GIUNTA PISANO. - Painter active in the mid-13th century. After more recent criticism, chiefly through the work of Bacci, has ruled out that a Pistoian document of 1 June 1202 and certain Pisan documents from 1258 to 1300 refer to him, the only reliable references concerning the chronology of this painter are the following: on 30 Jan. 1229, according to a document in the Archiepiscopal Diplomatic Archive of Pisa, G. quondam Guidocti de Colle buys from the archbishop of Pisa a house with adjoining land near Calci; in 1236 G. paints a Cross for Brother Elias, now lost, but which until the 17th century stood in the basilica of St. Francis in Assisi (Wadding, Tronci and others have handed down the text of the inscription: Frater Elias fieri fecit - Iesus Christe pie - Miserere precantis Helie - Junta pisanus me pinxit A. D. 1236 ind. IX); on 28 Jan. 1241 Iuncta pictor is recorded as the owner of a house near Calci, and on 28 Aug. 1254 Iuncta Capitinus pictor swears fealty to the archbishop of Pisa, Federico Visconti. Furthermore, three works still preserved bear his signature: the Crucifix of the basilica of St. Mary of the Angels in Assisi, whose inscription has been reconstructed by Bacci as follows: (IUNTA PISANUS (CAP)ITINI ME FECIT); the Crucifix that was found by Da Morrona in the kitchen of the Monastery of St. Anne in Pisa and that is now preserved in the church of Sts. Ranieri and Leonardo (or S. Ranierino), simply signed IUNTA PISANUS ME FECIT; and a large Cross painted in the church of St. Dominic in Bologna, which bears the inscription: CUIUS DOCTA MANUS - ME PINXIT JUNTA PISANUS. On the basis of these three signed Crucifixes, other works have been attributed, generally with little agreement, to G. di Guidocti Capitini da Colle (near Calci); among them a small Cross, painted on both sides, from the monastery of the Vallombrosan Hermitesses of St. Paul at Ripa d'Arno in Pisa, another small double Cross formerly in the Gualino collection and then in the Cini collection at Monselice, a Crucifix there, a small panel with the Crucifixion in the Harris collection in London, and two small narrative scenes with the Flagellation and the Mocking of Christ in the Museum of Moscow. These last attributions (of the paintings in London and Moscow) are certainly to be rejected, just as the identification proposed by Sirén of the lost Crucifix of Brother Elias with a Crucifix in the Museum of Gualdo Tadino is very doubtful. But the other attributions too are to be regarded with much reservation, all the more so because through the three signed Crucifixes (of Assisi, Pisa and Bologna) the artistic personality of G. stands out with peremptory clarity as that of the greatest Italian painter before Cimabue and Duccio di Duminisegna. Probably trained in the orbit of the Lucchese Berlinghiero, G. was a highly original interpreter of the refined Byzantine neo-Hellenism that spread through the peninsula after the fall of Constantinople, especially through Pisa, so closely linked to the East by its commerce and its political relations. G.'s style is distinguished by the dynamic intensity of its drawing, in which the abstraction of Byzantine forms is enlivened by a play of chiaroscuro that seems to prelude a search for plastic values; but above all the greatness of the artist lies in the powerful and bitter tragic quality of his figurations, among the most pathetic of the entire Italian Middle Ages. G.'s influence on contemporary painting was very great, both in Umbria, where the exquisite "Master of St. Francis" derives from him, and in Emilia and in Pisa itself, where he had various followers. - See pl. LVI.
