FOPPA, VINCENZO. - Painter, b. in Brescia ca. 1427 and d. in the same city in 1515 or 1516. A pupil first, perhaps, in the workshop of the Bembo family in Brescia, although he later came under the stylistic influence of Jacopo Bellini and Mantegna, he was able to create his own pictorial language, characterized by great monumentality, chiaroscuro strength and an almost Tuscan purity of drawing. For more than thirty years he lived in Pavia, where he had moved with his family in 1456.
From that same year dates the dramatic Crucifixion in the Galleria Carrara in Bergamo, his first signed work. He then worked in Milan, executing for Francesco Sforza in the Banco Mediceo the great fresco The Justice of Trajan, of which only the preparatory drawings are known (Federico Museum in Berlin; Ashmolean Museum in Oxford), and frescoing for Pigello Portinari the Stories of St. Peter Martyr and the Four Doctors of the Church in the Portinari Chapel, begun by Michelozzo in 1462 and completed in 1468, in S. Eustorgio. Only recently has this cycle of frescoes been restored to F. and it is considered one of the most important complexes of his activity. In 1475 he executed the great polyptych for the church of S. Maria delle Grazie in Bergamo, today in the Pinacoteca di Brera, and in 1485 two frescoes depicting respectively The Madonna with the Child between Sts. John the Baptist and John the Evangelist and The Martyrdom of St. Sebastian, both in the same gallery, coming from the demolished church of S. Maria di Brera. Of F., who is considered the founder of the Milanese school, works are preserved in the Castello Sforzesco in Milan and in the museums of Berlin, Glasgow and London. He had various pupils, among them Bergognone and Vincenzo Civerchio, and exercised a great influence on Butinone, Zenale, Zanetto Bugatto, Bonifacio Bembo and Lodovico Brea. According to Lomazzo he would also have written a treatise on perspective.
Bibliography5 works
Mario Massaccesi