Complete works of samuel.., p.297
Complete Works of Samuel Butler, page 297
Their object, or the object of those who commissioned them, was to bring the scene with which they were engaged home to the spectator in all its fulness, short of actual life and motion; but in this “short of actual life and motion” what a cutting-out of the part of Hamlet is there not involved. We can spare a good deal of Hamlet; but if the part is totally excised, — even though the Hamlet be Mr. Irving himself, — the play must suffer. To try to represent action without the immediate changes of position and expression which are its most essential features, seems like courting defeat, and to a certain extent defeat does invariably follow the attempt to treat very violent rapid action except loosely and sketchily. Violent action carried to high degree of finish is hardly ever successful in painting or sculpture; a crowd done in Michael Angelo’s Medici chapel manner must inevitably fail, and if a crowd is to be treated in sculpture at all, Tabachetti’s broad, large-brushed, and somewhat sketchy treatment is the one most to be preferred. In spite, however, of the incomparable success of Tabachetti’s work, I am tempted to question whether quiet and reposeful sculpture is not always most permanently pleasing, as not involving so peremptory a demand for the change that cannot, of course, ensue. At any rate, as one lie generally leads to others, so with the attempt to render action without action’s most essential characteristic, there is a departure from realism which involves a host of other departures if the error is to be distributed so as to avoid offence. In other words, convention, or a composition between artist and spectator, whereby, in view of admitted bankruptcy and failure of possible payment in full, a less thing shall be taken as a greater, has superseded nature at a very early point in the proceedings.
Nevertheless, within the limits of the composition we expect to be paid in full; whatever the dividend is we are to have all of it, and we sometimes take a different view of the terms of the settlement to that taken by those with whom we are dealing. It being admitted that the object of the Sacro Monte workmen was to bring a scene home to the spectator in all possible fulness, we expect to have a quotum of our own ideas of the scene, whatever they may be, put before us, and are more or less offended when we find a composition which we consider to be unreal even within its own covenanted limitations. The fault, however, rests greatly with ourselves, in forgetting that it must be the ideal of medieval Italians and not our own that we should look for, and that their ideas concerning the chief actors in the sacred dramas were not as ours are. For us, the οἵοι νὺν βρότοι εἴσι view of history has been gathered to its fathers, and οἵοι δὴ βρότοι ἤσαν is reigning in its stead. We believe that we have advanced upon, not degenerated from our ancestors, except here and there as by way of back eddy, but Italians in the Middle Ages may be excused for having been overawed by the remains of the old splendour which met them everywhere; and even if this had not been so, to children and half-educated people that which happened long ago is always grander and larger than any like thing that happened recently. As regards the sacred dramas this grandioseness of conception extended even to the villains of the piece, who must be greater, more muscular, thorough-going, unredeemed villains than any now existing. The realism which would have proved so touching and grateful now — for we should have found it turned into idealism through the impress of that seal which it is time’s glory to set upon aged things — would in the Middle Ages have seemed as unworthy, and as much below the dignity of the subject as modern treatment of the same subjects, with modern costumes, would seem to ourselves.
Ages thwart and play at cross purposes with one another, as parents do with children; and our forefathers have been at infinite trouble and expense to give us what we do not want, and have withheld what they might have given with very little trouble, and we should have held as priceless. We cannot help it; it always has been and always will be so. Omne ignotum pro magnifico is a condition of existence or at any rate of progress, and the unknown of the past takes a splendour reflected from that of the future. The artists and public of the sixteenth century could no more find what they deemed a worthy ideal in their own familiar, and as it seemed to them prosaic age than we in ours, and every age must make its art work to its own liking and not to that of other people. Caimi was thinking mainly of his own generation; he could not wait a couple of hundred years or so till the work should become touching and quaint through age; he wanted it to be effective then and there, which if the Apostles were shown as mere common peasants and fishermen of the then present day, it would not and could not be — not at any rate with the pit, and it was to the pit as well as to the boxes that these pieces were being played. Let the ablest sculptors of the present time be asked to treat sacred subjects as was attempted at Varallo, with the condition that they must keep closely to the costume of to-day, and they would probably one and all of them decline the task. We know very well that, laugh at it as we may, our costume will three hundred years hence be as interesting as that of any other age, but that is not to the point: it has got to be effective now, whereas our familiarity with it has bred contempt.
In the earlier ages both of painting and sculpture these considerations, obvious as they are, were not taken into account. The first artists during the medieval revival of art rose as little to theory as children do. They found the mere doing at all so difficult that they were at the mercy in great measure of what they could get. The real was as much as, and more than, they could manage, and they would have idealised long before they did, if they had not felt the task too much for them. They could, with infinite trouble, they hardly knew how, save themselves yet so as by fire and get a head or figure of some sort that was not quite unlike what it was meant for, but they could only do this by helping their unpractised memories to the facts morsel by morsel, treating nature as though she were a stuffed set piece, getting her to sit as still for as long a time as she could be persuaded to do, and then going all over her touch for touch with a brush like the point of a pin. If the early masters had been able to do all they would have liked to have done, no doubt they would most of them have been as vulgar as we are; fortunately their incompetence stood them in good stead and saved them from becoming the Guidos, Domenichinos, and Guercinos, that so many of their more competent successors took so much trouble to become. Incompetence, if amiable and painstaking, will have with it an unconscious involuntary idealism of its own which is perhaps more charming than any that can be attained by aiming at it deliberately; at any rate it will take the thing portrayed apart from the everyday familiar routine of life which is the great enemy of fancy and the ideal; but the artists of the Sacro Monte had got far beyond the point at which incompetence could be of much use to them, and had to find some other means whereby to steer clear of the everyday life which to the public for whom they had to play, would have appeared so vulgar, and to us so infinitely more delightful than much that they have actually left us. These means they could only find in much the same quarters as dramatic writers and players find them on the stage, and to a certain extent no doubt the Varallo chapels, like all other attempts to place a scene upon a stage, must submit to the charge of being more or less stagey, but — more especially considering that they are seen by daylight, — it is surprising how little stagey they are.
Also, like all other attempts to place a scene upon the stage, they will be found to consist of a few stars, several players of secondary importance, and a certain number of supers. It is a mistake to attempt, as I am told is attempted at the Comédie Française, to have all the actors of first-class merit. They kill one another even in a picture, and on the whole in any work of art it is better to concentrate the main interest on a sufficient number of the most important figures, and to let the setting off of these be the chief business of the remainder. Gaudenzio Ferrari hardly understood this at all, and has no figures which can be considered as mere stage accessories. Tabachetti understood it, but could hardly bring himself down to the level of his supers. D’Enrico understood it perhaps a shade too well; he was a man of business as well as of very considerable genius, and turned his supers over to Giacomo Ferro, who might be trusted to keep them sufficiently commonplace to show his own work to advantage. It must be owned, however, that the greater number of D’Enrico’s chapels would be better if there had been a little more D’Enrico in them and less Giacomo Ferro, and if the D’Enrico had been always taking pains.
We, of course, should have preferred the figures in the Varallo chapels to be all of them as realistic as the artist could make them, provided he chose good types, as a good man may be very well trusted to do. Whenever we get a bit of realism as in the Eve, and Sleeping St. Joseph of Tabachetti, in the Herod, laughing boys, and Caiaphas of D’Enrico, and still more in the Vecchietto, or in the three or four of the figures in the St. Eusebius Chapel at Crea, we accept it with avidity, and we may be sure that the masters who gave us the figures above-named could have given us any number equally realistic if they had been inclined to do so. Tabachetti’s instinct was certainly towards realism as far as he dared, but even he is not in most cases realistic — not, I mean, in the sense of making his personages actual life-like portraits. That he was not more so than he is is probably due to some of the considerations on which I have above imperfectly dwelt, and to others that have escaped myself, but were patent enough to him.
One other practical consideration would make against realism in such works as those at Varallo, I mean the fact that if the figures were to be portraits of the Varallo celebrities of the time, the whole place would have been set by the ears in the competition as to who was to be represented and with what precedence. It was only by passing a kind of self-denying ordinance and forbidding portraiture at all that the work could be carried out. Here and there, as in the case of Tabachetti’s portrait of the Countess Solomoni of Serravalle in his Journey to Calvary, or as in that of the Vecchietto (in each case a supposed benefactress and benefactor) an exception was made; in most others it seems to have been understood that whatever else the figures were to be, they must not be portraits.
CHAPTER VIII. GAUDENZIO FERRARI, TABACHETTI, AND GIOVANNI D’ENRICO.
Before going through the various chapels seriatim, it may be well to give a short account of three out of the four most interesting figures among the numerous artists who worked on the Sacro Monte. By these I mean, of course, Gaudenzio Ferrari, Tabachetti, Giovanni d’Enrico, and the sculptor, whoever he may have been, of the Massacre of the Innocents chapel. I take my account of Gaudenzio chiefly from Colombo’s admirable work, and from the not less excellent notice by Signor Tonetti, that appeared in the “Museo Storico ed Artistico Valsesiano” for July and August 1885.
Gaudenzio Ferrari was born, according to the general belief, in 1484, but Colombo shows reasons for thinking that this date is some four or five years too late. His father was named Antonio Lanfranco or Franchino. He too was a painter, but nothing is known of him or his works beyond the fact that he lived at Valduggia, where his son Gaudenzio was born, married a woman whose surname was Vinzio, and was dead by 1510. Gaudenzio in his early years several times signed his pictures with his mother’s name, calling himself Vincius, De Vincio, or De Vince.
He is generally said to have studied first under Gerolamo Giovenone of Vercelli, but this painter was not born till 1491, and we have the authority of Lomazzo for saying that Gaudenzio’s chief instructor was Stefano Scotto, a painter of Milan, who kept a school that was more or less a rival to that of Leonardo da Vinci. I have myself no doubt that Gaudenzio Ferrari has given Scotto’s portrait in at least three of the works he has left behind him at Varallo, but will return to this subject when I come to deal with the various places in which these portraits appear. His first works of importance, or at least the earliest that remain to us, are probably in or in the immediate vicinity of Varallo; but little is known of his early years and work, beyond what is comprised in the three pages that form the second chapter of Colombo’s book. There is an early ancona at La Rocca, near Varallo, another in the parocchia of Gattinara, and possibly a greatly damaged Pietà in the cloisters of Sta. Maria delle Grazie at Varallo may be, as it is said to be, an early work by Gaudenzio. Besides these, the wreck of the frescoes on the Pietà chapel on the Sacro Monte, and other works on the same site, now lost, belong to his earlier years.
Some believe that about the year 1506 he travelled to Perugia, Florence, and Rome, where he made the acquaintance of Raphael, and perhaps studied under Perugino, but Colombo has shown on what very slender, if any, grounds this belief is based, and evidently inclines to the belief that Gaudenzio never went to Rome, nor indeed, probably, outside Lombardy at all. The only one of Gaudenzio’s works in which I can myself see anything that may perhaps be called a trace of Umbrian influence, is in the fresco of Christ disputing with the Doctors, in the chapel of Sta. Margherita, in the Church of Sta. Maria delle Grazie at Varallo. This fresco, as Signor Arienta has pointed out to me, contains a strong reminiscence of the architectural background in Raphael’s school of Athens; it was painted — so far as an illegible hieroglyphic signature can be taken as read, and so far as internal evidence of style may be relied upon, somewhere about the year. If Gaudenzio was for the moment influenced by Raphael, he soon shook off the influence and formed a style of his own, from which he did not depart, except as enriching and enlarging his manner with advancing experience. Moreover, Colombo () points out that the works by Raphael to which Gaudenzio’s Disputa is supposed to present an analogy, were not finished till 1511, and are hence probably later than Gaudenzio’s fresco. Perhaps both painters drew from some common source.
In 1508 he was at Vercelli, and on the 26th of July signed a contract to paint a picture for the church of S. Anna. He is described in the deed as “Gaudentius de Varali.” He had by this time married his first wife, by whom he had two children, Gerolamo and Margherita, born in 1508 and 1512. In 1510 he undertook to paint an altarpiece for the main church at Arona, and completed it in 1511, signing the work “Magister Gaudentius de Vince, filius quondam magistri Lanfranchi habitator vallis Siccidæ.” In 1513 he painted the magnificent series of frescoes in the church of Sta. Maria delle Grazie at Varallo, signing the work and dating it, this time more legibly than he had done his earlier work in the chapel of St. Margaret. In July 1514 he signed a contract to paint an altarpiece for the Basilica of S. Gaudenzio at Novara. It was to be completed within eighteen months from the date of the contract and doubtless was so, but Gaudenzio found a good deal of difficulty in getting his money, which was not paid in full till 1521. He is occasionally met with at Novara and Vercelli between the years 1515 and 1524, but his main place of abode was Varallo.
No date can be positively assigned for his great Crucifixion chapel on the Sacro Monte, but it belongs probably to the years 1524–1528. I have already said that I can find no dates scrawled on the walls earlier than 1529. Such dates may be found yet, but if they are not found, it may be assumed that the chapel was not thrown open to the public much before that year. There is still a little relievo employed in the fresco background, but not nearly so much as in the church of Sta. Maria delle Grazie, and the increase of freedom is so evident that it is difficult not to suppose an interval of a good many years between the two works. I gather that by the year 1520 Gaudenzio had abandoned the use of gold and of relievo in painting, but he may have made an exception in the case of a work which was to consist both of sculpture and painting; and there is indeed a good deal to be said in favour of relievo in such a case, as helping to unite the sculptured and painted portions of the work. Even in the Magi chapel, the frescoes of which are several years later than those in the Crucifixion chapel, there are still a few bosses of relievo in the horses’ trappings. The date usually assigned to the Crucifixion chapel is 1524, and, in default of more precise knowledge, we shall do well to adhere to the date 1524–1528 already suggested.
About 1524 Gaudenzio painted a picture for the Sacristy of the Cathedral of Novara, and Signor Tonetti says that the very beautiful picture behind the high altar in the church of S. Gaudenzio at Varallo is generally assigned to about the same period. He goes on to say that in 1526 Gaudenzio was certainly working at his native village of Valduggia, where, in 1524 or 1525, a chapel had been erected in honour of S. Rocco, who it was supposed had kept the Valsesia free from the plague that had devastated other parts of Italy. This chapel Gaudenzio decorated with frescoes that have now disappeared, but whose former existence is recorded in an inscription placed in 1793, when the chapel was restored. The inscription runs: “Quod populus à peste denfensori erigebat an MDXXVI Gaudentius Ferrarius patritius ex voto picturâ decorabat,” &c.
In 1528 he transferred his abode to Vercelli, and about the same year married again. His second wife was a widow who had a boy of ten years old by Giovanni Antonio del Olmo, of Bergamo. Her name was Maria Mattia della Foppa; she came from Morbegno in the Valtellina, and was of the same family as Vincenzo Foppa, the reputed founder of the Milanese school of painting. In 1532 he married his daughter Margherita to Domenico Pertegalle, surnamed Festa, of Crevola near Varallo — he and his son Gerolamo undertaking to give her a dowry of 500 lire imperiale, payable in four years, and secured by mortgage on Gaudenzio’s house in Varallo.
In 1536 he painted the cupola of the church of the Madonna dei Miracoli at Saronno; he then returned to Vercelli, but his abode and movements are somewhat obscure till 1539, when it is certain that he left Varallo for ever, settled in Milan, and died there between the years 1546 and 1549. He does not appear to have continued to reside in Vercelli after 1536; we may perhaps, therefore, think that he returned for a time to Varallo, and that the frescoes on the Magi chapel should be given to some date between 1536 and 1539. They are certainly several years later than those in the Crucifixion chapel; but I will return to these frescoes when I come to the Magi chapel itself.
