Attributed to Bernardo Parentino

Attributed to Bernardo Parentino is the label a museum uses when it thinks a work may be by this painter but cannot prove it. In Verona the Castelvecchio museum is more cautious still. It calls the author of its picture simply a Venetian painter and adds Parentino's name with a question mark.

Parentino came from Parenzo, the town on the coast of Istria that is now Poreč in Croatia, then under Venetian rule. He worked mainly in Padua and Mantua, in the orbit of Andrea Mantegna, the court painter of Mantua. Even his life is unsettled. Old accounts merge the painter with an Augustinian friar from Parenzo who died in Vicenza in 1531, and scholars still disagree on whether they were one man. The frescoes of the life of Saint Benedict painted in the 1490s in the cloister of Santa Giustina in Padua are given to him.