Ambrogio Borgognone was an Italian

Italy

Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...

 Renaissance

Renaissance

The Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the Late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe. The term is also used more loosely to refer to the historical era, but since the changes of the Renaissance were not...

 painter

Painting

Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a surface . The application of the medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush but other objects can be used. In art, the term painting describes both the act and the result of the action. However, painting is...

 of the Milanese school.

Biography

While he was nearly contemporary with Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci was an Italian Renaissance polymath: painter, sculptor, architect, musician, scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, cartographer, botanist and writer whose genius, perhaps more than that of any other figure, epitomized the Renaissance...

, he painted in a style more akin to the pre-Renaissance, Lombard art of Vincenzo Foppa

Vincenzo Foppa

Vincenzo Foppa was a Northern-Italian Renaissance painter.He was an elderly contemporary of Leonardo da Vinci. Born at Bagnolo Mella, near Brescia in the Republic of Venice, he settled in Pavia around 1456, serving the dukes of Milan and emerging as one of the most prominent Lombard painters....

 and Bernardino Zenale. The dates of his birth and death are unknown; he is said to have been born at Fossano

Fossano

Fossano is a town and comune of Piedmont, Italy, in the province of Cuneo. It is the fourth largest town of the Province of Cuneo, after Cuneo, Alba and Bra....

 in Piedmont

Piedmont

Piedmont is one of the 20 regions of Italy. It has an area of 25,402 square kilometres and a population of about 4.4 million. The capital of Piedmont is Turin. The main local language is Piedmontese. Occitan is also spoken by a minority in the Occitan Valleys situated in the Provinces of...

 and his appellation attributed to his artistic affiliation with the Burgundian school

Burgundian School

The Burgundian School is a term used to denote a group of composers active in the 15th century in what is now northern and eastern France, Belgium, and the Netherlands, centered on the court of the Dukes of Burgundy. The main names associated with this school are Guillaume Dufay, Gilles Binchois,...

.

His fame is principally associated with his work at the Certosa di Pavia

Certosa di Pavia

The Certosa di Pavia Gra-Car , Shrine of the Blessed Virgin Mary Mother of Grace, is a monastery and complex in Lombardy, northern Italy, situated near a small town of the same name in the Province of Pavia, 8 km north of Pavia...

 complex, composed of the church and convent of the Carthusians. It is unlikely he designed, in 1473, the celebrated facade of the Certosa itself. He worked there for eight years starting in 1486, when he furnished the designs of the figures of the virgin, saints and apostles for the choir-stalls, executed in tarsia or inlaid wood work by Bartolomeo Pola, till 1494, when he returned to Milan

Milan

Milan is the second-largest city in Italy and the capital city of the region of Lombardy and of the province of Milan. The city proper has a population of about 1.3 million, while its urban area, roughly coinciding with its administrative province and the bordering Province of Monza and Brianza ,...

. Only one known picture, an altar-piece at the Basilica of Sant'Eustorgio

Basilica of Sant'Eustorgio

The Basilica of Sant'Eustorgio is a church in Milan, northern Italy. It was for many years an important centre for pilgrims on their journey to Rome or to the Holy Land, because it was the site of the tomb of the Three Magi or Three Kings....

, can with probability be assigned to a period of his career earlier than 1486.

For two years after his return to Milan he worked at the church of San Satiro

Santa Maria presso San Satiro

Santa Maria presso San Satiro is a church of Milan.The church lies on the site of a primitive worship place erected by the archbishop Anspertus in 879, dedicated to Saint Satyrus, confessor and brother of Saints Ambrose and Marcellina. The current church was instead built from 1472 to 1482 under...

. From 1497 he was engaged for some time in decorating with paintings the church of the Incoronata in the neighboring Lodi. Documentation of him thenceforth is scant. In 1508 he painted for a church in Bergamo

Bergamo

Bergamo is a town and comune in Lombardy, Italy, about 40 km northeast of Milan. The comune is home to over 120,000 inhabitants. It is served by the Orio al Serio Airport, which also serves the Province of Bergamo, and to a lesser extent the metropolitan area of Milan...

; in 1512, his signature appears in a public document of Milan; in 1524 - and this is our last authentic record - he painted a series of frescoes illustrating the life of St. Sisinius in the portico of San Simpliciano at Milan. Borgognone considered a modestly talented painter with marked individuality. He holds an interesting place in the most interesting period of Italian art.

The National Gallery

National Gallery, London

The National Gallery is an art museum on Trafalgar Square, London, United Kingdom. Founded in 1824, it houses a collection of over 2,300 paintings dating from the mid-13th century to 1900. The gallery is an exempt charity, and a non-departmental public body of the Department for Culture, Media...

, London, has a number or his works: the separate fragments of a silk banner painted for the Certosa, and containing the heads of two kneeling groups severally of men and women; and a large altar-piece of the marriage of St Catherine

Catherine of Alexandria

Saint Catherine of Alexandria, also known as Saint Catherine of the Wheel and The Great Martyr Saint Catherine is, according to tradition, a Christian saint and virgin, who was martyred in the early 4th century at the hands of the pagan emperor Maxentius...

, painted for the chapel of Rebecchino near Pavia.

But to judge of his real powers and peculiar ideals, his system of faint and clear coloring, 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 altar-pieces 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.

Bernardino Luini

Bernardino Luini

Bernardino Luini was a North Italian painter from Leonardo's circle. Both Luini and Giovanni Antonio Boltraffio were said to have worked with Leonardo directly; he was described to have taken "as much from Leonardo as his native roots enabled him to comprehend". Consequently many of his works were...

is said to have been one of his pupils.