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

Chap. VII. ALTARPIECE, SAVONA 175
of an irksome contract under threat of imprisonment. If we are right in
assuming that Foppa executed the altarpiece, now in the Brera, between 1470
and 1480, we have in the central panel of that picture the spontaneous
expression of a painter in the zenith of his fame, who put forth all his
strength in order to gain the approval of new patrons and to maintain the
high position he had won before the world ; while at Savona we stand
before the work of a master past his prime, who had been coerced under
the strongest pressure into finishing an altarpiece in which he had probably
lost all interest, and of which he had doubtless hoped to be quit for ever
when he turned his back on Liguria in the spring of 1489. Giuliano della
Rovere and the authorities at Savona were not so easy to deal with as the
monks of S. Maria di Castello at Genoa ; they held the painter to his
contract, and he fulfilled it to the letter of the agreement. More than
this they could not exact from him, and although the outward characteristics
of Foppa are abundantly present in this altarpiece, it is lacking in some
of those qualities which are rarely absent from his works—spontaneity of
feeling, unity of aim and purpose, and that intimate bond of sympathy
between all the figures which serves to bring them into closest relation one
with the other. It is true that in the present damaged state of the picture
it is scarcely possible to guess what may have been its original aspect, yet
the injuries which it has sustained cannot be held altogether responsible
for these deficiencies, and the circumstances of Foppa's life and the conditions
under which the work was produced must also be taken into consideration.
In the angel musicians on either side of the throne, dimmed and disfigured
though they now are, Foppa's character may still be recognized in the plastic
modelling of the heads and in the warmth and earnestness of the expression.
As in the Brera altarpiece, these angels wear bands of red at the neck and
wrists of their white draperies ;
these bands are repeated also in the dark robe
of the angel presenting the donor— a figure which must once have been of considerable
charm, with its characteristic type, thick fair hair, and attractive
expression, though all detail is now lost in the general gloom. The uplifted
hand of this angel, somewhat disproportionate in size with short fingers and
broad palm (characteristics which we find exaggerated in the saints of the
upper tier), is closely connected with the hands of the saints in the Brera
altarpiece ;
while in the beautiful but much injured hand of the Madonna resting
upon the book, we have a typical example of another form of hand, and one
which constantly recurs in Foppa's Madonnas : in the Brera altarpiece, in the
Arcore Annunciation, in the National Gallery Adoration of the Magi, and in
other works. Characteristic of the master too are the small grisaille figures
of saints in shell niches below the arms and at the sides of the throne, a