Page:EB1911 - Volume 12.djvu/67

 Besides Vasari, Lanzi and other historians of art, the following works may be mentioned: C. D. Arco, Vita di G. Pippi (1828); G. C. von Murr, Notice sur les estampes gravées après dessins de Jules Romain (1865); R. Sanzio, two works on Etchings and Paintings (1800, 1836).

GIUNTA PISANO, the earliest Italian painter whose name is found inscribed on an extant work. He is said to have exercised his art from 1202 to 1236. He may perhaps have been born towards 1180 in Pisa, and died in or soon after 1236; but other accounts give 1202 as the date of his birth, and 1258 or thereabouts for his death. There is some ground for thinking that his family name was Capiteno. The inscribed work above referred to, one of his earliest, is a “Crucifix,” long in the kitchen of the convent of St Anne in Pisa. Other Pisan works of like date are very barbarous, and some of them may be also from the hand of Giunta. It is said that he painted in the upper church of Assisi,—in especial a “Crucifixion” dated 1236, with a figure of Father Elias, the general of the Franciscans, embracing the foot of the cross. In the sacristy is a portrait of St Francis, also ascribed to Giunta; but it more probably belongs to the close of the 13th century. He was in the practice of painting upon cloth stretched on wood, and prepared with plaster.

 GIURGEVO (Giurgiu), the capital of the department of Vlashca, Rumania; situated amid mud-flats and marshes on the left bank of the Danube. Pop. (1900) 13,977. Three small islands face the town, and a larger one shelters its port, Smarda, 2 m. E. The rich corn-lands on the north are traversed by a railway to Bucharest, the first line opened in Rumania, which was built in 1869 and afterwards extended to Smarda. Steamers ply to Rustchuk, 2 m. S.W. on the Bulgarian shore, linking the Rumanian railway system to the chief Bulgarian line north of the Balkans (Rustchuk-Varna). Thus Giurgevo, besides having a considerable trade with the home ports lower down the Danube, is the headquarters of commerce between Bulgaria and Rumania. It exports timber, grain, salt and petroleum; importing coal, iron and textiles. There are also large saw-mills.

Giurgevo occupies the site of Theodorapolis, a city built by the Roman emperor Justinian ( 483–565). It was founded in the 14th century by Genoese merchant adventurers, who established a bank, and a trade in silks and velvets. They called the town, after the patron saint of Genoa, San Giorgio (St George); and hence comes its present name. As a fortified town, Giurgevo figured often in the wars for the conquest of the lower Danube; especially in the struggle of Michael the Brave (1593–1601) against the Turks, and in the later Russo-Turkish Wars. It was burned in 1659. In 1829, its fortifications were finally razed, the only defence left being a castle on the island of Slobosia, united to the shore by a bridge.

 GIUSTI, GIUSEPPE (1809–1850), Tuscan satirical poet, was born at Monsummano, a small village of the Valdinievole, on the 12th of May 1809. His father, a cultivated and rich man, accustomed his son from childhood to study, and himself taught him, among other subjects, the first rudiments of music. Afterwards, in order to curb his too vivacious disposition, he placed the boy under the charge of a priest near the village, whose severity did perhaps more evil than good. At twelve Giusti was sent to school at Florence, and afterwards to Pistoia and to Lucca; and during those years he wrote his first verses. In 1826 he went to study law at Pisa; but, disliking the study, he spent eight years in the course, instead of the customary four. He lived gaily, however, though his father kept him short of money, and learned to know the world, seeing the vices of society, and the folly of certain laws and customs from which his country was suffering. The experience thus gained he turned to good account in the use he made of it in his satire.

His father had in the meantime changed his place of abode to Pescia; but Giuseppe did worse there, and in November 1832, his father having paid his debts, he returned to study at Pisa, seriously enamoured of a woman whom he could not marry, but now commencing to write in real earnest in behalf of his country. With the poem called La Ghigliottina (the guillotine), Giusti began to strike out a path for himself, and thus revealed his great genius. From this time he showed himself the Italian Béranger, and even surpassed the Frenchman in richness of language, refinement of humour and depth of satirical conception. In Béranger there is more feeling for what is needed for popular poetry. His poetry is less studied, its vivacity perhaps more boisterous, more spontaneous; but Giusti, in both manner and conception, is perhaps more elegant, more refined, more penetrating. In 1834 Giusti, having at last entered the legal profession, left Pisa to go to Florence, nominally to practise with the advocate Capoquadri, but really to enjoy life in the capital of Tuscany. He fell seriously in love a second time, and as before was abandoned by his love. It was then he wrote his finest verses, by means of which, although his poetry was not yet collected in a volume, but for some years passed from hand to hand, his name gradually became famous. The greater part of his poems were published clandestinely at Lugano, at no little risk, as the work was destined to undermine the Austrian rule in Italy. After the publication of a volume of verses at Bastia, Giusti thoroughly established his fame by his Gingillino, the best in moral tone as well as the most vigorous and effective of his poems. The poet sets himself to represent the vileness of the treasury officials, and the base means they used to conceal the necessities of the state. The Gingillino has all the character of a classic satire. When first issued in Tuscany, it struck all as too impassioned and personal. Giusti entered heart and soul into the political movements of 1847 and 1848, served in the national guard, sat in the parliament for Tuscany; but finding that there was more talk than action, that to the tyranny of princes had succeeded the tyranny of demagogues, he began to fear, and to express the fear, that for Italy evil rather than good had resulted. He fell, in consequence, from the high position he had held in public estimation, and in 1848 was regarded as a reactionary. His friendship for the marquis Gino Capponi, who had taken him into his house during the last years of his life, and who published after Giusti’s death a volume of illustrated proverbs, was enough to compromise him in the eyes of such men as Guerrazzi, Montanelli and Niccolini. On the 31st of May 1850 he died at Florence in the palace of his friend.

The poetry of Giusti, under a light trivial aspect, has a lofty civilizing significance. The type of his satire is entirely original, and it had also the great merit of appearing at the right moment, of wounding judiciously, of sustaining the part of the comedy that “castigat ridendo mores.” Hence his verse, apparently jovial, was received by the scholars and politicians of Italy in all seriousness. Alexander Manzoni in some of his letters showed a hearty admiration of the genius of Giusti; and the weak Austrian and Bourbon governments regarded them as of the gravest importance.

His poems have often been reprinted, the best editions being those of Le Monnier, Carducci (1859; 3rd ed., 1879), Fioretti (1876) and Bragi (1890). Besides the poems and the proverbs already mentioned, we have a volume of select letters, full of vigour and written in the best Tuscan language, and a fine critical discourse on Giuseppe Parini, the satirical poet. In some of his compositions the elegiac rather than the satirical poet is seen. Many of his verses have been excellently translated into German by Paul Heyse. Good English translations were published in the Athenaeum by Mrs T. A. Trollope, and some by W. D. Howells are in his Modern Italian Poets (1887).

GIUSTINIANI, the name of a prominent Italian family which originally belonged to Venice, but established itself subsequently in Genoa also, and at various times had representatives in Naples, Corsica and several of the islands of the Archipelago.

In the Venetian line the following are most worthy of mention:—

1. (1380–1465), the Laurentius Justinianus of the Roman calendar, at an early age entered the congregation of the canons of St George in Alga, and in 1433 became general of that order. About the same time he was made by Eugenius IV. bishop of Venice; and his episcopate was marked by considerable activity in church extension and reform. On the removal of the patriarchate from Grado to Venice by Nicholas V. in 1451, Giustiniani was promoted to that dignity, which he held for fourteen years. He died on January 8, 1465, was canonized by Pope Alexander VIII., his festival (semi-duplex)