Ex Voto: An Account of the Sacro Monte or New Jerusalem at Varallo-Sesia: With Some Notice of Tabachetti's Remaining Work at the Sanctuary of CreaButler, Samuel
Religion
Ex Voto: An Account of the Sacro Monte or New Jerusalem at Varallo-Sesia: With Some Notice of Tabachetti's Remaining Work at the Sanctuary of Crea
Butler, Samuel
Art -- Italy -- Varallo-Sesia; Sacro Monte di Varallo (Sanctuary); Tabaguet, Jean Baptiste, 1568 -1615
About 1524 Gaudenzio painted a picture for the Sacristy of the Cathedral
of Novara, and Signor Tonetti says that the very beautiful picture behind
the high altar in the church of S. Gaudenzio at Varallo is generally
assigned to about the same period. He goes on to say that in 1526
Gaudenzio was certainly working at his native village of Valduggia,
where, in 1524 or 1525, a chapel had been erected in honour of S. Rocco,
who it was supposed had kept the Valsesia free from the plague that had
devastated other parts of Italy. This chapel Gaudenzio decorated with
frescoes that have now disappeared, but whose former existence is
recorded in an inscription placed in 1793, when the chapel was restored.
The inscription runs: “_Quod populus à peste denfensori erigebat an_
MDXXVI _Gaudentius Ferrarius patritius ex voto picturâ decorabat_,” &c.
In 1528 he transferred his abode to Vercelli, and about the same year
married again. His second wife was a widow who had a boy of ten years
old by Giovanni Antonio del Olmo, of Bergamo. Her name was Maria Mattia
della Foppa; she came from Morbegno in the Valtellina, and was of the
same family as Vincenzo Foppa, the reputed founder of the Milanese school
of painting. In 1532 he married his daughter Margherita to Domenico
Pertegalle, surnamed Festa, of Crevola near Varallo—he and his son
Gerolamo undertaking to give her a dowry of 500 _lire imperiale_, payable
in four years, and secured by mortgage on Gaudenzio’s house in Varallo.
In 1536 he painted the cupola of the church of the Madonna dei Miracoli
at Saronno; he then returned to Vercelli, but his abode and movements are
somewhat obscure till 1539, when it is certain that he left Varallo for
ever, settled in Milan, and died there between the years 1546 and 1549.
He does not appear to have continued to reside in Vercelli after 1536; we
may perhaps, therefore, think that he returned for a time to Varallo, and
that the frescoes on the Magi chapel should be given to some date between
1536 and 1539. They are certainly several years later than those in the
Crucifixion chapel; but I will return to these frescoes when I come to
the Magi chapel itself.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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