Visitation

Abstract

This chapel was built onto the side of Chapel Two shortly after 1544. Originally it housed the Annunciation scene, whereas the previous chapel served as a non-narrative recreation of the Holy House of Loreto, in which both Mary and Jesus were believed to have been raised. When Gaudenzio's sculptures of the Annunciation were moved to Chapel Two, around 1572, this space was redecorated to show Mary meeting her cousin Elizabeth after they had both experienced miraculous conceptions. Tradition records that Jean de Wespin began making the sculptures, but they were finished by Bartolomeo Ravelli between 1608 and 1612, after il Tabachetti suffered a period of mental illness. Samuel Butler, however, cites an early guidebook of 1586 that describes the new decorations as complete, and argues that Tabachetti was able to finish the work himself. By the time of Butler's visit, the sculptures were "loaded with many coats of shiny paint," which may have affected the attributions of other nineteenth century connoisseurs, such as Gaudenzio Bordiga who gave the works to Bartolommeo Carelli. These later paint layers were removed, and the original color restored, in recent conservation efforts that took place between 2001 and 2008. The first image of this chapel was printed in Giovanni Giacomo Ferrari's guidebook Brevi considerazioni Sopra i Misteri del Sacro Monte di Varallo (1611). The figures in the existing group are arranged in a different order, there are two additional figures, and the two male saints wear more distinct clothes so it is easier to identify them. All of this indicates that the woodblock print records the original composition by il Tabachetti and the current group was added sometime later. Comparing these works to others by Jean de Wespin suggests that the figures in Chapel Two were made to evoke Tabachetti's style even if they were modeled by another artist. The round faces and deep-set almond eyes of the two new charters at left especially recall the types of faces we see in his work for Chapels Eight (c. 1599) and Seventeen (1612) at Crea. These sculptures also reflect the artist's tendency to dress auxiliary figures in more modern looking or fanciful Orientalizing clothing with a lot of carefully articulated folds of fabric. Stefani Perrone writes that the sculptures of Mary and Elizabeth have faces made of terracruda, whereas the remainder of the group is made of terracotta, although this seems unlikely for practical reasons and the source of her information is not entirely clear. The painted prophets in the lunettes above the figures are usually attributed to Giulio Cesare Luini and date to the mid-sixteenth century. As usual, Bordiga points to a different artist: Antonio Zanetti, who was from Bugnate a town near the southern end of Lago d'Orta. The tapestries behind the sculptures were painted by Andrea Bonini, a local artist from Varallo, at the end of the nineteenth century. / Varallo was the first Sacro Monte in Northern Italy. The collection of chapels on the hilltop overlooking Varallo was established by Bernardino Caimi (before 1450 - 1499 or 1500) as a way of recreating the sights and experiences of a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. He organized the chapels according to their Holy Land geography and incorporated architectural details from the pilgrimage churches corresponding to each scene. Caimi chose Varallo to be the site of his New Jerusalem in 1481, he received papal permission to begin collecting donations in 1486, and he is believed to have overseen the project from 1491, when the first chapel was finished, until his death. Different writers have counted each of these dates as the year of the Sacro Monte founding. Many of the early chapels were decorated by Gaudenzio Ferrari (c. 1480 - 1546), who was born nearby and gained a reputation during his lifetime as one of the leading painters in Lombardy. Saint Carlo Borromeo (1538 - 1584) visited the Sacro Monte multiple times while he was Archbishop of Milan (1564 - 1584). Carlo and his contemporaries implemented new policies to clarify Catholic doctrine and structure spiritual practices in Milan after the Council of Trent (1545 - 1563). Carlo Bascapè (1550 - 1615), Saint Carlo's close friend and the Bishop of Novara, personally oversaw a building campaign to reorganize the chapels at Varallo and restructure the pilgrimage experience according to the ideals of the Counter-Reformation. These changes were largely based on designs by Galeazzo Alessi (1512 - 1572), which are collected and preserved in a manuscript called the Libro dei Misteri (1565 - 1569) in Varallo's Biblioteca Civica. Construction continued throughout the first half of the seventeenth-century, led primarily by Giovanni d'Enrico the Younger (c. 1559 - 1644) and his family workshop. Beginning in 1609, d'Enrico also supervised the construction of the new Basilica, which is dedicated to the Assumption of the Virgin. The Basilica was consecrated in 1649 and the old church, or Chiesa Vecchia, was demolished in 1773, but the Chiesa Nuova was not finished until the façade was added in 1891 - 1896.