\paperw19995 \margr0\margl0 \plain \fs20 \f1 Italian painter.\par
Born around 1320 at Caversaccio, near Como, the painter Giovanni di Jacopo is better known as Giovanni
da Milano, which is the name that he used to sign his works. The artist was probably trained in Lombardy under the influence of Giotto, who presented his workshop at the court of Azzone Visconti in Milan in the 1330s. Moving to Tuscany, perhaps to intro
duce that same workshop, Giovanni da Milano was included in the list of foreigners present in Florence in 1346. In 1363 he enrolled in the Arte dei Medici e Speziali, the guild that incorporated Florentine painters. Only one picture that is attributed to
Giovanni da Milano has been preserved in his homeland, a lunette frescoed with the \i Virgin and Child\i0 that is now at Mendrisio, in Switzerland, and was probably painted during one of the journeys made by the artist after his transference to Florenc
e. It is likely that he created the polyptych for the high altar of the Florentine church of Ognissanti, which was intended as a replacement for the \i Maestα\i0 painted by Giotto some forty years earlier, shortly after his arrival in Tuscany. Some of t
he panels of this complex altarpiece are now in the Galleria degli Uffizi. Around 1360 Giovanni painted the imposing polyptych representing the \i Madonna and Saints\i0 for the Spedale della Misericordia at Prato, which is now in the cityÆs Museo Civico
. Over the same period, the painter composed another polyptych for an unidentified church in Pisa; it was later dismembered, however some of its parts are now divided among the Museo Nazionale di San Matteo in Pisa, the MusΘe du Louvre in Paris and the W
illiam College of Art at Williamstown, in the United States. Giovanni da MilanoÆs Florentine masterpiece, the fresco decoration of the Guidalotti-Rinuccini Chapel in the church of Santa Croce with \i Scenes from the Lives of the Virgin and Mary Magdalene
\i0 , dates around 1365. As the fresco was left unfinished, the lower part of the cycle was completed several years later by a mediocre Florentine painter, Matteo di Pacino. The \i Pietα, \i0 which is now in the Galleria dell'Accademia in Florence but wa
s originally in the nunnery of San Gerolamo alla Costa, is dated 1365. His longtime residence in the Tuscan city allowed Giovanni da Milano to become a Florentine citizen in 1366. The last document relating to the life of the Lombard artist records his p
resence in Rome in 1369, where he was working on the decoration of two chapels in the Vatican Palaces in the company of the painter Giottino and Taddeo GaddiÆs sons, Giovanni and Agnolo.
