Giusti Constantin

Italie, 1796-Zouk (Lebanon), 1873

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Giusti came to Lebanon with the Jesuits in 1831 and, in echo and perspective, raised the issue of the cultural shift in the history of religious painting in Lebanon. This was not due to the confrontation between a local tradition and a European tradition, as was often believed – a result of the myth of a XIXth-century Arab renaissance bursting forth four centuries after the Italian one. Rather, it was due to the moment when painting began to fit in and to develop, not among the public, but among the painters themselves.

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Giusti spent forty years in Lebanon, and travelled throughout the region to fulfil commissions for portraits and religious canvases. The young Daoud Corm had been his assistant in Bzommar. Settled on Damascus Street in Beirut, he placed adverts offering his services as a “painter of portraits and landscapes” in the press, especially in the daily newspaper Lissan el Hal. He named the Vatican as his universal legatee. During the fire and looting of the apostolic Nunciature in Beirut in 1975, during the “Battle of the Hotels”, militiamen stole Giusti’s crockery and Italian canvases, including one Guido Reni and a heavily restored copy of Caravaggio.

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Giusti played a far more important role on the Lebanese scene than many realise. Close to Jesuit and clerical circles, he exerted a sort of theological authority on the image in this ecclesiastical circuit.