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Updated: June 10, 2025
At a first glance, perhaps, all these chapels will seem uninteresting; I venture to think, however, that some, if not most of them, though falling a good deal short of the best work at Varallo and Crea, are still in their own way of considerable importance. The first chapel with which we need concern ourselves is numbered 4, and shows the Conception of the Virgin Mary. It represents St.
There can hardly, therefore, be a doubt that the artist was a Fleming who had worked for several years in Italy. It is also evident that he had Tabachetti's work at Varallo well in his mind. When, however, as in the Annunciation, the Nativity, the Crucifixion, and other chapels, the work at Varallo is by another than Tabachetti, no allusion is made to it.
Look at De Hooghe; look at The Pilgrim's Progress, or even Shakespeare himself how long they slept unawakened, though they were in broad daylight and on the public thoroughfares all the time. Look at Tabachetti, and the masterpieces he left at Varallo. His figures there are exposed to the gaze of every passer-by; yet who heeds them? Who, save a very few, even know of their existence?
The touch was a finishing one, put on with deliberation, slowly, so that it was two or three seconds before I discovered that the interloper was no saint. The figures in the chapels at Oropa are not as good as the best of those at Varallo, but some of them are very nice notwithstanding. We liked the seventh chapel the best the one which illustrates the sojourn of the Virgin Mary in the Temple.
Frescoes at Saronno and in the Sacro Monte at Varallo. The whole lake-district of Italy, where the valleys of Monte Rosa and the Simplon descend upon the plain of Lombardy, is rich in works of this school. At Luino and Lugano, on the island of San Giulio, and in the hill-set chapels of the Val Sesia, may be found traces of frescoes of incomparable beauty.
There are, by the way, two very ambitious altars on either side the main arch leading to the chancel in the church at Naters, of which the one on the south side contains obvious reminiscences of Gaudenzio Ferrari's Sta. Maria frescoes at Varallo; but none of the four altar-pieces in the two transepts tempted me to give them much attention.
The automatic movements of these last-named figures would have struck the originators of the Varallo chapels with envy.
The one horse introduced into the composition is again of the heavy Flemish type adopted by Tabachetti at Varallo. There is great difference in the care with which the folds on the several draperies have been cut, some being stiff and poor enough, while others are done very sufficiently. In spite of smallness of scale, ignoble material, disarrangement and decay, the work is still striking.
The Virgin is alone silent. The Nativity is much damaged and hard to see. The treatment bears no analogy to that adopted by Gaudenzio Ferrari at Varallo. The Purification. I can hardly say why this chapel should remind me, as it does, of the Circumcision chapel at Varallo, for there are more figures here than space at Varallo will allow.
The little objects looking like sentry-boxes that go all round Prato Church contain rough modern frescoes representing, if I remember rightly, the events attendant upon the crucifixion. These are on a small scale what the chapels on the sacred mountain of Varallo are on a large one.
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