JACOBELLO DEL BONOMO - b. ~1355 Venezia, d. ~1390 ?

Italian painter. He was a close follower of Lorenzo Veneziano, perpetuating his style through the second half of the fourteenth century. He was Venetian but his known works were for locations outside Venice. He was identified as the Master of Arquà, an anonymous painter around whom a number of works were grouped, taking a polyptych in the Oratorio of SS. Trinità in Arquà Petrarca as the core work.

Jacobello’s first documented painting is a now lost painting of St Ursula for the Garzadori chapel in the church of San Michele, Vicenza, signed and dated 1375. His earliest surviving work is the signed polyptych from San Francesco, Romagna, dated 1385, now in the Municipio of Sant’Arcangelo, Romagna.

The Man of Sorrows

This panel was certainly part of a larger altarpiece. It is likely to have been the central pinnacle panel with the mourning Virgin and St John the Evangelist on either side, situated above the Virgin and Child in the centre of the main tier below. This kind of polyptych was common from the mid-fourteenth century onward.