GIOVANNI DI NICOLA DA PISA

Italian painter. He was active mainly in his native Pisa, but was heavily influenced by Sienese painting. He was a pupil of Lippo Memmi, the brother-in-law of Simone Martini, who is documented as working in Pisa in 1325, and may at that date taken on Giovanni di Nicola as a pupil.

Giovanni di Nicola's only surviving signed work is the Virgin and Child with Sts Bona, John the Baptist, Mary Magdalene and Bartholomew, dated 1350, now in the Museo Nazionale di San Matteo, Pisa. In 1358 he was elected a member of the Consiglio del Popolo in Pisa. A now lost altarpieceGLOSSARYA picture or sculpture that stands on or is set up behind an altar. The term reredos is used for an ornamental screen or partition, not directly attached to the altar table but affixed to the wall behind it. A diptych is an altarpiece consisting of two panels, a triptych one of three panels, and a polyptych one of four or more panels. From the 14th to 16th century, the altarpiece was one of the most important commissions in European art; it was through the altarpiece that some of the most decisive developments in painting and sculpture came about. showing St John the Baptist, signed and dated 1360 was recorded in San Pietro in Vinculis (San Pierino) in the eighteenth century.

Giovanni di Nicola was a contemporary, and probably a collaborator of Francesco Traini, whose expressive style derived from that of Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti.