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

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284 VINCENZO FOPPA
Note 4.
The Name Foppa
There can be
no doubt that Foppa was the painter's patronymic, and was not derived
from a place, as Crowe and Cavalcaselle, Moiraghi, and others would have us believe.
To have traced its origin to the little hamlet of Foppa which lies close to Bascape,
half-way between Pavia and Melegnano, is purely arbitrary, since there are many other
places which bear this name in North Italy— in Pavian and Milanese territory, in the
Bergamasque valleys, in the Valtellina,i and in other districts.
Foppa as a surname is constantly met with at Milan ;
besides the patrician family
of that name who had their chapel in S. Marco and who are mentioned among the
two hundred noble Milanese families in the fourteenth century,^ there were many others
of humbler origin whose names occur in records from the fourteenth century onwards.
But there are no grounds for supposing that Vincenzo was connected with any of
them. The surname was by no means peculiar to Milanese and Pavian territory. It
was extraordinarily common at Bergamo and in the neighbouring valleys, of which we
have abundant proof in documents of the Archivio Notarile at Bergamo. There we
find, among others, the following variations in the spelling of the name : Foppa de
Buzzone, de Foppa de Clusone, de Fopa de Zonio, de Foppis de Gronis, de la Foppa
de Buzzone, etc.
In Brescia, it must be admitted, it is not very often met with ; but Moiraghi was
certainly wrong in asserting that no trace of the name was to be found there, ^ for
in the Libri d' Estimo of the years 1434 and later we find the names of the brothers
Isepinus and Marchettus della Foppa ; in 1469 those of Joanellus and Francescus ;
in the Custodie Notturne of 1438 and subsequent years Ambrosius, Jacobus, and
Dominichus are variously entered as della Foppa, de la Fopa, and de la Foya
and in a parchment of 1448 in the Archives of S. Giovanni Evangelista a Yosef della
Foppa is spoken of as a witness. It is clear, then, that the name Foppa was not
necessarily derived from a place of that name, but rather, as the numerous
examples at Bergamo prove, was a surname borne by persons belonging to many
different localities, and in the forms " de Foppa de Clusone, de Fopa de Zonio" we
have the exact counterpart of "de Foppa, de Fopa de Brisia," which we meet with
in documents relating to the painter.
The word Foppa is merely a dialect form of Fossa, signifying a moat, pit, or
grave ;* Foppone in Milanese dialect (literally Fossa grande) is a cemetery. The
^ It is well known that the wife of the painter Gaudenzio Ferrari was Maria della Foppa
of Morbegno in the Valtellina, and she, moreover, had a brother named Vincenzo (see Colombo,
Viia, etc., di Gaudensio Ferrari, p. 160, and Doc. 13), though we have no proof that any relationship
existed between the Delia Foppa of Morbegno and Vincenzo Foppa of Brescia ; but it was
this perhaps which induced Santo Monti to make the curious statement that the painter
Vincenzo Foppa was born at Morbegno and migrated to Brescia (see Storia delV ArienellaDiocesi
di Como, p. 299, and Atti della Visita Pastorale . . di F. Ningiiarda Vescovo di Como, pp. 27, 264,
etc., for the Foppa of Morbegno).
" Giulini, VIII, 313.
^ Mem. e Doc, p. 90.
* That the word Foppa was commonly used to express a ditch or fosse in the fifteenth
century we gather also from a letter of Bartolomeo Gadio's of Jan. 8, 1474, published in the
Arch. Stor. Lomb., 1883, p. 363.