This man, who began life as a tailor or embroiderer, was early interested in the fine arts.

Like Ciriac of Ancona, he had a taste for travel and collection,[170] visiting the sacred soil of Greece and sojourning in divers towns of Italy, everywhere making drawings, copying pictures, taking casts from statues, and amassing memoranda on the relics of antiquity as well as on the methods practised by contemporary painters.
Equipped with these aids to study, Squarcione returned to Padua, his native place, where he opened a kind of school for painters.

It is clear that he was himself less an artist than an amateur of painting, with a turn for teaching, and a conviction, based upon the humanistic instincts of his age, that the right way of learning was by imitation of the antique.

During the course of his career he is said to have taught no less than 137 pupils, training his apprentices by the exhibition of casts and drawings, and giving them instruction in the science of perspective.[171] From his studio issued the mighty Andrea Mantegna, whose life-work, one of the most weighty moments in the history of modern art, will be noticed at length in the next chapter.

For the present it is enough to observe that through Squarcione the scientific and humanistic movement of the fifteenth century was communicated to the art of Northern Italy.