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
I think the reconstruction of the chapel, then, and its assumption of its
present state, except that a fresco background was added, should be
assigned to some year about 1580–1585, and am disposed to ascribe, at any
rate, the figure of the man who is binding Christ to the column to
Tabachetti, who was then working on the Sacro Monte, and whose style the
work seems to me to resemble more nearly than it does that of D’Enrico.
Whoever the chapel is by, it was evidently in its present place and much
admired in 1586; there could hardly, therefore, have been any occasion to
reconstruct it, especially when so much other work was crying to be done,
and when it had, in all probability, been once reconstructed already.
[Picture: Plate X. “Man in background in the Flagellation Chapel”]
On the whole, until external evidence shows D’Enrico to have done the
figures, I shall continue to think that at least one of them, and very
possibly all except the two old wooden ones, are by Tabachetti. The foot
of the man binding Christ to the column has crumbled away, either because
the clay was bad, or from insufficient baking. This is why the figure is
propped up with a piece of wood. The damp has made the rope slack, so
that the pulling action of the figure is in great measure destroyed, its
effect being cancelled by its ineffectualness; but for this the reader
will easily make due allowance. The same man reappears presently in the
balcony of the Ecce Homo chapel, but he is there evidently done by
another and much less vigorous hand.
The man in the foreground, who is stooping down and binding his rods, is
the same as the one who is kicking Christ in Tabachetti’s Journey to
Calvary, and is one of those adopted by Tabachetti from Gaudenzio
Ferrari’s Crucifixion chapel; this figure may perhaps have been an
addition by Giovanni D’Enrico, or have been done by an assistant, for it
is hardly up to Tabachetti’s mark. The two nearest scourgers are fine
powerful figures, but I should admit that they remind me rather of
D’Enrico than of Tabachetti, though they might also be very well by him,
and probably are so.
Fassola says that the graces obtainable by the faithful here have
relation to every kind of need; they are in a high degree unspecialised,
and that this freedom from specialisation is characteristic of all the
chapels of the Passion.
CHAPEL NO. 31. THE CROWNING WITH THORNS.
Much that was said about the preceding chapel applies also to this. It
is mentioned in the 1586 edition of Caccia as done “_sottilmente in
natural ritratto_,” and as being one of the few works that would form
part of the Palazzo di Pilato block that were as yet completed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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