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

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VINCENZO FOPPA
impossible, though the compositions of Donatello and his followers undoubtedly
attracted him powerfully at a certain epoch of his career.
At a later period the works of Mantegna may have affected him to some
extent, as we infer from the strain of Mantegnesque feeling occasionally
noticeable in some of Foppa's compositions. The St. Sebastian of the
Castello, for instance, seems to presuppose an acquaintance with Mantegna's
version of the same subject in the Vienna Museum, a work perhaps thirty
years earlier in date than Foppa's painting.' The connection between the
two pictures is seen more especially in the pose of the figure and in the composition
of the background ; in both, the saint is raised on a pedestal and
bound to a column placed against a massive pier, from which springs a broken
arch.
But far too much stress has, we think, been laid upon the relations
between Vincenzo and the painters of Padua, and we most emphatically deny
that he was ever in any sense a pupil of Mantegna or at any time a servile
follower of his methods. Foppa's true place in art was defined by Morelli
when he referred to him as "that great master who has been far too little
appreciated . . . who holds in the schools of Brescia, and more especially
of Milan, a position similar to that occupied at Padua and Mantua by the
mighty Mantegna,"- a position therefore of equality with Mantegna as head
and leader of a school.
The admirable knowledge of architectural design displayed by Foppa in
the frescoes of the St. Sebastian of the Brera and of the Madonna of 1485,
the more developed feeling for atmosphere and space perceptible in the background
of the composition in the Castello, may have been due in some
measure to direct intercourse with another master, namely, Bramante, though
we have no documents to aid us in proving this with absolute certainty.
From 1474 onwards^ the great Umbrian architect and painter was undoubtedly
living at Milan, and in the years when Foppa was executing his
frescoes in S. Maria di Brera was engaged upon architectural works and
paintings in that city. Moreover, those of Foppa's works in which these
more developed tendencies are manifest were certainly produced later than
1474, that is after Bramante had settled at Milan, and judging from that
master's noble and impressive Christ at the Column in the Church of the
1 Three examples of the Martyrdom of St. Sebastian by Mantegna exist. At
Aigueperse, Puy de Dome (Kristeller, p. 138, fig. 56, who dates it as about 1454); at
Vienna, as noted above, of 1457-59 (Kristeller, p. 168, pi. 10) ; and in the Ca d' Oro at
Venice, a work placed by Kristeller (p. 330, fig. 112) at the close of the master's life.
- Ivan Lermolieff, Die Galcrie zn Berlin, ed. Frizzoni, 1893, pp. 106, 107.
^ Miintz, I, 127 ; Beltrami in Rassegna cT Arte, 1901 ; Carotti, Le opere di Leonardo,
Bramante, etc., p. 98.