Vincenzo Foppa of Brescia, founder of the Lombard school, his life ...

Chap. III. FOPPA'S ALTARPIECE AT BRESCIA 79
200 lire for two years, and with this we may conclude the pictorial decoration
was completed. Twenty years later the chapel was redecorated with marbles
and sculpture, which must have resulted in the destruction of Foppa's ceiling
painting, for Jean d'Auton, who came to Genoa in 1502 in the suite of
Louis XII, speaks of the chapel as "magnificent ... all of marble
white and brown, and the vaulting of marble
;
painted also with fine gold
and rich azure and sown throughout with fleurs de lys."'
The chronicler gives a minute account of the sculptures, but says not one
word of frescoes in the chapel ; even if any of Foppa's work had survived to
that time it must certainly have perished in 1532, when the chapel was entirely
restored, and Mazone's altarpiece — probably the last relic of fifteenth century
painting within its walls—was removed.
We have no certain information as to the date of Foppa's return to the
north, but the fact that an altarpiece bearing his name and the date 1472 was
in the seventeenth century in the Church of S. Maria Maddalena at Brescia,
might lead us to infer that on quitting Genoa he went to Brescia in order to
execute this work. The altarpiece is mentioned by Faini, the earliest writer
who attempted any systematic account of the paintings in that city, in a manuscript
entitled Pitttire nelle Chiese di Brescia,"^ as follows: "The Church
of the Maddalena is small and of ancient date ; the picture over the High
Altar, divided into various compartments, is by the hand of Vincenzo Foppa
the Brescian, a good painter in those days."
This information from the pen of a seventeenth century writer would in
itself be of no value as a guarantee that the work in question was actually by
Foppa, but in another place Faini adds the important notice that the picture
bore the signature of Foppa and the date 1472 : " In the Church of S. Maria
Maddalena, formerly belonging to the Umiliati, the picture of the High Altar,
in which is seen a company of diverse saints, and in it is his [Foppa's] name
and the date 1472."'
Referring again to the manuscript Pitture nelle Chiese di Brescia, we
'
" Une mirifique chapelle laquelle est toute de mabre biz et blanc voultee de mabre
aussi toute paincte a fin or et riche azur et partout semee de fleurs de lys " {Chroniqjies
de Louis XII, III, 74).
- f. 174; the writer, Bernardino Faini, died in 1673.
^ " Nella chiesa di S. Maria Maddalena altre volte de frati Humiliati, la Pala
deir altar maggiore in cui si vede una compartita di diversi santi in essa vi e il suo nome
e la data 1472." This is a MS. note in what must have been Faini's own copy of
Ottavio Rossi's Elogi Historici di Bresciani Illustri, and is written in the margin of
Rossi's brief and very inaccurate notice of Foppa, p. 508. The volume contains
numerous other notes in the same handwriting, one of which is signed in full
" Bernardinus Fainus." The book is in the possession of one of the present writers.