Christ at the Tomb with a Dominican Monk

Little is known about the artist, although the progress of his career can be followed through several existing works. It was Pallucchini (La pittura veneziana del Trecento, Venice and Rome, 1964, pp. 200-7) who first recognized that the polyptych in the parish church of Arquà Petrarca, around which Bologna (Contributi allo studio della Pittura Veneziana del Trecento I, Arte Veneta, V, 1951, pp. 21-31) had grouped a number of works under the provisional name of 'The Master of Arquà', was in fact an early work of Jacobello, dating from circa 1370. He further argued that Jacobello's middle period was represented by a polyptych published by Puppi (Contribuiti a Jacobello di Bonomo, Arte Veneta, XVI, 1962, pp. 19-30), now in Prague Cathedral but of a Dalmatian provenance, and by other panels in the Czartoryski Museum in Crakow. A signed and dated work of 1375 in the Garzadori Chapel in the church of San Michele in Vicenza had probably already disappeared by the seventeenth century. The artist's masterpiece, a polyptych, also signed, and dated 1385, is in the Biblioteca Comunale di Sant'Arcangelo di Romagna. Pallucchini rightly associated Jacobello with the painterly tradition represented by Paolo and Lorenzo Veneziano and suggested that he was the most important Venetian artist active between 1370 and 1390.