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

126 VINCENZO FOPPA
overshadowed to some extent by the sterner and more rugged influences
dominating his art in his early middle period, now re-asserts itself, and is
perceptible in his evident striving to attain to a higher aesthetic level.
This tendency is manifest in all the figures of the central panel, and in the
heads of SS. Louis, Vincent, and Clara. The type of the Madonna and
that of the Infant Saviour in the Brera are clearly identical with those of
the Virgin and Child of the Castello ; but while in the latter composition
beauty subordinated to character was still, so to speak, elementary and
apparent only in general lines, in the Brera altarpiece the painter, while
preserving the original types, refines, softens, and adds qualities of external
grace in so considerable a degree, that this work as a whole marks a very
distinct advance in his development. This tendency to develop his art on
more ideal lines becomes ever more marked in his later work ; it was this
aspect of his art which appealed more especially to his followers, and it was
these inherent qualities which rendered the Lombard school of Foppa peculiarly
receptive of Leonardesque principles.
As to the question of the date we have, as already observed, no certain
clue ; nevertheless it seems probable, both from the style of the picture and
the general scheme of its composition and from what we know of the
circumstances of Foppa's life, that it might have been produced between
1470 and 1480.
The picture may have been painted at Bergamo, the woodwork being
prepared by some local carver, and Foppa himself being lodged in the convent
and given every facility for superintending the work and executing the
paintings on the spot ; such arrangements are not without parallel in the
history of Italian art. On the other hand, it is by no means necessary to assume
that the altarpiece could only have been executed in this manner. A polyptych
of this kind, composed as it was of separate panels, could easily have
been produced in a Pavian or Milanese workshop, one of the many carvers
who were employed at Pavia in these years furnishing the woodwork under
Foppa's directions and after his designs, the panels being then painted and
gilded in Master Vincenzo's workshop.
If the altarpiece was executed in Foppa's bottega at Pavia it could easily
have been transported by water to Milan and thence to Bergamo ; the way in
which the ancona for the Chapel of the Relics was produced gives us an insight
into the working of these matters and into the arrangements attending the
transport and placing of altarpieces.^
1 We have many instances in the history of Italian art of paintings thus produced
at a distance and then sent to their destination ; but one example may suffice—that of
an altarpiece for the Church of S. Pietro in Ciel d' oro, which was executed at Venice and
'
transported from thence by water to Pavia : ' Item maiestatem unam magnam, sitam super