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
This is on the highest ground of the Sacro Monte, the Transfiguration
being supposed to have happened on Mount Sinai. Inside the chapel they
have made Mount Sinai, but Fassola says that it was originally quite too
high, and the Fabbricieri had ordered it to be made lower, “so as to
render it more enjoyable by the eye.” It was begun at the end of the
sixteenth century, but is mentioned as being only “founded” in the 1586
and 1590 editions of Caccia, and the work seems to have got little
further than the foundations, until in 1660 it was resumed; Fassola,
writing in 1671, says that the chapel was “_levata in alto da terra
l’anno del mille_, _sei cento e sessanta_,” or about ten years before his
book appeared; it was still in great part unpainted, and he makes an
appeal to his readers to contribute towards its completion. From both
Fassola and Torrotti it would appear that only the group of figures on
the mountain was in existence when they wrote. They both of them make
the extraordinary statement that these figures are by Giovanni D’Enrico,
whom they must have perfectly well known to have been dead more than a
quarter of a century before Fassola wrote, and many years before the
figures could possibly have been placed where they now are. It is much
as though I, writing now, were to ascribe Boehm’s statue of Mr. Darwin,
in the Natural History Museum at South Kensington, to Chantrey. The
figures on the mountain are among the worst on the Sacro Monte. I see
that Cusa ascribes the figures of Peter, James, and John only to
D’Enrico, but the ascription is very difficult to understand.
Bordiga does not say who did the figures of Peter, James, and John, but
he gives the Christ, Moses, and Elias to Pietro Francesco Petera of
Varallo. The fourteen figures at the foot of the mountain he assigns to
Gaudenzio Soldo of Camasco, a pupil of the sculptor Dionigi Bussola. In
1665 Giuseppe and Stefano Danedi, called Montalti, and pupils of
Morazzone, “painted the cupola of the chapel with innumerable angels
great and small exhibiting the most varied movements.” Giuseppe had the
greater share in this work, in which may be seen, according to Bordiga,
signs of the influence of Guido, under whom Giuseppe had studied.
Among the figures below the mountain there is a blind man, and a boy with
a bad foot leading him—both good—and a contemptuous father telling the
Apostles that they cannot cure his son, and that he had told them so from
the first, but the paint is peeling off the figures so much that the work
can hardly be judged fairly. When photographed they look much better,
and Signor Pizetta tells me he was last year commissioned to photograph
the boy, who is in a fit of hystero-epilepsy, for a medical work that was
being published in France, so it is probably very true to nature.
CHAPEL NO. 18. RAISING OF LAZARUS.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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