GIROLAMO da TREVISO, the ELDER. – Painter, born c. 1450, died c. 1496. Remembered as belonging to the Pennacchi family, doubts nonetheless persist regarding his lineage, all the more so since in certain works he signs himself only “Hieronymus Tarvisio.”
With the loss of the frescoes and altarpiece that he is said to have painted in 1470 for the Spineda chapel in S. Niccolò in Treviso, the sole surviving work from his youth, which reveals him as a follower of the Squarcionesque milieu, is the St. Jerome (signed and dated) in the Piccinelli collection at Seriate near Bergamo. Similar traits are found in the Pietà at the Brera and in the fresco, recently attributed to him, of the same subject in the church of the Eremitani in Padua. After his Paduan experience, the painter must have gone to Venice, and Antonellian influences appear in the Flower Altarpiece of Treviso Cathedral, dated 1487, to which may be compared a signed Madonna formerly in the Weber collection in Hamburg and another in the Boehler art gallery in Munich (formerly at Dessau), in which a derivation from Bellinian models is also evident. The influence of Bellini is likewise present in the Transfiguration at the Accademia in Venice, the upper part of an altarpiece destroyed by fire and painted in 1488 for the church of S. Margherita in Treviso. Signed and dated 1493 is the altarpiece from Collalto in Friuli, now in the Venetian Accademia, which, together with the Madonna and Four Saints from Treviso Cathedral (from S. Vigilio), also shows the decline of the painter’s art as he feebly attempts to keep pace with the artistic movements of his time.