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

Chap. X. INFLUENCE ON PIEDMONTESE PAINTERS 257
named works, it
must be admitted, the connection with Foppa is comparatively
remote. In the last decades of the fifteenth century an extraordinary revival
of art took place at Pavia ; up to 1480 the names of but ten painters are
known to us in documents, but after this date we note a marked increase
in their numbers, which seems to indicate a sudden reawakening of the
artistic faculty—the result perhaps of the direct teaching and influence of
Foppa in the years when we know him to have been living at Pavia and
actively employed there, namely, between the years 1473 and i486 ; for it
is impossible to believe that all these artists could have been trained in the
schools of Giovanni da Vaprio and of Leonardo Vidolenghi, or that this
remarkable development was due to either of these masters. Into this question,
however, we cannot enter here, and it will be more fully dealt with in a volume
treating of recent discoveries in the Pavian Archives.
Evidence of Foppa's influence is, of course, most strikingly apparent in
the works of Pavian and Milanese masters, though by no means confined to
them. It is seen also in several paintings of Piedmont, to some extent in the
few remaining works of Gandolfino da Asti, more especially in a signed picture
belonging to Sir Henry Howorth, in which a group of singing angels seems
founded upon a well-known Foppesque motive, and occasionally also in works
by Macrino d' Alba. Morelli classed this painter among direct pupils of
Foppa,^ and though more recent writers do not admit this,^ it appears to us that
a strain of Lombard influence is undeniable in some of his works, for instance,
in his altarpiece in the Certosa of Pavia, in another at Tortona, and in certain
panels of saints in the Turin Gallery.'
Foppa's visits to Liguria were not of sufficiently long duration to have
enabled him to found a school there, yet several of the painters who were
working contemporaneously with him at Genoa and Savona evidently felt his
influence. This is apparent in the works of another Piedmontese, Giovanni
Mazone of Alessandria, the same artist, it will be remembered, who in 1463
agreed to paint the altarpiece for the Chapel of St. John Baptist in the
cathedral at Genoa, and was urged to surpass in it, if possible, Foppa's
fresco on the ceiling of that chapel, and who many years later was ordered
to take as his model the Majestas painted by Foppa for the Spinola
family.
In Mazone's interesting altarpiece for the Sistine
Chapel at Savona (now
in the Louvre), containing the portraits of Sixtus IV and Giuliano della
^ III, p. 122.
2
See Ugo Fleres, Le Gallerie Naz. Italiane, III, p. 69 and foil., and Lisetta Ciaccio
in Rass. d' Arte, Oct., 1906.
* An influence of Foppa on Macrino is also admitted by Berenson, op. cit., p. 252.
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