Vincenzo Foppa

Before Leonardo da Vinci came south to Milan in the 1480s, the painter the Lombard dukes turned to was Vincenzo Foppa. Born in Brescia around 1427, he spent the heart of his career in Pavia in the service of the Sforza, the ruling family of the Duchy of Milan, and for decades he was the most important painter in the whole region of Lombardy.

Foppa worked in a sober, silvery light, with the careful perspective he had picked up from the new Renaissance ideas coming out of Padua and Venice. His earliest dated work, a Crucifixion of 1456, already sets its three crosses into a real landscape rather than a plain gold background. Later he absorbed the sculptural modelling of Andrea Mantegna and the softness of Leonardo, and his fresco of the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, from around 1485, is often counted his finest surviving work.

He lived a very long life for his time, dying in Brescia in 1515, by which point the younger Milanese painters had grown up under Leonardo's shadow rather than his.