Giovanni da Rimini

In 1309 a painter signed a large crucifix for the Franciscan church of Mercatello sul Metauro, a small town in the hills of the Marche. The inscription reads Iohannes pictor fecit hoc opus, Giovanni the painter made this work, and it names a friar, Tobaldo. It is his only signed and dated work, and every other picture now given to him has been gathered around it.

The man himself is known from legal papers. From 1292 a Giovanni, painter, appears in documents in Rimini, later with the title of master. His crucifix keeps close to the one that Giotto, the Florentine painter, had made for the Franciscans of Rimini a few years before, and Giovanni is counted among the first local painters to take up that lesson. Several more painted crosses, frescoes in the church of Sant'Agostino in Rimini and a few small gold-ground panels are attributed to him.

His career was pieced together only in the 20th century. In 1935 an exhibition in Rimini devoted to the city's painting of the 1300s set out to reconstruct the local school, and his name with it.