Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 9.djvu/505

 F S F S 473 informed of the dates either of the death or the birth of Borgognone. His fame is principally associated with that of one great building, the Certosa, or church and convent of the Carthusians at Pavia, for which he worked much and in many different ways. It is certain, indeed, that there is no truth in the tradition which represents him as having designed, in 1473, the celebrated facade of the Certosa itself. His residence there appears to have been of eight years duration, from 1486, when he furnished the designs of the figures of the virgin, saints, and apostles for the choir-stails, executed in tarsia or inlaid wood work by Bartolommeo Pola, till 1494, when he returned to Milan. Only one known picture, an altar-piece at the church San Eustorgio, can with probability bo 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 in that city. From 1497 he was engaged for some time in decorat ing with paintings the church of the Incoronata in the neighbouring town at Lodi. Our notices of him thenceforth are few and far between. In 1508 he painted for a church in Bergamo; 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. Without having produced any works of signal power or beauty, Borgognone is a painter of marked individuality. He holds an interesting place in the most interesting period of Italian art. The National Gallery of London has two fair examples of his work the separate frag ments of a silk banner painted for the Certosa, and con taining the heads of two kneeling groups severally of men and women, and a large altar-piece of the marriage of St Catherine, painted for the chapel of Rebecchino near Pavia. 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 Teutonic 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 altar-pieces 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. Calvi, Visita alia Certosa, di Pavia, and Notizie, vol. ii. ; Crowe and Cavalcasclle, Hist, of Paint ing in North Italy, vol. ii. p. 4Is&amp;lt;7. FOSSOMBRONE, a town of Italy, in the province of Pesaro and Urbino, about 7 miles from Urbino, on the left bank of the Metauro, which is there crossed by a fine bridge of a single arch. It is commanded by an old castle on the heights, and it possesses a cathedral with ancient inscriptions and pictures, a Capuchin church, a seminary, and the vestiges of a Roman theatre. There are several silk factories in the town, and the silk produced in the district ranks as the finest in all Italy. The population of the town proper in 1871 was 3821, and of the commune 9056. Of the origin of Fossombrone nothing is definitely known. It appears by the name of Forum Sempronii as a flourishing muni cipal town under the Roman empire. Luined by the Goths and Lombards, it was soon afterwards restored on a slightly different site. The Malatesta and Galeazzo families had for a long time pos session of the lordship, but they sold it in 1440 to the duke of Urbino. FOSSOMBRONI, VITTORIO (1754-1844), a Tuscan statesman and mathematician, was born at Arez/o in 1754. He was educated at the university of Pisa, where he devoted himself particularly to mathematical science. He obtained an official appointment in Tuscany in 1782, and twelve years later was entrusted by the grand-duke with the direc tion of the works for the drainage of the Val di Chiana, a task for which he had already shown his fitness by the publication of a treatise on the subject. In 1796 he was made minister for foreign affairs ; and on the erection of the grand-duchy into the ephemeral kingdom of Etruria, he became a member of the commission of finance. After the annexation of Tuscany to the French empire, he was created by Napoleon I. chevalier of the Legion of Honour. He was also named head of the commission established for carrying out the drainage of the Pontine marshes. He became first minister of the restored grand-duchy (1814), and his administration, which was only terminated by his death, greatly contributed to promote the wellbeing of the country. Fossombroni was author of many treatises on mathematical and mechanical science, most of them relating to hydraulics. At the age of seventy-eight he married, and twelve years afterwards died, in 1844, at the age of ninety. FOSTER, JOHN (1770-1843), an English author and dissenting minister, generally known as the &quot; Essayist,&quot; was born in a small farmhouse near Halifax, Yorkshire, September 17, 1770. Partly from constitutional causes, but partly also from the want of proper companions, as well as from the grave and severe habits of his parents, the outward and physical life of boyhood had for him scarcely an existence, and his earlier years were enshrouded in a somewhat gloomy and sombre atmosphere, which was never afterwards wholly dissipated. His youthful energy, finding no proper outlet, developed within him a tendency to morbid intensity of thought and feeling ; and, according to his own testimony, before he was twelve years old he was possessed of a &quot;painful sense of an awkward but entire individu ality ; &quot; what observations he made on men and things were characterized by a precocious shrewdness and gravity, but he lived in an interior world of emotions and senti ments which he recoiled from communicating to any human being ; his imagination often exercised on him a tyrannous sway, endowing past or fictitious events with a stronger and more importunate reality than the actual circumstances which surrounded him, and sometimes arousing almost insupportable emotions of pain or terror. A partial counteractive to the predominance of this inward life was supplied by his love of natural scenery, but even here his interest was rather in the grand and sublime than in the beautiful, and nature awakened his strong enthusiasm more frequently than it inspired him with quiet and genial enjoy ment. The most wholesome influence exercised on his earlier years was perhaps that obtained from the perusal of books of travel a species of literature for which he had always a decided preference. It supplied him with actual scenes and adventures on which to exercise his imagination, and helped to deliver him from a too constant contempla tion of abstractions and a too minute analysis of his own moods and sentiments. His moral feelings in youth were not only sensitive but deeply rooted and constant and steadfast in their influence, being manifested in entire dutifulness to his parents, strong but &quot; not malicious &quot; antipathies, habitual abhorrence of cruelty, intense love of the heroic, and a tone of mind whose seriousness was ex cessive. The small income accruing to Foster s parents from their farm they supplemented by weaving, and at an early age he began to assist them by spinning wool by the hand wheel, and from his fourteenth year by weaving double stuffs. Even &quot; when a child,&quot; however, he had the &quot; feelings of a foreigner in the place ; &quot; and though he p3rformed his monotonous task with conscientious diligence, IX. 60