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

Chap. I. EARLIEST KNOWN WORK 5
The earliest at present known is the charming Madonna and Child
with angels in the collection of Cavaliere Aldo Noseda at Milan, a picture
in the highest degree characteristic of Foppa and full of the most poetic
feeling,
but showing no trace of Paduan tendencies.
In the absence of all documents which might throw light on the
history of the painter's early development, the only possible clue is afforded
by his own works, and judging from this picture it is to be assumed that
he may have received his first training in the school of Verona.
Verona was in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries the centre
and focus of painting in North Italy. Here Altichiero and his followers
worked and left their mark ; hence came Antonio Pisano,' whose influence
was so penetrating and far-reaching in the first half of the fifteenth century ;
and here flourished that painter, or one might almost say that group of
painters emanating from Pisanello, on whom art historians have bestowed the
generic name of Stefano da Zevio ; for it is hardly to be assumed that all the
works which pass under this name could have been produced by one master.
The influence of Pisanello must have been paramount at Verona at this
in no
period, and Vincenzo Foppa's earliest known works prove that he felt it
small degree, though we cannot tell if he was ever his direct pupil. The
recent discoveries of Professor Biadego render it not improbable ;
he has shown
that Pisanello, though often engaged upon work in other places, was a taxpayer—and
as such a citizen and householder—at Verona from 1442 onwards.
The early history of the school of Verona still remains to be written,
and among its many obscure problems awaiting definite solution is that
relating to Stefano da Zevio.
A certain number of works still in existence at Verona and elsewhere,
some of them signed "Stefanus pinxit," all more or less closely related
in feeling and general characteristics, seem to prove that they were all
produced in one workshop at varying periods of time and by different
hands. From that workshop came the painter who produced the Madonna
in the rose garden with St. Dorothea and angels of the Verona Museum ;
a Madonna and Child belonging to Princess von Biilow at Berlin ;
the
lunettes of S. Giovanni in Valle and S. Eufemia at Verona, the latter
Arch. Ven. we have been unable to consult, but it will doubtless contain many surprises
for art critics, and will prove once more that only by combining documentary research
with iesthetic criticism can we ever hope to attain to the truth. Signor Lazzarini has been
good enough to inform us that he has never found the slightest trace of Vincenzo Foppa
at Padua.
•
See Biadego, Pisanus Pictor (1908), who has proved that the painter's christian
name was Antonio and not Vittore, and that he was born in 1397
died in 1455. (See also G. F. Hill in the Burlington Magazine, igo^.)
(not in 1380), and