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

144 VINCENZO FOPPA
one hundred thousand victims.' The severer the visitation the more ardent
waxed the devotion to St. Sebastian, who from very early times had been
regarded as the " dispeller of pestilence"; with him in the fourteenth
century was associated St. Roch, and representations of these saints became
widely diffused throughout the length and breadth of the land.
Foppa twice treated the subject of St. Sebastian on a large scale, ^ and
both paintings undoubtedly owed their origin to one of these outbursts of
religious fervour, and were dedicated either to obtain the intercession of the
saint on behalf of the plague-stricken city or as a thank-offering for deliverance
from the scourge, though we are unable to specify the exact date of
either of these compositions.
The St. Sebastian of the Brera^ is a finely imagined figure : he stands
bound to a column and pierced by many arrows, but free from all exaggeration
of gesture or pose ; a calm and heroic figure, unmindful of his own
physical sufferings, but turning his gaze upon his executioners as though
compassionating their ignorance and misguided zeal. The form is anatomically
correct in drawing ;
the limbs and surface of the body are modelled with
great dexterity and knowledge, and in the features Foppa's powers of characterization
and expression are manifest. The architectural setting shows the
same skilful treatment and acquaintance with the laws of perspective as we
found in the fresco of 1485
; above, on the left of the arch, is a little medallion
containing not the usual profile head, but a small seated figure, taken perhaps
^ Three times during these years Lodovico il Moro organized solemn processions in
which the young Duke Gian Galeazzo and all the principal persons in the city took
part, many of whom went about the streets clad in sackcloth scourging themselves
(Morigia, Historia delVAntichita di Milano, etc., p. 165). In the years 1502 and 1503
during the French occupation, and again between 1512-14, the plague caused great
havoc at Milan (Verri, Storia di Milano, II, 107, 119).
2 A small panel picture of the martyrdom of St. Sebastian was discovered by Dr.
Frizzoni in the winter of 1906 in the possession of a dealer at Milan, and was ascribed
by him to Vincenzo Foppa on the evidence of the colouring, technique, and other
particulars, an attribution which we are unable to accept. It is possible that this may
be the little panel mentioned by Caffi some five-and-twenty years ago in the collection of
Signora De Cristoforis at Milan, and there ascribed to Civerchio (see Arch. Stor. Ital.,
1883, p. 342).
^ A very feeble drawing in the Venice Academy is sometimes erroneously held to be
a study for this fresco (Braun, No. 78256), a drawing perhaps identical with a study
referred to in a MS. in the Melzi Library (a library now belonging to the Marchese
Soragna at Milan); the passage is dated October 21, 1771, and speaks of the drawing as
in the Bossi Collection and as "the study for the figure of St. Sebastian in fresco
executed in water-colour on red-tinted paper and heightened with white." Another
drawing of a St. Sebastian, in the collection of Mr. Fairfax Murray, is also ascribed to
Foppa—an attribution which does not appear to us convincing.