_Gaudenzio Ferrari_ (Lombard: 1481-1549).
A welcome addition to the Gallery, as being the work
(though not a specially important work) of a great and most
indefatigable painter not previously represented. Gaudenzio
was a native of Valduggia (in the Val Sesia); his father was
a painter; his mother's surname was Vinzio, and in his early
work he often signed his pictures after her, "Gaudentius
Vincius." He passed his life exclusively in Piedmont and
Lombardy, where nearly all his works are still to be found--at
Vercelli, Novara, Saronno, and Milan. The most important of
them are at Varallo, on the Sacro Monte and in the church at
its foot. In some of the chapels on the Sacro Monte he not only
painted the frescoes in the background but also executed the
terra-cotta figures, thus carrying out the scheme of uniting
painting and sculpture in a single design. His "Crucifixion
Chapel," the most important of his works in this kind, has on
this account been described as "the most daring among Italian
works of art." Gaudenzio, who was nearly contemporary with
Luini, first studied at Milan in the school of Stefano Scotto
(whose portrait he is believed to have introduced more than
once in his work at Varallo). The story that he visited Rome
and made the acquaintance of Raphael rests on no authority,
and probably arose from a certain similarity in his works to
the charm of Raphael. But this is a similarity, not of what is
called "influence," but of age and temperament. "The influence
of Perugino or of Raphael," says Morelli, "is not more and
not less perceptible in Ferrari's paintings than in those of
nearly all the great masters of that happy period, generally
called the golden age of Italian art, during which Gaudenzio
and Luini held much the same place in their own school as
Raphael does in the Umbrian, Cavazzola (Morando) and Carotto
in the Veronese, Garofalo and Dosso in the Ferrarese, and Fra
Bartolommeo and Andrea del Sarto in the Florentine. Gaudenzio,
it is true, has not the grace of Luini, neither are his works
so perfect in execution as those of his rival; but take him
for all in all, as regards inventive genius, dramatic life,
and picturesqueness, he stands far above Luini. In his hot
haste Ferrari often loses his balance, and becomes quaint and
affected; many of his larger compositions, too, are overcrowded
with figures; but in his best works he is inferior to very few
of his contemporaries, and occasionally, as in some of those
groups of men and women in the great 'Crucifixion' at Varallo,
he might challenge a comparison with Raphael himself" (_German
Galleries_, p. 441). The best and fullest account of Gaudenzio,
in English, is to be found in Mr. Samuel Butler's interesting
work on Varallo, entitled _Ex Voto_ (Trübner, 1888).
Christ, holding the resurrection banner in His hand, rises from a
marble tomb. The painter, who was a child of the mountains, gives us a
background of blue hills. The picture was the centre compartment of an
altar-piece in a church at Magianico, near Lecco, on the Lake of Como.
This composition was copied with variations by Gaudenzio's follower
Giuseppe Giovenone in a picture now at Turin.