"Crucified Christ with the Virgin and Saint John"

Ambrogio Bergognone (c.1460–1523), Ambrogio Borgognone (variously known as Ambrogio da Fossano, Ambrogio di Stefano da Fossano, Ambrogio Stefani da Fossano or as il Bergognone or Ambrogio ( c. 1470s – 1523/1524) was an Italian painter of the Renaissance period active in and near Milan.

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. His fame is principally associated with his work at the Certosa di Pavia complex, composed of the church and convent of the Carthusians. 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.

For two years after his return to Milan, he worked at the church of San Satiro. From 1497 he was engaged for some time in decorating with paintings the church of the Incoronata in neighbouring Lodi. Documentation of him thenceforth is scant. The National Gallery, 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 altarpiece 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 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.