Above the town of Varallo, one hundred kilometres from Milan, sits a sprawling alpine woodland interspersed with chapels in which the life and Passion of Christ are depicted in beguiling tableaux of fresco and polychrome sculpture. This Sacro Monte di Varallo, (or ‘holy mountain,’ and henceforth Sacro Monte unless specified) was established in 1486 by Fra Bernadino Caimi, a brother of the Observant Franciscan order.1 He founded the Sacro Monte as a replica of the Holy Land: a place where visitors experienced (and continue to experience) pilgrimage facilitated by compelling scenes of surrogate sanctity.
Under Caimi, the Sacro Monte presented a rich, immersive, and bodily experience of pilgrimage conceived as a faithful replica of the topography of the Christian Holy Land. After his death in 1499, the site was developed by a suite of artists, the most famous of whom was Gaudenzio Ferrari (1471-1546), whose vivid tableaux have come to define the site. The concept and design features of Ferrari’s tableaux were adopted by artists in the latter half of the cinquecento and beyond—not just at Varallo, but the subsequent Sacri Monti of the Italian Alps.2 Today the Sacro Monte remains a place of living worship: the chapels contain artwork produced across centuries from the late quattrocento to the 1920s, if not later.3 With such a long history, change has defined the site. This article therefore seeks to examine the artistic changes to the site within the context of Caimi’s early design.
This article progresses in a largely chronological order by first examining how Caimi’s early designs for the Sacro Monte presented a rich, immersive, and bodily experience of pilgrimage. Gaudenzio Ferrari’s vignettes from the early cinquecento were developed out of this context of experiential pilgrimage, which I argue by defining the visual characteristics of Ferrari’s artworks using select examples from the site’s 45 chapels. These visual characteristics include how the chapels negotiate viewer-spectator experience, illusionistic space, illusionistic narrative, and light. By observing and defining these design choices, I complicate the understanding of the immersive impetus behind the Sacro Monte’s early design.
Ferrari’s contributions to the Sacro Monte have often confounded traditional art historical inquiry. His elaborate use and combination of varied materials including painting, sculpture, polychromy, as well as more idiosyncratic materials of fabric, horsehair, and metals stemmed from a sincere pursuit of realism. However, this ostensibly contradicts the renaissance of popular imagination, a period typically defined by emerging ideas of the distinct (and opposing) capabilities of art forms, famously known as paragone (‘comparison’). I argue that Caimi and Ferrari’s early designs provide a compelling antithesis to the paragone in many ways: Ferrari’s artworks illuminate a holistic picture of renaissance artistic practice that was intended for an audience of pilgrims, rather than traditional spectators. While the latter audience implies a separation between the viewer and artwork, pilgrimage implies an intimacy, interaction, and involvement with place: something I will argue was fundamental to the Sacro Monte’s early iterations. It is critical to define this distinction because, I contend, the paragone did eventually come to define and dictate the latter artworks at the site. As the Sacro Monte developed into the cinquecento, the role of pilgrim and spectator were conflated, moving the pilgrims into a more traditional role of artistic spectator. The second half of this essay thus discusses how the Sacro Monte eventually evolved into a site that came to epitomise renaissance paragone.
Drawing largely from visual analysis of the site rather than archival or other documentary sources, the bounds of this study are necessarily limited. While the literature on the Sacro Monte has expanded in recent decades with contributions by Alessandro Nova, Allie Terry-Fritsch, Roberta Panzanelli, Sefy Hendler, and more, there has been little serious visual analysis of the art that was created there, especially insofar as it can provide evidence for the site’s shifting identity. Considering this visual approach, I am more concerned with defining artistic change than examining the broader reasons for these changes. As such, I hope this analysis will open the door to further interrogation of the complexities of the site’s history in the context of peripheral renaissance artistic practice and this period of rapid change in the history of art.
BERNADINO CAIMI’S SACRO MONTE DI VARALLO
Fra Bernadino Caimi’s Sacro Monte was created to replicate the experience of a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, facilitated by the surrounding landscape and a series of thematic chapels.4 Caimi designed the site following his own travels to Jerusalem, where he was appointed guardian to the Holy Sepulchre in 1477.5 The hill above Varallo was already a site of considerable religious veneration before Caimi identified it as a suitable place on which to build his Sacro Monte. Various accounts of Caimi’s discovery recount that the site had previously been the location of miracles, and the hill had possibly once been the site of a Celtic temple.6 However, with a hill and adjacent river, the site also shared a basic topographic similarity with Jerusalem, which almost certainly appealed to Caimi’s vision. After receiving papal approval in 1486, Caimi immediately began work on the site.7
Caimi’s desire to create Varallo’s Sacro Monte was in some way indicative of a broader contemporary zeitgeist. In 1486, the Florentine merchant Giovanni Rucellai commissioned Leon Battista Alberti to design a replica in marble of the Holy Sepulchre, complete with Medici insignia, in his local church of San Pancrazio. The Tuscan capital was itself meaningfully associated with the Holy Land: throughout the quattrocento, its elites posed it as a ‘new Jerusalem’ in its own right, as has been explored recently by Allie Terry-Fritsch.8 In addition to this visual and spatial verisimilitude, Caimi and his order of Observant Franciscans regarded pilgrimage and its associated experiences of isolation, asceticism, and physical labour as an important cornerstone of Christian devotion that allowed for uninterrupted meditation of holy mysteries. The inherent strangeness and difficulty of similar sites, such as the Franciscan sanctuary of La Verna in the Tuscan Apennines, reminded the devotee that their true home was in Heaven.9 However, the Holy City’s control by the Mamluks and later Ottomans and its geographical distance from Italy made a true pilgrimage challenging for quattrocento Italians.10 By replicating the Holy Land on a hill in the north of Italy, Bernadino Caimi provided a safe and geotropically-local simulacrum in which the physical act and experience of pilgrimage could inspire the same reflection, mediation, and devotion as a visit to the original site. This holistic experience provided an exacting alternative to witnessing the real place.
Caimi’s chapels were built on the mountain in a configuration replicating the relative locations of Holy Land sites. Franciscan friars guided pilgrims through the chapels, providing didactic explanations similar to those received on a true pilgrimage to the real Jerusalem.11 Scholars have widely explored this topomimetic approach.12 Art historian Rudolf Wittkower explores how Caimi’s design relates to a medieval desire to acquaint the West with the Holy Land via the use of copy, repetition, association, and mimesis.13 Terry-Fritsch argues that the site functioned somaesthetically: a visit was performative and experiential, and designed to ‘activate the body and mind of the pilgrim [through] the physical performance of viewing.’ 14 David Leatherbarrow’s architectural study of the Sacro Monte, meanwhile, takes a phenomenological approach. He explores the way mountains—such as the one on which the site was built—often have spiritual significance. He writes that ‘the mountain is the site of an interruption in the spiritually bankrupt expanse of profane space; it can act as a centre or point of reference that gives orientation and stability to the world.’15 According to Leatherbarrow, the act of pilgrimage up and through the mountain and experience of the chapels at the Sacro Monte functioned as a ‘theatre of memory’: it associated meaning and spiritual significance with place, aiding memorisation.16 For pilgrims, the Sacro Monte would have provided not only a vivid encounter with holy stories, but also their physical context in holy sites, revealed gradually via the pilgrim’s own progression through the mountain. The Holy Land was not so much imitated in Italy as it was made anew via the pilgrim’s physical involvement, experience, and interaction with a topographically accurate landscape.
This performative desire is evident in the chapel of the Holy Sepulchre, which was one of the first chapels built (though it is now the last stop on the modern-day pilgrim’s path through the site). Although this chapel has changed and developed over the centuries since its creation, its layout remains largely faithful to Caimi’s original design. It is notable for its simplicity, especially in comparison to the vibrant tableaux that would eventually come to characterise Varallo.17 The chapel consists of an anteroom leading to the main shrine, where a wooden sculpture of Christ is laid to rest in a glass case. Before entering the anteroom, the pilgrim encounters two relics beside the door: a stone from the real Sepulchre and Caimi’s own skull. Caimi was beatified shortly after his death, although never canonised. Nonetheless, the presence of his skull encourages veneration similar to other holy relics, a major component of pilgrimages. Passing Caimi’s skull, the pilgrim moves through the door into the anteroom, where they must crouch and crawl through another, smaller door into the chapel, making them intensely aware of their ‘physical configuration’ and relationship to the space.18As an inscription over the small door indicates, this chapel, ‘similar to the Holy Sepulchre of Jesus Christ,’ attempts to sincerely and accurately replicate Christ’s tomb.19 However, this replication is not achieved primarily via place, material, or visual convention, but by the pilgrim’s own movements— movements that replicate those required at the original site.
Outside the chapel of the Holy Sepulchre is another large stone set in a niche. Its inscription reads: ‘This stone is entirely similar to that which covered the Sepulchre of our Lord Jesus Christ in Jerusalem, found in the excavations for the first foundations of this sacred site.’20 This stone is not from Jerusalem, and was not taken from the real site in the same way as the one mere metres away beside the door to the chapel. Instead, it is ‘similar’ in shape, size and material to the one ‘which covered the Sepulchre.’ Its discovery during the construction of the first chapels at the Sacro Monte was treated like a miracle, suggesting divine influence and lending credence to the Sacro Monte’s sanctity, to Caimi’s choice of the site, and thus to any and all pilgrimage designed to take place. Consequently, like the small door, the correspondence of this stone uncovered at Varallo to one in Jerusalem allowed it to embody, as if sympathetically, the holiness of the original despite no real relationship.21 As Wittkower writes, ‘it was the evocation of reality, not literal likeness, that counted.’22 In other words, Caimi’s design for the Sacro Monte mediated realism not through an illusion of the Holy Land—something essentially deceptive or imaginary—but instead via physically corresponding places and objects, such as the arrangement of the site, the Sepulchre’s little door, the foundation stone. The mimetic certainty of the site was achieved through bodily, verifiable experience in a faithfully replicated landscape.
GAUDENZIO FERRARI’S CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE SACRO MONTE
During Caimi’s lifetime, the Sacro Monte at Varallo was dually managed by the brothers of the Observant Franciscan order and Milano Scarognini, one of Varallo’s several city fathers. The friars were largely in charge of managing the pilgrims and pilgrimage at Varallo, while Scarognini managed the physical site and its buildings.23 Scarognini remained an important administrative figure until 1517, even after Caimi’s death in 1499. Whereas the chapels created under Caimi’s supervision have largely been obscured by subsequent remodelling, those that do remain (such as that of the Holy Sepulchre) demonstrate his unique approach to displaying relics and/or approximations of relics (i.e., similar objects and spaces). However, it was likely under Scarognini’s oversight that the now characteristic tableaux, created by Gaudenzio Ferrari, were introduced.
Ferrari was born around 1471 in Valduggia, twenty kilometres from Varallo, but trained in Milan, Florence, and Rome. While the exact mechanism for his leadership of the artistic development of the Sacro Monte after 1507 are unclear, his elaborate scenes of sculpture and fresco remain the defining features of the site.24
Ferrari’s chapel of The Wise Men (ca 1525, Fig. 1) has remained largely unchanged in the centuries since its completion, and thus provides a compelling example of his artistic contributions to the Sacro Monte.25 Its topographic location derives, as a contemporary English-language sign states, ‘from the attentive imitation of the lower basilica of the Nativity of Bethlehem, in the Holy Land, where [it is] still found today.’26 This chapel contains sculptures of the three Magi, their attendants, and their horses made of terracotta in vivid polychromy. The sculptures are expressive, and their hair—made from horsehair—is thick and shining. Two of the kings have real crowns, and the boy attendant to the Magus Balthazar has real arrows in his quiver. The walls of the chapel are curved, and frescoed on them is a crowd of men and horses before a sweeping pastoral background. This frescoed landscape does not depend on one point perspective: it remains consistent regardless of the position of the viewer, a distinction that becomes important in consideration of the Sacro Monte’s latter chapels, as explored later in this article.27
The scene is highly populated, but this effect is not achieved directly by the statues. Whereas the Magi and their attendants stand fully realised in modelled terracotta, a frescoed crowd threatens to emerge from the walls. This sense of emergence is not figurative exaggeration: small details in the fresco are also moulded in terracotta, and the horse behind Balthazar surfaces halfway from the wall and rocky floor. The interdependence between the fresco and the statues continues throughout this scene, creating a dialogue between the narrative as depicted in flat and fashioned in form; a blooming and melting of the two- and three-dimensional space. Even the most independent statues, such as the three kings, rely on the complete scene. Their clothes resemble the clothes of the frescoed onlookers, and their feet and cloaks, made from terracotta, are attached to the rocky floor, making the kings appear as if they are melting into the ground.
Ferrari’s frescoed scene is opaque and luminous, in part because the artist has not used shading or shadow to increase the sense of depth, form, or artificial light. While a twenty-first century visitor’s view of the scene is aided by sensor lights, the original pilgrim’s ability to see the mystery would have relied on the natural light of the chapel’s windows, or the dancing flames of torches at night.28 Witnessing the scene under darkness would have increased the sense of tangibility—the sculptures would have appeared to move under the flickering light, and the frescoed crowd would have felt ready to emerge from the darkness with an immediacy aided by their visual proximity to the three-dimensional statues.
As the pilgrim progresses along the corridor into the chapel, they encounter the three Magi one by one, all turned to face a doorway similar to the one through which the pilgrim themselves is about to pass. As the pilgrim moves through the doorway, they encounter similarly modelled figures of Mary, Joseph, and baby Jesus in a small grotto (ca 1515, Fig. 2)—the very scene which has attracted the Magi. Passing from one tableau to the next, the pilgrim thus not only sees scenes from Christ’s life, but participates in the Nativity and the Adoration of the Magi. Rather than an illusionistic depiction of an event that occurs independently from the viewer, these tableaux make biblical stories into the experiential reality of the pilgrims themselves.
Perhaps indicative of its importance, the Nativity scene is the Sacro Monte’s oldest and simplest by far. According to a recent guide published by the site’s modern administration, it is ‘a perfect imitation of the grotto at Bethlehem,’ an effect achieved by the raw stone of the grotto, presumably replicating the natural state of a cave.29 Until recently, this chapel was decorated with grass, though this has been recently removed, demonstrating the constant state of transformation at the site and the fact that the Sacro Monte’s chapels continue to develop with the intervention of contemporary devotees.30 Nevertheless, its effect remains striking, emphasised by the pilgrims’ proximity to the figures: they are close enough to touch, but blocked by a rather excessive metal grille, as I shall discuss below. Mary and Joseph kneel above the Christ child, their hair falling over their faces. The figures depicted are proxies, but proxies made real by their hair, clothes, and—in the case of the Magi—the way they emerge from the walls to become solid. This latter detail of the sculptures’ terracotta nature is also intimately associated with God’s creation of man (‘But now, O LORD, thou art our father; we are the clay, and thou our potter; and we all are the work of thy hand’), giving them a one-to-one affinity with human beings.31 The scene refuses any desire to separate the individual elements: statues and frescoes are contextually dependent, dialogical in relation to the two- and three-dimensional space, but also to the pilgrim who witnesses and performs their own role in the scene. The scene might be described using Roberta Panzanelli’s term ‘hyperreal’: the artworks are embodied mysteries developed out of Caimi’s design for experiential pilgrimage.32
Mimesis, copies, and repetition are customary modes of representation in both Christian visual culture and art historical literature. Both Caimi and Ferrari’s desires to achieve visual and experiential ‘truth’ through replication function within wider discussions of the role art plays in the representation of divine ineffability. It is in this way that, while Ferrari’s vignettes of sculpture and fresco were not in Caimi’s plan for the site, they might be considered an extension of Caimi’s original concept. Like Caimi’s desire for experiential pilgrimage in a topographically accurate place, the little door, the Sepulchre’s stone, and so on, Ferrari’s scenes were convincingly ‘true’ in their use of real figures with real clothes and hair, made, according to the Bible, of the same material as humans: clay. The significance of the artworks’ materiality is inherent to their function in the holistic religiosity of the site. The tableaux proxies are not meant to be perceived as illusions, but as authentic and true, set in landscapes where the space depicted corresponded convincingly to the pilgrim’s experience of the mountain writ large.
The success of Ferrari’s contributions to the experience of pilgrimage can be demonstrated by the testimony offered by the first detailed guide of the Sacro Monte, Questi sono li misteri che sono sopra el Monte de Varalle, published in 1514.33 The guide is useful in reconstructing the experience a contemporary pilgrim may have had at the site, and also identifies the changes that had already occurred in the three decades since Caimi founded the Sacro Monte. The guidebook is in the form of a vernacular poem written by an anonymous pilgrim.34 The poet waxes to the reader in the second person, directing them through the site and presupposing their reactions. The account is as emotive as it is descriptive, where the sentiment in the writing encourages a heightened experiential subjectivity. ‘Here your heart will move with sighs,’ the poet writes, describing the pilgrim witnessing a chapel depicting Judas betraying Christ, ‘crying for the love of God immense.’35 The poem anticipates various emotional reactions of the pilgrim, including movements of the heart, sighs, tears, and quiet contemplation.
Much like the physical pilgrimage through the mountain, the poem progresses through the Sacro Monte with a rigour expressed by the emotions and ‘tiredness’ of the pilgrim.36 Later, the poet writes:
O pilgrim who is tired here
Come towards the middle of the mountain to rest
Having visited the sacred places
Here I call you alone to comfort you
As you will now see a spring standing here
With dreamy fir trees surrounding to give you shade
In the middle rises a vase and produces a Christ
Who instructs you to seek heaven.37
The pilgrim’s desire to rest at this spring is not only a result of the physical labour of climbing the mountain, but also the emotional toll of having witnessed Christ’s Passion in a truly tangible sense. The poem testifies that, despite the changes that had occurred beyond Caimi’s original conception, Ferrari’s vignettes—henceforth called ‘mysteries,’ following this guide—still relied on a high degree of tangible reality.
FERRARI’S MYSTERIES AND THEORIES OF ART
Ferrari’s contributions to the Sacro Monte were artworks with a highly specific function, and the sources from which they drew, both in terms of style and content, are diverse. The sculptures have been related to medieval sacre rappresentazioni (religious plays) and tableaux vivants due to their similar use of life-sized figures, genuine materials, episodic narrativisation of Christ’s life, and implicit spectator involvement.38 Indeed, the wooden sculpture of Christ in the chapel of the Holy Sepulchre—one of Varallo’s oldest elements—has articulated shoulders, suggesting that the arms would have been manipulated or swapped out according to the statue’s desired use, and pointing to a further affinity with these theatrical practices.39 Similarly, wax effigies embodied a similar kind of sympathetic substitution in their size and verisimilitude, similar to the effect of ex-votos, such as those at Santissima Annunziata in Florence.40 Indeed, the crypt (called scurolo, dark place) of the Basilica at Varallo is today adorned with ex-votos from modern pilgrims who have visited the site and received a miracle.
With the material turn in art history, examinations of the tangible qualities of such devotional polychromed works have become increasingly common in scholarship.41 Although Ferrari’s vignettes certainly draw from these earlier practices, it would be reductive to classify them as a medieval form that became increasingly anachronistic when compared to developing ideas about both religion and the visual arts. Indeed, Ferrari blended the sort of devotional practice encouraged by these modes with the artistic styles he used in the centres where he had previously worked— Florence, Rome, and Milan—and he was certainly capable of achieving the kind of Albertian and Brunelleschian epitomes of perspectival accuracy, compositional complexity, and figural ideals as desired in these centres. His paintings of the Storie della vita di Cristo on the altar of the church of Santa Maria delle Grazie at the base of the Sacro Monte include various scenes that employ inventive perspectival shifts and pictorial illusion, as do his monumental altarpieces now in the collection of the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan. Considering that this work depicts the same range of subjects with which he engaged at the Sacro Monte, they provide an interesting point of contrast for the way Ferrari adapted his practice according to the medium, discrete requirements of the location—whether church, or place of surrogate pilgrimage—and in response to the intended audience. As is manifestly clear, Ferrari was aware of wider contemporary practices but chose to create his mysteries at the Sacro Monte according to an alternative set of intentions.
The visual and material forms and approaches that shaped Ferrari’s tableaux at the Sacro Monte are therefore noteworthy as examples of works that present a contradiction to renaissance artistic theory as it is canonically understood, particularly as characterised by the paragone. It is important to define this distinction as it frames the remainder of this study in two ways. First, as an ostensible antithesis to renaissance practice, Ferrari’s designs and the rest of the Sacro Monte have traditionally been negatively received by critics and scholars; and second, the developments of the site after Ferrari, I argue, subscribed to a more typical renaissance ideal per the paragone, overwhelmingly changing the pilgrim’s experience at the site, and demonstrating, retrospectively, the strength of Ferrari’s design.
Beginning in the fifteenth century, artists and thinkers such as Leon Battista Alberti and Leonardo da Vinci came to question the discrete and opposing capabilities of artistic media, particularly discussing the means painting and sculpture offered in the pursuit of illusion, or mimesis. Known as paragone (‘comparison’), this debate came to define artistic approaches in this period as artists sought to prove that their medium was the best at evoking truth and the stirring of emotion in the viewer. These thinkers specified that painting achieved illusion through the skilful application of colour on a flat surface, projecting the three-dimensional into two dimensions.42 Leonardo’s Treatise on Painting, a series of his writings from the late quattrocento that were compiled and first printed in 1651, extolls the relative possibilities that painting offers in achieving the accurate depiction of the natural world. Rather than depict the world based on other artists’ approaches, he writes, a painter’s ‘business [is] not to represent the works of men, but those of nature.’43 Ferrari himself is thought to have worked with Bernardino Luini, a noted member of Leonardo’s circle, and he may have engaged first-hand in discussions on and applications of Leonardo’s paragone. Sculpture, on the other hand, was defined by the possibilities of the three-dimensional form. Attributed to the taste for antiquity, marble and bronze could be transformed by a virtuosic sculptor to achieve mimesis through three-dimensionality, texture, and changes in light. As Leatrice Mendelsohn writes, ‘The search for il vero replaced the desire for verisimilitude.’ That is, ‘truth’ was achieved not via rudimentary or elemental similarity—the one-to-one correspondence of an artwork to its ‘true’ counterpart—but instead by the artist’s ability to surpass the confines of materiality to achieve a more comprehensive or perfect illusion.44
As paragone debates hinged on the unique capabilities of each medium, they presupposed the complete divorce of the two. Ferrari’s works entirely eschew this stipulation. Aside from combining sculpture and painting, they also include real hair, metals, and plastered fabric, as can be seen in the tableaux described above. They therefore approach mimesis not through the artist’s skill in manipulating a single medium but through actual transposing of material as well as form. Moreover, the mimesis of the work was not based on purely appearance, but, as I have discussed, by the potential for the pilgrim to verify the experience of the scenes by observing details such clothes and hair through interactions with light and space and authenticating the experience by their own involvement in journeying through the scenes.
As the parallels to the aforementioned sacre rappresentazioni and ex-votos demonstrate, interactive forms of renaissance artistic material and visual culture were not defined or limited by the paragone, which only developed after the proliferation of these forms. Nevertheless, the modern-day reception of the Sacro Monte has suffered as a result of this preconception. Paragone discussions were a largely intellectual exercise, even if they did come to affect the works of well-known artists such as Michelangelo. Located at a pilgrimage site and meant for religious interactions, Ferrari’s sculptures draw from a different visual tradition. He did not intend to provide his audience with an artistic intellectual exercise, but with a religious one. His contributions to the Sacro Monte must therefore be considered holistically, within a broader appraisal of the period that also includes ephemera such as processions, feasts, music, ritual, and performance, as Terry-Fritsch has suggested.45 These aspects of contemporary visual and religious culture do not fit within canonical conceptions of the renaissance as put forth by nineteenth-century scholars who approached the Sacro Monte at Varallo. German art historian Albert von Zahn and National Gallery of London director Sir Charles Eastlake, for example, condemned the ‘base’ materials of wood, terracotta, and polychromy, so far removed from aesthetic preferences of academic art history and the ‘transcendental achievements’ of the renaissance masters.46 Even Samuel Butler, whose enthusiastic writing on the Sacro Monte in the nineteenth century was among the first scholarly texts to discuss the site, qualified his praise within an interest for the peculiar, ‘primitive,’ and manifestly anti-academic nature of the works.47 In each of these cases, the artistic or intellectual intentions with which these men approached the site were not the same ones that inspired religious works such as the Sacro Monte. Indeed, the Sacro Monte under Ferrari did not pursue artistic illusion as defined by contemporary ideas of paragone. In every sense, from the topographic layout of the early site to the specific tangibility of Ferrari’s sculptures, the early figures in the site’s history chose not to surpass the confines of their materials in pursuit of higher illusion, but rather insisted upon the immediate reality. The early Sacro Monte and the paragone thus ran along two opposing lines of intention: while the paragone sought il vero (per Mendelsohn) by appealing to a higher plain of mimesis, Ferrari’s vignettes achieved il vero not via illusion, but via witness and tangibility: truth complete.
THE SACRO MONTE DI VARALLO AND PARAGONE POST FERRARI
In late 1507, the Milanese ambassador to France, Girolamo Morone, visited Varallo and wrote a letter to his friend, poet Lancino Curzio, that provides a remarkable account of the site’s value to a contemporary audience. ‘The very simplicity of the craft and the skill-less architecture of the natural site surpasses all antiquity,’ he wrote.48 Morone was certainly well acquainted with contemporary artistic taste: he was a humanist who modelled himself on Virgil, and was probably personally acquainted with Leonardo.49 As Alessandro Nova writes, the fact that Morone praised the modest, provincial Sacro Monte above the ‘ancients’ speaks volumes to the profound and guileless devotion that the site inspired, even to a cinquecento contemporary of metropolitan taste.50 But it was precisely the unadorned and meditative state of the Sacro Monte that inspired Morone’s praise. Perhaps the most important takeaway from his letter is his description of the site’s simplicity, its so-called ‘skill-less’ architecture (‘et sine arte structura’). It was within this context of simplicity that Ferrari constructed his chapels less than ten years later, and it contrasts pointedly with the huge changes that came to affect the Sacro Monte in the succeeding years.
Although a detailed discussion of the Counter Reformation’s effects on the post-Ferrari Sacro Monte is outside the scope of this study, we must acknowledge that the post-Reformation chapels demonstrate a wholly different approach to Ferrari and Caimi’s design. Around 1565, Perugian architect Galeazzo Alessi (1512 –1572) set out elaborate plans to redesign the Sacro Monte di Varallo, as described in his Libro dei Misteri. In this treatise, he sought to build many more chapels on the mountain, illustrating all the episodes in Christ’s life via Ferrari-like tableaux, and radically redesign the topography of the site.51 For example, Alessi introduced screens separating the pilgrim from the scene. Today, the pilgrim must approach the screen, often kneel, and place their head through a small gap to witness the mystery therein (Fig. 3). Art historian Margaret Bell astutely links these screens, and the pilgrim’s relationship to them, to the Council of Trent’s doctrine of ‘due honour and veneration.’52 By kneeling, the pilgrim treats the religious figures after whom the sculptures are modelled with the respect they deserve.
Sefy Hendler has written the most substantial discussion of the later developments at the Sacro Monte, especially in how they relate to the paragone.53 To Hendler, the screens fundamentally changed pilgrims’ relationship with the mysteries, moving the site from one of witness and experience to one with a more traditional viewer-spectator relationship. With the inclusion of the screens, the pilgrim’s view of the scene was mediated by a set distance and point of view, thus allowing (or presupposing) a reading of the site within the bounds of the paragone.54 While important, this assessment follows the tendency in the modern literature on the Sacro Monte to separate Caimi’s and Ferrari’s works from those of the later period. Such an approach rejects the continuous development of this devotional site over the centuries. Moreover, it implies that Caimi and Ferrari had the exact same vision, which did not include mediation between pilgrims and tableaux.
Whereas the separation between pilgrim and tableaux was defined more starkly after the Council of Trent, there was indeed some aspect of mediation even in the early days of the Sacro Monte. As noted above, under Caimi, Franciscan friars acted as guides for early pilgrims at the Sacro Monte, and would have mediated or even ‘choreographed’ their interactions with the site since the beginning.55 Furthermore, Hendler’s article infers a great deal from the pilgrim’s original ability to mingle amongst the statues prior to the introduction of the screens, demonstrated in a graffito from 21 August 1521.56 But as Symcox explores, the pilgrims’ movements were likely quite restricted, and crowds of statues were tightly packed and on raised, rocky shelves, meaning that pilgrims could not freely mingle with them as one might imagine.57 Thus, while Ferrari’s mysteries indeed allowed for a level of veracity in their use of life-sized figures, real clothes, and physical space, their power came from the cumulative effect of structural, visual, experiential stimuli and the unveiling of Christ’s story via the pilgrims’ own involvement. While their interaction was not perhaps as verisimilar as being, for example, among the crowd of onlookers of Christ’s crucifixion, pilgrims could participate through a meditative experience that drew from established traditions. Mediation on holy mysteries was, and remains, a touchstone of Christian devotional practice. The Rosary prayers of the Sorrowful Mysteries—the Agony in the Garden, the Scourging at the Pillar, the Crowning with Thorns, the Carrying of the Cross, and the Crucifixion—guide the devotee (in prayer) through Christ’s passion, as might occur (in practice) via pilgrimage. That is to say, such elements of the real in Ferrari’s chapels were mediated through meditative experience, as is implied by the inherent ineffability by the term ‘mystery,’ or demonstrated by the 1514 guide: ‘Here your heart will move with sighs, crying for the love of God immense.’58
The most fundamental change to the Sacro Monte post Ferrari, I argue, is instead exemplified in the relationship between the frescoes, sculptures, and the pilgrim’s implied perception. After Ferrari, artists began to move away from holistic vignettes intended to facilitate meditative experience for the mind and body of the pilgrim, and instead constructed scenes intent on creating illusions of narrative and—as becomes important to the remainder of this discussion—space, for an implied artistic audience. For example, the chapel depicting Jesus before Pilate’s Court (now Chapel 27), begun in the early 1600s and executed by artists Giovanni and Antonio ‘il Tanzio’ d’Enrico (ca 1600, Fig. 4), clearly demonstrates a change in the ethos of the site, as manifest in the art that was created.59 This chapel is superficially similar to several of Ferrari’s in that it contains polychromed sculptures and frescoed walls. For example, a scribe near the screen through which the pilgrim looks holds a real feathered quill, and there are real architectural features, such as the dais on which Pilate stands.
Jesus, with his hands and neck tied with rope and his hair only partially obscuring his downturned face, is lamenting, but peaceful. However, despite these tangible details, the frescoed walls seek to create a vast and expansive illusory space, rather than one that situates the scene within the mountain corresponding to the actual location. The chapel recedes with dramatic trompe l’oeil arches, an obelisk, and buildings overgrown with baroque decay. This small chapel is perhaps only three metres deep, but it continues indefinitely with none of the ‘skill-less architecture’ per Morone’s 1507 letter. Such a perspectival ensemble relies on both the paragone stressing that the painting excellently represents a theoretical space, and the pilgrim remaining in statis in a specific point at which the perspective resolves.
In the nearby chapel depicting the Crowning of Jesus with Thorns (ca 1600, modern Chapel 31, Fig. 5), the small room is made larger by elaborate illusionistic space extending far beyond the confines of the room. In this chapel, a statue of Jesus is taunted by statues of soldiers. On a wall, a frescoed Jesus is also taunted, spat at, and presented with his body covered in sores. In the same chapel, Jesus and his captors appear twice, thus destroying the narrative device, so to speak, of religious proxies set within a singular, witnessable scene. This chapel, much like Jesus before Pilate’s Court, is no longer a scene mere metres away from the pilgrim, but an illusion requiring the separation of the viewer from the work of art.
The style and content of the frescoed background stresses this by not only creating an illusion of space but also evoking a separate time with particular visual forms. Pilate is flanked by false columns and niches filled with all’antica paintings of monochrome sculptures (see Fig. 4). Like the use of one point perspective to increase the sense of illusionistic depth, the painted depictions of monochrome sculptures are particularly noteworthy as they are quite self-consciously juxtaposed with the three- dimensional polychromy in the scene. As monochrome sculptures resembling Greek and Roman statues, these painted sculptures clearly speak to the contemporary interest in classical and Hellenistic finds. Moreover, unlike Ferrari’s earlier chapels, where the frescoes were intentionally opaque and universally lit to account for both changing light conditions and the pilgrim’s movement through and changing perspective on the scene, these painted statues are given form and depth through the use of false, painted shadow in the niches in which they sit. Such false shadow suggests an unseen, unreal, miraculous light that is beyond the experience of the pilgrim: the viewer no longer has the same experience as the pilgrims, but only observes it from afar. These monochrome statues might feasibly have been included in order to situate the proxy statues within a more ‘realistic’ scene resplendent with ornate decoration befitting Pilate’s court. However, it is impossible to overlook the contrast between the painted-yet-monochrome, and polychrome-yet-sculptural statues in this chapel when considering the different artistic approaches used in this site. As stated above, whereas Ferrari’s mysteries achieved an alternative to renaissance paragone, these painted sculptures seem to speak to a desire from the artists to acknowledge the paragone directly: fashioned in two-dimensional fresco, along with adding contextual ornament to the scene, they are the epitome of paragone ideals. Painted monochrome sculptures in this fashion are not the only trompe l’oeil works present in the later chapels at the Sacro Monte. Many later chapels include the kind of elaborate illusionistic space as seen in Jesus before Pilate’s Court, repeating narrative as per the Crowning of Jesus with Thorns, or false niches, rooms, and doors.
It is important to add that these chapels are no less effective in arousing an emotional reaction or piety from the viewer. In fact, to a modern viewer (as Leatherbarrow says, with the ‘eye trained in perspective’), these chapels are often more impressive.60 However the mysteries insist not on the real moment and real space as experienced by the pilgrim, but present scenes of ornate and expansive narrative as implied by the infinite space of the elaborate baroque use of perspective. Ferrari’s scenes did not rely on artistic illusion in the same way, even when he painted landscape on a wall. His scenes did not deny the immediacy of the room and the shared pilgrim-to-mystery dialogue created therein. While he could not actually collapse the walls to reveal true landscape, he came as close to doing so by frescoing a landscape which corresponded to that with which the pilgrim would be familiar thanks to their journey up (and progression through) the mountain. Architectural features in the chapels increased this correspondence. Two small windows in Ferrari’s most famous contribution to the site—the Crucifixion—contain a view of the valley, creating a ‘visual continuity between painted and physical reality.’61 In all Ferrari’s extant chapels, his frescoed landscapes encompass the length of the walls. This is readily observed in the chapel of the Crucifixion. In this scene, the large room is decorated floor to ceiling, the fresco overwhelming the space (Fig. 6 and Fig. 7). Here, the artist eschews the need for perspective by filling the foreground with people, leaving only hills and the tops of trees exposed. The shadowless luminosity of Ferrari’s frescoes is testament to their reliance on real, rather than illusionistic, light. Thus, while the desire for illusion through the paragone would be ‘concealing [the] true nature’ of the support (here, wall), Ferrari instead insisted upon the immediate reality of the mystery in the context of a real mountain, above a real town.62 Alessi, on the other hand, transformed the ‘topographical schema [into] a historia sacra, a comprehensive historical-cum-theological narrative with a clear didactic purpose,’ as Symcox writes.63 This illusionistic conceit only presents itself post Ferrari, and this change demonstrates the shifting artistic priorities present at the Sacro Monte. The site moved from one of so-called ‘skill-less’ pilgrim-enacted experience, to one filled with expansive, elaborate, and overwhelmingly illusionistic works representing biblical scenes.
CONCLUSION
In 2003, the Sacro Monte di Varallo, along with the eight other Sacri Monti of northern Italy, became UNESCO World Heritage Sites.64 The UNESCO recognition was awarded due to the ‘remarkable artistic heritage’ of the Sacri Monti and how they ‘represent the successful integration of architecture and fine art into a landscape of great beauty for spiritual reasons at a critical period in the history of the Roman Catholic Church.’65 These qualities of artistic, topographic, and architectural synergy are Caimi and Ferrari’s legacy as manifest at the Sacro Monte.
Ferrari’s mysteries should be understood not as a collection of discrete artistic elements. They are not simply statues placed carefully within rooms decorated with fresco, nor fresco embellishing statues, but an altogether different kind of art founded on a desire for embodied pilgrimage. Elaborating on the design of the founder Caimi, Ferrari sought to create a site of viewer participation facilitated by the surrogates of people, places, and events of the time of Christ. Each chapel serves the act of pilgrimage by making tangible the characters and events in Christ’s story, and by guiding the pilgrim though the unveiling of these events via the experience of the site as a whole. This art is markedly antithetical to the intellectual debate embodied in the renaissanceparagone. Ferrari’s ensembles combined not only painting and sculpture but also other materials including real hair and clothes and, in so doing, looked to achieve embodied truth, rather than illusion, for visiting pilgrims. The emerging preferences for the illusionistic capabilities of art as defined by the paragone were only enacted at the Sacro Monte after Ferrari. While latter contributions are similar in that they replicate the basic elemental qualities of Ferrari’s mysteries, in their desire to illustrate Christ’s Passion, they reflexively demonstrate the originality and strength of Ferrari’s holistic design. The UNESCO recognition alludes to this originality. It does not, however, differentiate between the early and later Sacro Monte: to do so for the sake of nomenclature would be unnecessary. The living state of worship at the Sacro Monte is the value of the site. Its constant change provides the juxtaposition required to appreciate the early designs.
This all cumulates in the last of the narrative chapels at the Sacro Monte: Jesus placed in the Shroud, frescoed in the nineteenth century (Fig. 8).66 The statues are painted in various colours, but gone are the real details of horsehair and clothing. The chapel itself is small, but the frescoed background is a sweeping, sublime landscape typical of the romantic period, depicting the hill of Calvary and Jerusalem below. Despite the similarity to Ferrari’s design, the setting is no longer Varallo, pilgrimage has no longer been made anew in the Alps.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thank you to Dr Irene Brooke for her invaluable comments on this essay when it was first submitted for marking, and her encouragement of my pursuit of this topic. My many thanks also go to Emma Iadanza for her drive, passion, praise, and many (many!) edits during the publication process. Finally, thank you to Anna Suigo and her family who very graciously took me into the mountains to Varallo over the 2023 Christmas break. Without their generosity I would not have been able to visit the remote Sacro Monte and study this intriguing aspect of the Italian renaissance.
Citations
[1] Caimi obtained papal approval for the Sacro Monte di Varallo in December 1486 from Pope Innocent VIII. Geoffrey Symcox, Jerusalem in the Alps: The Sacro Monte of Varallo and the Sanctuaries of North-Western Italy (Turnhout: Brepols, 2019), 48.
[2] The nine Sacri Monti of Italy are in the towns of Varallo, Crea, Orta, Varese, Oropa, Ossuccio, Ghiffa, Domodossola, and Valperga. Varallo is the oldest.
[3] Chapel 4, Joseph’s Dream, was ‘decorated’ in 1927. That is to say, it was frescoed and adorned with flowers and baskets, as seen in a photo published in Casimiro Debiaggi, The Sacro Monte of Varallo, (Varallo Sesia: Amministrazione Vescorte del Sacro Monte di Varallo, n.d.), 15. As of December 2023 these flowers and baskets are no longer present.
[4] This aspect of the Sacro Monte is by far that which is explored most in the literature on the site. See Elena De Filippis, Sacro Monte of Varallo (Borgosesia: Tipolitografia di Borgosesia, 2009); Sefy Hendler, ‘Le déclin du Paragone: les Sacri Monti, et le Paragone’ in La Guerre des Arts: le Paragone peinture-sculpture en Italie XVe-XVIIe siècle, LermArte 11 (Roma: L’Erma di Bretschneider, 2013), 354-67; David Leatherbarrow, ‘The Image and Its Setting: A Study of the Sacro Monte at Varallo,’ RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, 14 (1987): 107-22; Allie Terry-Fritsch, ‘Performing the Renaissance Body and Mind: Somaesthetic Style and Devotional Practice at the Sacro Monte di Varallo,’ Open Arts Journal, 4 (2015): 111-32.
[5] Symcox, Jerusalem in the Alps, 44. Caimi received the appointment from his superiors in the order of Observant Franciscans.
[6] Symcox, Jerusalem in the Alps, 48.
[7] Symcox, Jerusalem in the Alps, 48.
[8] Terry-Fritsch has published extensively in this area, including the 2020 volume Somaesthetic Experience and the Medici Viewer: Art and Political Persuasion in Renaissance Florence, 1459-1580 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020).
[9] For the Christian tradition of pilgrimage see Leatherbarrow, ‘The Image and Its Setting,’ 108.
[10] Rudolf Wittkower, ‘“Sacri Monti” in the Italian Alps,’ in Idea and Image: Studies in the Italian Renaissance, The Collected Essays of Rudolf Wittkower (London: Thames and Hudson, 1978), 175.
[11] Terry-Fritsch, ‘Performing the Renaissance Body and Mind,’ 119.
[12] ‘Topomimesis’ is explored in Symcox, Jerusalem in the Alps, 59.
[13] Wittkower, ‘“Sacri Monti” in the Italian Alps,’ 175.
[14] Terry-Fritsch, ‘Performing the Renaissance Body and Mind,’ 113.
[15] Leatherbarrow, ‘The Image and Its Setting,’ 117.
[16] Leatherbarrow, ‘The Image and Its Setting,’ 117.
[17] Debiaggi, The Sacro Monte of Varallo, 55.
[18] Terry-Fritsch, ‘Performing the Renaissance Body and Mind,’ 117.
[19] ‘SIMILE È IL S[AN]TO SEPVLCRO DE YV XPO [IEHSUS CHRISTUS]’ (‘[This chapel] is similar to the Holy Sepulchre of Jesus Christ.’)
[20] ‘Questa pietra è in tutto simile a quella con la quale fù coperto il Sepolcro del nostro Signor Gesù Cristo in Gerusalemme trovata nello scavare i primi fondamenti di questo sacro luogo.’ Author’s translation.
[21] ‘Sympathetic magic’ in the context of early modern devotion has been increasingly explored with the material turn in art history. See Suzanna Ivanič, Mary Laven, and Andrew Morrall, ‘Introduction,”’ in Religious Materiality in the Early Modern World (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019), 19.
[22] Wittkower, ‘“Sacri Monti” in the Italian Alps,’ 178.
[23] Symcox, Jerusalem in the Alps, 65.
[24] Ferrari was born in Valduggia (part of the Val Sesia) between 1475 and 1480, and possibly worked at the Sacro Monte as an assistant to the Milanese artist Stefano Scotto in the last decade of the quattrocento before he himself lead the artistic developments at the site after 1507. Symcox, Jerusalem in the Alps, 76-80.
[25] Debiaggi, The Sacro Monte of Varallo, 16.
[26] Bethlehem Complex [English-language signage]. Sacro Monte di Varallo, Varallo Sesia, Piedmont, Italy. Viewed December 29th 2023. Author’s italicisation.
[27] The corridor through which the pilgrim today moves was added in ca 1614, but originally they would have walked through the chapel itself. Date sourced from De Filippis, Sacro Monte of Varallo, 49.
[28] Terry-Fritsch, ‘Performing the Renaissance Body and Mind,’ 125.
[29] Debiaggi, The Sacro Monte of Varallo, 21.
[30] A recent image of the Chapel of the Nativity is provided in Debiaggi, The Sacro Monte of Varallo, 17. It is unclear when this image was taken, or when the chapel was changed. However considering that the image was clearly taken with a digital camera, it was presumably within the last 20 years.
[31] Isaiah 64:8 (King James Bible).
[32] Roberta Panzanelli, ‘Pilgrimage in Hyperreality: Images and Imagination in the Early Phase of the “New Jerusalem” at Varallo (1486-1530),’ (PhD diss., UCLA, 1999).
[33] Anonymous, Questi sono li misteri che sono sopra el Monte de Varalle, in Una ‘guida’ poetica del 1514, ed. Stefania Stefani Perrone (Borgosesia: Società per la Conservazione delle Opere d’Arte e dei Monumenti in Valsesia, 1987).
[34] Symcox writes that while the author is anonymous, it was likely written by one of the Franciscan brothers who directed pilgrims through the site—hence the sense of this account being a guidebook prototype. See Symcox, Jerusalem in the Alps, 62.
[35] ‘Qua di suspiri el core mouerete […] Piangendo per amor de dio imenso’ See Capitulo XI of Anonymous, Questi sono li misteri, 24.
[36] Leatherbarrow, ‘The Image and Its Setting,’ 109.
[37] ‘O pelegrin che sei qua affatichato / Vien verso mezo monte a riposarte / Auendo i lochi sancti visitator / Quiui te inuoco sol per consolarte / Che un fonte or vederai quiui parato / Con vaghi abeti hatorno adumbrarte / In mezo un vaso sorge e spora un Christo / El qual te inuoca a far del ciel aquisto.’ Capitulo XLIII of Anonymous, Questi sono li misteri, 41.
[38] Roberta G. Panzanelli, ‘It’s about Time. Gaudenzio’s bel composto at Varallo,’ California Italian Studies 6, no. 2 (2016), 13. See also Symcox, Jerusalem in the Alps, 59.
[39] Terry-Fritsch, ‘Performing the Renaissance Body and Mind,’ 128.
[40] Symcox, Jerusalem in the Alps, 56.
[41] Ivanič et al., “Introduction,” 19.
[42] See Frank Fehrenbach, ‘Coming Alive: Some Remarks on the Rise of “Monochrome” Sculpture in the Renaissance,’ Source: Notes in the History of Art 30, no. 3 (2011): 50.
[43] Leonardo da Vinci, A treatise on painting, by Leonardo da Vinci. (London: I. and J. Taylor, 1796), 37.
[44] Leatrice Mendelsohn, Paragoni: Benedetto Varchi’s ‘Due Lezzioni’ and Cinquecento Art Theory, Studies in Fine Arts: Art Theory 6 (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1982), 55.
[45] See Terry-Fritsch Somaesthetic Experience and the Medici Viewer, passim.
[46] Symcox, Jerusalem in the Alps, 5.
[47] For an extensive discussion of Butler, and the most extensive study of the art historical reception of the Sacro Monte di Varallo, see Symcox, Jerusalem in the Alps, 4. Butler’s writings, Alps and Sanctuaries of Peidmont and The Canton Ticino, and Ex Voto: An Account of the Sacro Monte or New Jerusalem at Varallo-Sesia were published in 1881 and 1888 respectively.
[48] ‘Ipsa fabricae simplicitas et sine arte structura ingenuusque situs omnem superant antiquitatem.’ Girolamo Morone, ‘LXV: Lancino Curtio (1507, 29 Settembre)’ in Lettere ed orazioni latine, ed. D. Promis and G. Müller (Torino: Stamperia Reale, 1863), 149. Translation courtesy of Annabel Jane Wharton, Selling Jerusalem: Relics, Replicas, Theme Parks (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 96 and Emma Iadanza.
[49] Alessandro Nova, ‘“Popular” Art in Renaissance Italy: Early Response to the Holy Mountain at Varallo,’ in Reframing the Renaissance: Visual Culture in Europe and Latin America 1450-1650, ed. Claire Farago (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995), 124.
[50] Nova, ‘“Popular” Art in Renaissance Italy,’ 124.
[51] De Filippis, Sacro Monte of Varallo, 25.
[52] Quoting the 1563 Council of Trent in Margaret F. Bell, ‘Image as Relic: Bodily Vision and the Reconstitution of Viewer/Image Relationships at the Sacro Monte di Varallo,’ California Italian Studies 5, no. 1 (2014): 321.
[53] See Hendler, ‘Les Sacri Monti, et le Paragone,’ 354-367. Panzanelli, ‘It’s about Time’ also explores these ideas, although to a lesser extent.
[54] ‘Sa conception des ‘vitraite’ […] redéfinit la place des pèlerins dans l’espace.’ Hendler, ‘Les Sacri Monti, et le Paragone,’ 364. See also Bell, ‘Image as Relic.’
[55] Terry-Fritsch, ‘Performing the Renaissance Body and Mind,’ 120.
[56] Hendler, ‘Les Sacri Monti, et le Paragone,’ 362.
[57] Symcox, Jerusalem in the Alps, 82.
[58] ‘Qua di suspiri el core mouerete […] Piangendo per amor de dio imenso.’ See Capitulo XI of Anonymous, Questi sono li misteri, 24.
[59] Dates and artist details from Debiaggi, The Sacro Monte of Varallo, 38.
[60] Leatherbarrow, ‘The Image and Its Setting,’ 122.
[61] Panzanelli, ‘It’s about Time,’ 25.
[62] Quote from Fehrenbach, ‘Coming Alive,’ 50.
[63] Symcox, Jerusalem in the Alps, 105.
[64] UNESCO World Heritage Centre, ‘Sacri Monti of Piedmont and Lombardy,’ UNESCO World Heritage Centre, [web].
[65] UNESCO, ‘Sacri Monti of Piedmont and Lombardy.’
[66] Debiaggi, The Sacro Monte of Varallo, 53.