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Jacobello di Bonomo
( fl 137090). Italian painter. In 1375 he signed a panel of St Ursula (ex-S Michele, Vicenza). In 1384 he contracted to take on two pupils, and in 1385 he signed a polyptych of the Virgin and Child with Saints (Santarcangelo di Romagna, Municipio), which is the basis for all attributions. If polyptychs of St Augustine and Other Saints (Arquà Petrarca, Santa Trinità) and the Madonna of Humility and Saints (Lecce, Mus. Prov. Sigismondo Castromediano) are, as Pallucchini argues, early works of Jacobellos, they indicate a development under the influence of Lorenzo Veneziano. The Santarcangelo polyptych, however, shows a marked departure in style and may suggest a knowledge of other Italian traditions. Lorenzos daintiness is replaced by the solidity typified by the figure of St Catherine. Draperies are less exuberant, the underlying forms more insistent, with a greater interest in sculptural mass than in linear pattern. The recession of the Virgins throne is more ambitious and accurate than that of thrones drawn by Lorenzos followers, Catarino or Stefano di SantAgnese. Furthermore, Jacobellos figures are bulkier and his faces less elongated. His facial modelling is less refined, more graphic than painterly, and his characters appear less abstracted than Stefanos. Jacobellos style at its most impressively ponderous is seen in some of the saints from a polyptych of the Virgin and Child with Saints in Prague Cathedral.
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