Ambrogio Bergognone

While he was nearly contemporary with Leonardo da Vinci, he painted in a style more akin to the pre-Renaissance, Lombard art of Vincenzo Foppa and Bernardino Zenale.

The dates of his birth and death are unknown; he is said to have been born at Fossano, in Piedmont, and his appellation is attributed to his artistic affiliation with the Burgundian School.

He worked there for eight years starting in 1486, in collaboration with his brother Bernardino Bergognone, when he furnished the designs of the figures of the virgin, saints and apostles for the choir stalls, executed in tarsia or inlaid woodwork by Bartolomeo Pola, till 1494, when he returned to Milan.

Only one known picture, an altarpiece at the Basilica of Sant' Eustorgio, can with good probability be assigned to a period of his career earlier than 1486.

[3] But to judge of his real powers and peculiar ideals, his system of faint and clear colouring, whether in fresco, tempera or oil; his somewhat slender and pallid types, not without something that reminds us of northern art in their Teutonic sentimentality as well as their fidelity of portraiture; the conflict of his instinctive love of placidity and calm with a somewhat forced and borrowed energy in figures where energy is demanded, his conservatism in the matter of storied and minutely diversified backgrounds to judge of these qualities of the master as they are, it is necessary to study first the great series of his frescoes and altarpieces at the Certosa, and next those remains of later frescoes and altarpieces at Milan and Lodi, in which we find the influence of Leonardo and of the new time mingling with, but not expelling, his first predilections.