His early years are better documented than his adult life. He was born in Padua, then subject to the republic of Venice, and home to one of the three major European universities of the fifteenth century, the University of Padua. His father Girolamo was characterised by A. Hyatt Mayor as "a writer of some note, probably also an amateur artist, who belonged to what would now be called the intelligentsia"; letters by him in very good humanist Latin survive. According to Giorgio Vasari, Girolamo was also an artist "a Paduan painter and disciple of Squarcione", but this remark is the only evidence for that.