Bartolomeo Biscaino
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(b Genoa, bapt 14 April 1629; d Genoa, 1657).
Italian painter, draughtsman and etcher. He was taught by his father, Giovanni Andrea Biscaino, a mediocre landscape painter, and entered the workshop of Valerio Castello, probably at the end of the 1640s. The chronology of his oeuvre, truncated by his early death in a plague, is hard to reconstruct. Only two paintings bear early documentation: St Ferrando Imploring the Virgin (Genoa, Pal. Bianco) and an untraced Flaying of Marsyas. However, his graphic work had a continuing reputation: he was called a ‘great draughtsman’ by Pellegrino Orlandi in his Abecedario pittorico (1704), and his etchings, of which over 40 are catalogued in Bartsch, were ‘very favourably received’, according to Antoine-Joseph Dezallier d’Argenville (1762). About half the etchings are signed or initialled, and two are dated (Nativity, 1655, B. 22; St Mary Magdalene in the Desert, 1656, B. 38). From them it is possible to attribute further works, mostly small canvases, to Biscaino, and to characterize his development.
