Giusto de' Menabuoi
( fl 1349–c. 1390).
Italian painter. He was a native of
Florence, but all records of his activity and all surviving works are in
or from northern Italy. Together with the Veronese painter Altichiero,
and following in the wake of the native Guariento, Giusto helped
establish Padua as a major centre for the development of late
14th-century painting. His work illustrates the widening stylistic gulf
in the years following the Black Death between the activities of
Florentine painters working in Florence and those of artists either born
there or exposed to the influence of Florentine art before the
mid-century, but working further north, where, after c. 1350, the
most significant developments of the Giottesque legacy took place.
Beyond a shared Florentine tendency to monumental form, his art
increasingly diverged from the style of Orcagna and his school, and
Giusto’s expansion of the pictorial possibilities suggested by Giotto,
Maso di Banco and Taddeo Gaddi in the early decades of the century is
bolder than anything attempted by the painters of late 14th-century
Florence. His career may be divided into two phases: work in Lombardy,
1350s and 1360s; and from c. 1370 in Padua, where he enjoyed the
patronage of the Carrara court.