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

APPENDIX I 281
history; Brescia was certainly not the "patria" (if by this we are to understand the
native place) of Civerchio, who is known to have come from Crema, and it is much
more probable that the Vincenzo alluded to was Foppa, and that "Verchio" was
merely a mistaken reading of "Vecchio,"' liy which name, as we have seen, the
Anonimo mentions him, a name probably bestowed upon him on account of the great
age to which he attained. It has been assumed that he was so called to distinguish him
from "Vincenzo Foppa the younger," but what has been said in the foregoing pages
makes it clear that there was no such person,- and that he was invented merely to
account for the appearance of a Vincenzo Foppa in 1495, when it was thought that
our painter died in 1492.
Note 2. The Probable Dates of Vincenzo Foppa's Birth and Death
No writer mentions the year of Foppa's birth, but recently discovered documents
afford some clue to the approximate date,
Ottavio Rossi^ in his short notice of Foppa gives in the margin the date 1407,
by which he presumably intended to indicate the period when the painter flourished.
But such a date is altogether discredited by Vincenzo's works, which prove that they
were products of the last half of the fifteenth century or even of a still later period.
From a document to which we have several times had occasion to allude (letter of
Galeazzo Maria Sforza of 1468, Doc. No. 15), we know that Vincenzo was a married
man with children in 1456, to which year his first dated work belongs. He could
scarcely therefore have been born later than 1430, and taking into consideration the fact
that Faini, in his list of Brescian painters at the end of his MS. Pitture di Brescia,
writes 1427 against the name of Vincenzo Foppa, and assuming that Rossi's date 1407
may have been a misprint for 1427, we should perhaps be justified in placing the birth
of Foppa in that year.
Historians have always stated on the authority of Zamboni, the earliest writer who
mentions a date in connection with his death, that Foppa died in 1492, but documents
in the Brescian Archives prove that he was still living in 1495, and enable us to trace
1
In chap. VIII, p. 204, we alluded to the fact that many mistakes in the history of art are traceable
to the misreading of written documents. Vasari's mistake is, we believe, a case in point.
The bulk of his information relating to Lombard artists was derived, as we stated in chap, i,
from a letter written by Girolamo Campagnola to Leonico Tomeo. Originally therefore he appears
to have read "Verchio" for Vecchio, and as such the name was inserted in his first edition.
Before bringing out his second edition he must have added considerably to his knowledge
relating to the Lombard school ;
but even then it is evident that confusion still reigned in his
mind on the subject. Thus in Vol. II, part 11, p. 521, we have the passage relating to Vincenzo
Bresciano (see chap. I, p. 4 and note i), and on p. 523 the paragraph just alluded to relating to
Vincenzo Verchio. On p. 345 in the life of Michelozzo we have Vincenzo di Zoppa, and the
same a few pages further on in the life of Filarete. All these notices, we believe, refer to one
painter, Vasari having misread "Verchio" for "Vecchio," and "Zoppa" for " Foppa," in the
written information at his disposal.
2 Chap. X, p. 261, note 2. See also Note 5 of this appendix.
^ Elogi di Bresciani illustri, p. 508.