museum of Palazzo Venezia in Rome.

Emilio Lavagnino