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

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VINCENZO FOPPA
In the walled city seen in the background Don Pietro Moiraghi believed
that he could identify a number of buildings at Pavia : ' the great tower of
the city known as Torre Maggiore, the towers of the Carmine, of S. Giovanni
Domnarum, and of the Broletto—a purely imaginary theory, for the round
tower, to which prominence is here given, is of a form unknown at Pavia.
The tower of Boethius, though round in form,^ was of a totally different
character to the one seen in the Bergamo picture ; and among the hundred
or more towers which were standing at Pavia in Foppa's day, and are
represented in a fresco of 1522 by Bernardino Lanzani da S. Colombano in
S. Teodoro at Pavia,' not one has the form of the tower in the Bergamo
Crucifixion.* If it is to be identified with any known building, it might with
greater likelihood be held to represent the medieval tower in the Castello at
Brescia known as Mirabella, to which it bears some resemblance ; but in all
probability the background was merely a fanciful composition, the result of
impressions received by Vincenzo in his intercourse with other painters from
different parts of Italy, either in the workshop of his master or when he had
come to his full maturity. A very similar tower is seen in Crivelli's Blood of
the Redeemer in the Poldi Museum at Milan, and in Giovanni Bellini's picture
of the same subject in the National Gallery ; and in this last, too, we find
the motive of the paved floor and the parapet opening out upon the landscape,
though in place of Bellini's symbolical bas-reliefs^ we have on the parapet of
the Bergamo picture the painter's signature and the date :
0)CCCC
-VINCC.
LVi f)IC- (i\'''\ HPI
MENSIS
..IC5'S
APRIL.ISp,,^
,^ .
The inscription is undoubtedly original, though it has suffered considerably,
the "A" of "Aprilis" having at some period been changed into an
1 Almanacco Sacro Pavese, 1897, p. 331.
- See A. M. Spelta, Aggionta air Historia sua, p. 142, where a reproduction of this
tower is given.
* Reproduced by Don P. Moiraghi in Bollettino Stor. Pavese, 1893.
* For the towers of Pavia see Zuradelli, Le Torri di Pavia.
' For the symbolical significance of this class of composition, see the late Dr.
Ludwig's important article in the Jahrbuch d. K. Preussischen Kunstsammliingen, 1902.
" " 1456 Die Mensis Aprilis Vincencius Brixiensis pinxit."