Matteo Giovannetti (c. 1300–1369) was a painter from the small Lazio town of Viterbo who came to Avignon in 1343 in the substantial wake of the Italian painter Simone Martini’s death the previous year. He was approximately 43 when he arrived. He took over the principal painting workshop at the Palais des Papes and held it for the next 24 years.
His three substantial surviving fresco programmes are the best 14th-century Italian fresco work surviving anywhere in Europe.
The Chapel of Saint-Martial in the Tour Saint-Jean was painted in 1344–1345 under Pope Clement VI. It depicts the life of the 3rd-century AD bishop Saint Martial of Limoges across approximately 30 scenes covering the chapel walls and vault. The figures are rendered in the soft-edge Sienese-Trecento manner that Giovannetti had inherited from Simone Martini’s Avignon workshop; the palette is the cool blue-and-gold standard of the Avignonese papal-court taste.
The Chapel of Saint-Jean in the same tower was painted in 1347–1348 (substantively immediately before the 1348 Black Death arrival at Avignon). It depicts the parallel lives of John the Baptist and John the Evangelist.
The Audience Hall (Grande Audience) frescoes — painted between 1352 and 1356 under Pope Innocent VI — depicted the Old Testament prophets in standing portraits. Most of the Audience Hall fresco was substantively destroyed during the 1791 Revolutionary conversion of the Palais to military barracks; fragments survive on the east wall.
Giovannetti returned to Italy in 1367 with Pope Urban V’s brief and abortive return of the papacy to Rome. He died at Rome in 1369, aged approximately 69. The subsequent Italian Renaissance painting tradition substantively largely did not preserve his name; the Avignon frescoes substantively were forgotten until the 19th-century French Romantic rediscovery of medieval Provençal art.