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

Chap. I. THE CRUCIFIXION AT BERGAMO 15
The Bergamo picture has been cited as a proof of Foppa's Squarcionesque
trainingf, but the connection which it shows with Verona and with Jacopo
Bellini is infinitely closer. The arch within which the picture is framed
and the medallions with busts in profile have been pointed to as showing
his Paduan descent, but Vincenzo must have been intimately acquainted with
such motives at Verona, for in the frescoes of a chapel in S. M. della Scala,
executed, according to documents recently discovered by Prof. Simeoni, by
Giovanni Badile in 1443,' we find the round arch supported by columns with
medallions on either side used in two of the compositions, and we also
meet with it in numerous drawings by Jacopo Bellini. It was in fact merely
one of the favourite motives of the day, for the artists of the early fifteenth
century were quick to appreciate the decorative qualities of ancient coins and
to adapt them to their own purpose.
The treatment of trees in the landscape is absolutely identical with Pisanello's
manner in S. Anastasia at Verona, and in our National Gallery, and
the character of the landscape itself, with its hummock-shaped hills, is most
intimately connected with the landscape of Bono da Ferrara in his St. Jerome
of the same gallery, a picture in which the painter describes himself as
a disciple of Pisanello. This similarity was long ago pointed out by Crowe
and Cavalcaselle,^ and was again referred to by Mr. Herbert Cook in his
admirable Catalogue of Milanese pictures at the Burlington Fine Arts
Club in 1898.^ A very similar quality of landscape and treatment of trees
is seen in the Madonna and Child in the Louvre, ascribed by some critics
to Jacopo Bellini, by others to the school of Pisanello, and again, in the
predella of the Annunciation in S. Alessandro at Brescia—a work closely
connected with Jacopo Bellini—we find the same hummock-shaped hills
in the background of the Visitation. Yet in spite of this evident connection
with Pisanello and Jacopo Bellini,
the landscape of the Bergamo Crucifixion
is deeply imbued with Foppa's own character ; in the exquisite feeling
and balance of the composition and in the delicate tones of the colouring,
Vincenzo already shows that intimate appreciation of nature which he develops
in so remarkable a degree in his later works and which proves him to have
been one of the ablest landscape painters in the Lombard school of his day.
The central composition, as already observed, is derived from Jacopo
Bellini, though in the hands of Foppa it assumed a totally distinct character.
From this picture therefore it would also be impossible to infer that Vincenzo
was a pupil of Squarcione.
' See Niiov. Arch. Ven., T. XIII, pt. i, p. 152 and foil.
' II, 3.
'
p. xxvi. See too Pisanello, by G. F. Hill, where Foppa's picture is twice
referred to.