st illusive groups in painted terra-cotta. The
scenes of the Last Supper, of the Martyrdom of the Innocents, of the
Raising of Jairus' daughter, for instance, are certainly touching in
the naive piety of their life-sized realism. But Gaudenzio Ferrari had
many [94] helpmates at the Sacro Monte; and his lovelier work is in the
Franciscan Church at the foot of the hill, and in those two, truly
Italian, far-off towns of the Lombard plain. Even in his great,
many-storied fresco in the Franciscan Church at Varallo there are
traces of a somewhat barbaric hankering after solid form; the armour of
the Roman soldiers, for example, is raised and gilt. It is as if this
serious soul, going back to his mountain home, had lapsed again into
mountain "grotesque," with touches also, in truth, of a peculiarly
northern poetry--a mystic poetry, which now and again, in his
treatment, for instance, of angel forms and faces, reminds one of
Blake. There is something of it certainly in the little white spectral
soul of the penitent thief making its escape from the dishonoured body
along the beam of his cross.
The contrast is a vigorous one when, in the space of a few hours, the
traveller finds himself at Vercelli, half-stifled in its thick pressing
crop of pumpkins and mulberry trees. The expression of the prophet
occurs to him: "A lodge in a garden of cucumbers." Garden of cucumbers
and half-tropical flowers, it has invaded the quiet open spaces of the
town. Search through them, through the almost cloistral streets, for
the Church of the Umiliati; and there, amid the soft garden-shadows of
the choir, you may find the sentiment of the neighbourhood expressed
with great refinement in what is perhaps [95] the masterpiece of
Ferrari, "Our Lady of the Fruit-garden," as we might say--attended by
twelve life-sized saints and the monkish donors of the picture. The
remarkable proportions of the tall panel, up which the green-stuff is
climbing thickly above the mitres and sacred garniture of those sacred
personages, lend themselves harmoniously to the gigantic stature of
Saint Christopher in the foreground as the patron saint of the church.
With the savour of this picture in his memory, the visitor will look
eagerly in some half-dozen neighbouring churches and deserted
conventual places for certain other works from Ferrari's hand; and so,
leaving the place under the influence of his delicate religious ideal,
may seem to have been listening to
|