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

Chap. IV. FRESCOES OF S. GIACOMO 113
at Pavia spread rapidly, and when the Monastery of S. Giacomo was chosen
as the seat of the General Chapter of the Franciscans in 1478, not the least
weighty among the reasons which conduced to this decision was no doubt the
universal desire on the part of the members of the order to see these paintings,
of which they had heard so much, adorning the walls of one of their own
churches.
The documents relating to the paintings of S. Giacomo, it may be added,
have only recently come to light in the Pavian Archives and are now
published for the first time.' Hitherto these frescoes were known only through
one record published many years ago by Caffi (Doc. No. 28), from the wording
of which it was impossible to tell whether they were ever executed. Our
documents are therefore of great value for the new facts they give us relating
to the history of the work, for the light they shed upon the proceedings of a company
of painters and upon the methods by which a series of this description was
apportioned among the different members of the company,^ but above all, for
the brilliant picture they give us of Vincenzo, who once more stands forth
among his colleagues as the head and leader of his company, and as the one
to whom the most important share of the work was assigned. With
documentary evidence so astonishingly full and precise it would have been
a comparatively easy matter, with the aid of critical methods, to separate the
work of the different masters, and what a flood of light might not then have
been cast upon the whole history of the early Lombard school and its many
unsolved problems, had the paintings to which such definite reference is
made, been still in existence. It is therefore a matter of more than ordinary
regret that they, like so many other treasures of art, should have fallen
victims to the spirit of destruction which wrought such havoc in the eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries. In all probability they perished between
1724 and 1 73 1, during which period S. Giacomo was almost entirely rebuilt
and the choir was decorated with frescoes by the painter Magatti.^ Towards
the close of the century the monastery was suppressed, and in 1805 the church
was razed to the ground.
1
Nos. 27, 30, 31.
"
We have no doubt that the work in the Chapel of St. Peter Martyr at Milan was
conducted upon lines very similar to those followed at S. Giacomo, and that in the
methods and proceedings of the company of painters employed by Donna Zaccarlna,
we have an example, perhaps, of the manner in which the frescoes in the chapel of
Pigello Portinari may have been apportioned among different painters of one company.
' Maiocchi, Chiese di Pavia, II, 158.