IACOPINO di FRANCESCO dei BAVOSI or dei PAPAZZONI, known as IACOPO da BOLOGNA. — Bolognese painter, mentioned in documents from 1360 to 1383 and certainly already active before 1350. He was the foremost artist among the various Iacopi who were active as painters in Bologna during the fourteenth century.
He formed his style on the examples of the masters of Rimini, and especially of Francesco da Rimini, who was active around 1330, while maintaining his independence from the influence of the leading master of fourteenth-century Bolognese painting, Vitale da Bologna. With him and with Simone de' Crocifissi he collaborated on the cycle of frescoes in the former oratory of S. Apollonia at Mezzaratta (Bologna). His figures, although marked by Giottesque severity, sometimes reveal a popular character, as in the two polyptychs nos. 161 and 159 in the Pinacoteca di Bologna and in the fragments of a third, dismembered one, in the same Gallery. In addition to the magnificent fresco recently discovered in the church of S. Giacomo Maggiore in Bologna, depicting Il Santo alla battaglia di Ciavijo, and the dramatic Crocifisso of S. Giovanni in Monte in Bologna, his works include the four Kress panels, formerly in the Gozzadini collection, in New York; the tragic Crocifissione in the Museum of Moulins; and that in the Johnson Collection in Philadelphia.
Un Vitale e un Jacopo da Bologna, in Proporzioni, 2 (1948), pp. 67-72; R. Longhi, Catalogo-guida della Mostra della pittura bolognese del '300, Bologna 1950, see preface, pp. 17-18.