THE RIVER Sesia carves a circuitous course to the south-east from the flank of the Monte Rosa. Varallo has long been the principal town of the Valsesia. It is best approached by the old road from the south, which passes the still isolated porticoed Cappella della Madonna di Loreto, with a beautiful external frescoed lunette of the Adoration by Gaudenzio Ferrari. High above the main piazza, from which it is approached by a picturesque ramp, is the Collegiata di San Gaudenzio, with a notable polyptych of about 1516–20 by Gaudenzio. Below are the narrow curving streets of the ancient town, whose charm has not been reduced by recent prosperity. A short, but by no means direct, walk leads to the Pinacoteca with half a dozen pictures, including two of David with the head of Goliath, by the most forceful artist of Counter-Reformation Piedmont, Tanzio da Varallo. The impact of these masterpieces is diminished by an irritatingly theatrical display, from which the museum’s exemplary collection of maiolica is happily spared.
A few dozen metres beyond the Pinacoteca, you reach the limits of the original conurbation. To the left is the house identified as that of Gaudenzio, who is the subject of a nearby statue of 1874 by another local artist, Pietro della Vedova. This is eloquent of the high place that the greatest master of the High Renaissance in Piedmont held for the generation of Giovanni Morelli and Sir Charles Eastlake. Behind the statue is the great Renaissance conventual church of Santa Maria delle Grazie. The nave is dominated by the arcaded west wall with Gaudenzio’s prodigious frescoes of the life and Passion of Christ. Executed in 1513, the series evinces that narrative instinct and sense of objective realism for which Gaudenzio was so remarkable: he leaves us in no doubt that the Bad Thief was bad and the Good Thief repentant. The frescoes, which are enriched by sections of stucco, demand patience and field glasses, and are best seen without artificial light on a clear morning when Gaudenzio’s disciplined use of colour tells to particular effect.
Santa Maria delle Grazie was founded by Bernardino Caimi, as was the Sacro Monte for which most visitors come to Varallo. Caimi returned from the Holy Land in 1481 and determined to replicate the pilgrimage route of Jerusalem. After his death in 1499 impetus was lost, but in 1517 the project was revived. Gaudenzio understood exactly what was required of him, but once again momentum faltered. After another long pause, the Sacro Monte found in 1565 a determined advocate in the Archbishop of Milan, Carlo Borromeo; and a series of additional chapels were designed by one of the most consistently rewarding Italian architects of the period, Galeazzo Alessi, who had been brought up in Perugia in the shadow of Perugino and Raphael but is perhaps best known for his Genoese palazzi. Momentum was maintained, and major Lombard and Piedmontese painters and sculptors were called in. The high bluff of the Sacro Monte hangs over the town. Although you can drive and there is a funicular, it is best to walk up the steep path above Santa Maria delle Grazie. The last two bends are marked by chapels and the pilgrim then reaches the Sacro Monte.
Sacro Monte, Chapel V: Gaudenzio Ferrari, Adoration of the Magi (detail).
The first chapel – of 1565–6 – looms beyond the gateway: Alessi at his most simply classical. The Fall of Man is represented. The statues in painted terracotta are by local masters, while Alessi enlisted his Perugian near contemporary, Orazio Alfani, for the murals; he did not repeat the mistake. The pilgrim to this New Jerusalem follows a fixed labyrinthine route, turning and circling up the wooded hillside. The cycle continues with the Annunciation. Gaudenzio is first encountered in Chapel V, with the story of the Magi, his statues perfectly complemented by his frescoes. In Chapel VI, Gaudenzio’s Nativity is particularly inventive: the Virgin rests the Child on an ostensibly real manger. Prodigious in a wholly different way, although far less moving, is the high drama of Chapel XI, the Massacre of the Innocents, with no fewer than ninety-five statues, including the slaughtered children’s toys, and fluent frescoes by Giovanni Battista and Giovanni Mauro della Rovere.
The chapels are as ingenious architecturally as in their decoration; Chapels XXXIII–V are gathered round what is in effect a piazza, with astounding views up the narrow valley of the Sesia as it carves its course downwards from the west. Many of the finest sculptures in the higher chapels are by Tanzio’s brother, Giovanni d’Enrico, who shared his sense of realism and worked particularly happily in conjunction with one of the greatest Milanese masters of the late sixteenth century, Morazzone. Most extraordinary of all is Chapel XXXVII, dedicated to the Crucifixion, for which Gaudenzio took an earlier wooden statue of Christ as the centrepiece of a seamless combination of sculptures and murals that must have seemed startlingly original when it was created and has not lost its capacity to move. In the presence of such a masterpiece, one understands why San Carlo Borromeo saw the Sacro Monte as a powerful instrument of the Counter-Reformation. For the life of Christ is told in a language that must have been instantly comprehensible to the pilgrim. One hopes that most of those who make the pilgrimage today are oblivious to the spurious classicism of the late nineteenth-century façade of the basilica where their circuit ends.
The Sacro Monte set the precedent for those at Varese and Orta. With its sequence of classical chapels, this surely was also among the ancestors of the great gardens of eighteenth-century England and elsewhere, with their defined circuits of temples and other buildings. And in the nineteenth century it struck a strong chord with such visitors as the Revd S.W. King, whose description in The Italian Valleys of the Pennine Alps of 1858 could hardly be surpassed, and Samuel Butler, whose Ex Voto of 1888 is understandably still in print.
Sant’Andrea, the tower from the cloister.
