( fl 1496–1504). Italian painter. Several signed works by Pasqualino are known, two of which are also inscribed with dates. They are a Virgin and Child with St Mary Magdalene (1496; Venice, Correr) and a Virgin and Child with St John the Baptist (1502; priv. col., see Pallucchini, 1980). All are half-length pictures of the Virgin and Child, with or without accompanying saints, and they provide a stylistic basis for further attributions to the painter. With the single exception of a Virgin and Child (Maastricht, Bonnefantenmus.), which corresponds to a design by Giovanni Bellini of the 1480s, Pasqualino’s works are closely dependent in style and composition on the art of Cima da Conegliano, whose pupil or assistant he must have been. The Correr picture is freely based on several of Cima’s works of the early to mid-1490s, in particular the Madonna of the Orange Tree (Venice, Accad.); however, the elongated, tubular forms, rigid modelling, fussily detailed landscape background and opaque colours are typical features of Pasqualino’s own style. Unlike Cima’s other known associates such as Andrea Busati or Girolamo da Udine, Pasqualino does not seem to have been employed in Cima’s workshop merely as an executant of the master’s designs. By 1504 he evidently had sufficient reputation to be entrusted with the important commission to decorate the main wall of the albergo of the Scuola della Carità in Venice. The documents show, however, that he died in the same year without having painted anything and the commission later went to Titian.

• Pasqualino Veneto
  • Cima da Conegliano, §2: Working methods and technique