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
To say that D’Enrico will compare with Tabachetti would be an obvious
exaggeration, and, indeed, there are only very few figures on the Sacro
Monte about which we can feel certain that they are by him at all. The
Caiaphas, Herod, Laughing Boys in the Herod chapel, and the Man with the
Two Children in the Ecce Homo chapel cannot, I think, be given to any one
else, but at this moment I do not call to mind more than some fourteen or
fifteen figures out of the three hundred or so that are ascribed to him,
about which we can be as certain that they are by D’Enrico as we can be
that most of those given to Tabachetti and Gaudenzio are actually by
them. For not only have we to reckon with Giacomo Ferro, who, if he had
half the pay, we may be sure did not less than half the figures, and
probably very much more, but we must reckon with the figures taken from
older chapels when reconstructed, as in D’Enrico’s time was the case with
several. What became of the figures in Gaudenzio Ferrari’s original
Journey to Calvary chapel, and in other works by him that were cancelled
when the Palazzo di Pilato chapel was built? It is not likely they were
destroyed if by any hook or crook they could be made to do duty in some
other shape; more probably they are most of them still existing up and
down D’Enrico’s various chapels, but so doctored, if the expression may
be pardoned, that Gaudenzio himself would not know them. In the Ecce
Homo chapel we can say with confidence that the extreme figure to the
left is by Gaudenzio, and has been taken from some one of his chapels now
lost; we are able to detect this by an accident, but there are other
figures in the same chapel and not a few elsewhere, about which we can
have no confidence that they have not been taken from some earlier chapel
either by Gaudenzio or some one else. What, then, with these figures,
and what with Giacomo Ferro, it is not easy to say what D’Enrico did or
did not do.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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