_BERNARDINO CAIMI_, _AND FASSOLA_.
IN geographical position Varallo is the most western city of North Italy
in which painting and sculpture were endemic. Turin, Novara, Vercelli,
Casale, Ivrea, Biella, Alessandria, and Aosta have no endemic art
comparable to that of the cities east of Milan. Bergamo, Brescia,
Verona, Vicenza, Padua, not to mention Venice and the cities of the
Friuli, not only produced artists who have made themselves permanently
famous, but are themselves, in their architecture and external features
generally, works of art as impressive as any they contain; they are
stamped with the widely-spread instinctive feeling for beauty with which
the age and people that reared them must assuredly have been inspired.
The eastern cities have perhaps suffered more from war, nevertheless it
is hard to think that the beauty so characteristic of the eastern
Lombardic cities should fail so conspicuously, at least by comparison, in
the western, if the genius of the places had been the same. All cities
are symptomatic of the men who built them, towns no less than bodily
organisation being that unknown something which we call mind or spirit
made manifest in material form. Englishmen, Frenchmen, Germans, and
Italians—to name them in alphabetical order, are not more distinct in
their several faults and virtues than are London, Paris, Berlin, and
Rome, in the impression they leave on those who see them. How closely in
each case does the appearance of the city correspond with the genius of
the nation of which it is the capital. The same holds good more or less
with the provincial cities of any country. They have each in a minor
degree their distinctive evidences of character, and it will hardly be
denied that while the North Italian genius is indebted to the cities of
Piedmont for perhaps its more robust and vigorous elements, it owes its
command of beauty whether of form or colour to Lombardy rather than to
Piedmont. It seems to have been ordained that an endemic interest in art
should not cross the Po northward to the west of the Ticino, and to this
rule Varallo is only partially an exception; the reasons which led to its
being an exception at all will be considered presently. I know, of
course, that Novara, and still more Vercelli, contain masterpieces by
Gaudenzio Ferrari, but in each case the art was exotic, and with the not
very noteworthy exceptions of Lanini, Difendente Ferrari di Chivasso, and
Macrino d’Alba, I do not at the moment call to mind the name of a single
even high second-class painter or sculptor who has hailed from west of
the Valsesia.
The exceptional position of Varallo as regards North Italian art must be
referred mainly to its selection by Bernardino Caimi as the site for the
New Jerusalem which he founded there at the end of the fifteenth century;
a few words, therefore, concerning him will not be out of place here; I
learn from Torrotti that he was a “Frate Minore Osservante di S.
Francesco,” and came of the noble and illustrious Milanese family of the
Counts Caimi. He had been Patriarch of the Holy Land, and, as I find
stated in Signor Galloni’s excellent work already referred to, {40} had
been employed on important missions in the island of Cyprus, chiefly in
connection with the reformation of abuses. Full of zeal and devotion he
returned to his native country, and ere long conceived the design of
reproducing in Italy a copy of the most important sites in the Holy Land,
for the comfort and greater commodity of so many Christians who, being
unable to commit themselves to long and weary voyages by land and sea,
and among infidels, might gather thence some portion of that spiritual
fruit which were otherwise beyond their reach.
Old and mendicant as he was, he was nothing daunted by the magnitude of
the task before him, and searched Lombardy from one end to the other in
his desire to provide Providence with a suitable abode. For a long while
he sought in vain, and could find no place that was really like
Jerusalem, but at last, towards the end of 1491, he came to Varallo
alone, and had hardly got there before he felt himself rapt into an
ecstasy, in the which he was drawn towards the Sacro Monte; when he got
up to the plain on the top of the mountain which was then called “La
Parete,” perceiving at once its marvellous resemblance to Jerusalem, even
to the existence of another mountain hard by which was like Calvary, he
threw himself on the ground and thanked God in a transport of delight.
It is said that for some time previously the shepherds who watched their
flocks on this solitary height had been talking of nothing but of
heavenly harmonies that had been heard coming from the sky; that Caimi
himself while yet in the Holy Land had been shown this place in a vision;
and that on reaching an eminence called Sceletta he had been conducted to
the site itself by the song of a bird which sang with such extraordinary
sweetness that he had been constrained to follow it.
I should have set this bird down as a blue rock thrush or _passero
solitario_, for I know these birds breed yearly on the Sacro Monte, and
no bird sings so sweetly as they do, but we are expressly told that Caimi
did not reach Varallo till the end of the year, and the _passeri
solitarii_ have all migrated by the end of August. We have seen,
however, that Milano Scarrognini actually founded a chapel in October
1491, so Torrotti is wrong in his date, and Caimi may have come in 1490,
and perhaps in August, before the _passeri_ were gone. There can be
little doubt in fact that he came, or at any rate chose his site, before
1486.
Whatever the bird may have been, Caimi now communicated his design to the
Consiglio della Vicinanza at Varallo, through Milano de’ Scarrognini, who
was a member of the body, and who also gave support in money;
negotiations were not finally concluded until the 14th of April 1493, on
which day, as we have already seen, the site of the monastery of S. Maria
della Grazie was conveyed to the Padri dell’ Osservanza with the
concession of a right to build their New Jerusalem on the adjoining
mountain—which they had already begun to do for some time past.
Divine assistance was manifest in the ease with which everything had been
arranged, but Torrotti goes on to assure us that it was presently made
still clearer. The design had been to begin with a reproduction of the
Holy Sepulchre, and hardly had the workmen begun to dig for the
foundation of this first work, when a stone was found, not only
resembling the one which covered the actual Holy Sepulchre itself, but an
absolute facsimile of it in all respects—as like it, in fact, or even
more so, than Varallo was to Jerusalem. The testimony to this was so
notorious, and the fact was so soon and widely known, that pilgrims
flocked in crowds and brought gifts enough to bring the first abode of
the Fathers with the chapel beside it to a speedy and successful
completion. Everything having been now started auspiciously, and the
Blessed Bernardino having been allowed to look, as it were, into the
promised land, God took him to Himself on the 5th day of the Ides of
February 1496, or—as I have above said that the inscription on Caimi’s
tomb declares—in 1499.
The churches, both the one below the mountain in which Gaudenzio’s great
series of frescoes may be still seen, and the one on the top, which stood
on the site now occupied by the large house that stands to the right of
the present church, and is called the Casino, were consecrated between
the 5th and 7th days of September 1501, and by this time several of the
chapels with figures in them had been taken in hand, and were well
advanced if not completed.
Fassola’s version of Bernardino Caimi’s visit is more guarded than
Torrotti’s is. Before going on to it I will say here the little that
need be said about Fassola himself. I find from Signor Galloni’s “Uomini
e fatti” (p. 208) that he was born at Rassa above Bucioleto in the Val
Grande, on the 19th of September 1648. His family had one house at
Rassa, and another at Varallo, which last is believed to have been what
is now the hotel Croce Bianca, at which I always myself stay. Torrotti,
in his preface, claims to have been one of his masters; he also says that
Fassola was only eighteen when he wrote his work on the Sacro Monte, and
that he had published a work when he was only fourteen. The note given
by Signor Galloni [p. 233] settles it that Fassola was born “anno D. 1648
die 19 septembris hora 22 min. 30,” so that either the book lay some
years unpublished, or he was over twenty when he wrote it. Like the
edition of Caccia already referred to, it is dated a year later than the
one in which it actually appeared, so that the present custom of
post-dating late autumn books is not a new one. In the preface the
writer speaks of his pen as being “tenera non tanto per talento quanto
per l’età.” In the same preface he speaks of himself as having a double
capacity, one as a Delegate to the governing body of the valley, and the
other as a canon; but he must mean some kind of lay canon, for I cannot
find that he was ever ordained. In 1672 he published his work “La
Valsesia descritta,” which according to Signor Galloni is more hastily
written than his earlier work. On the 14th of December, the same year,
he left the Valsesia and travelled to France, keeping a journal for some
time, which Signor Galloni tells us still existed in 1873 in the
possession of Abate Cav. Carestia of Riva Valdobbia. He went to Paris,
and appears to have stayed there till 1683, when he returned to Varallo,
and the Valsesia.
He found his country torn by faction, and was immediately hailed by all
parties as the one man whom all could agree to elect as Regent General of
the Valley. He was elected, and on the 5th of October convened his first
general council of the Valsesia. He seems to have been indefatigable as
an administrator during the short time he held office, but in the year
1684 was deposed by the Milanese, who on the 3rd of December sent a body
of armed men to seize him and take him to Milan. He was warned in time
to fly, and escaped to France, where according to some he died, while
others say that he settled in Poland and there attained high distinction.
Nothing, however, is known for certain about him later than the year 1684
or the beginning of 1685.
In 1686 Torrotti published his book. He says that Fassola during his
regency repeatedly desired him “ripigliare questa relatione per commodità
dei Pelegrini, Divoti, visitanti,” and that so much new matter had come
to light since Fassola’s time that a new work was called for. Fassola,
he says, even in the midst of his terrible misfortunes, continued to take
the warmest interest in his native city, and in the Sacro Monte, where it
appears he had been saluted by a very memorable and well-known miracle,
which was so well known in Torrotti’s time that it was not necessary to
tell us what it was. Fassola may or may not have urged Torrotti to write
a second work upon the Sacro Monte, but he can hardly have intended him
to make it little more than a transcript of his own book. If new facts
had come to light they do not appear in Torrotti’s pages. He very rarely
adds to Fassola, and never corrects him; when Fassola is wrong Torrotti
is wrong also; even when something is added I have a strong suspicion
that it comes from Fassola’s second book. On the whole I am afraid I
regard Torrotti as somewhat of a plagiarist—at least as regards his
matter, for his manner is his own and is very quaint, garrulous, and
pleasing.
Fassola’s work is full of inaccuracies, and of such inaccuracies as can
only be explained on the supposition that the writer resided mainly at
Rassa, wrote his book there, and relied too much upon notes which he did
not verify after his work was written. Nevertheless, as Signor Galloni
justly says, “he must be allowed the merit of having preserved an immense
mass of matter from otherwise almost certain destruction, and his pages
when subjected to rigid examination and criticism furnish abundant
material to the writer of genuine history.”
He leans generally much less towards the miraculous than Torrotti does.
After saying, for example, that Bernardino Caimi had returned from
Jerusalem in 1481 full of devotion and with the fixed intention of
reproducing the Holy City on Italian soil, he continues:—
“With this holy intent the good ecclesiastic journeyed to the
mountains of Biella, and thence to the Val d’Ossola, and thence to
several places in the Valsesia, which of all others was the valley in
which he was most inclined to unburden his mind of the treasure of
his heroic design. Finally, arriving at Varallo, as the place of
most resort, where most of those would come whose means and goodwill
would incline them to works of piety, he resolved to choose the most
suitable site that he could here find. According to some, while
taking counsel with himself and with all who could help him, the site
which we now adore was shown him in a vision; others say that on
walking without the town he was seduced by the angelic warbling of a
bird, and thus ravished to a spot where he found all things in such
order for his design that he settled upon it then and there. Many
hold as true the story of certain shepherds who about a fortnight
earlier than the coming of the father, heard songs of more than
earthly sweetness as they were keeping watch over their flocks by
night.”
“But,” concludes Fassola, with some naiveté considering the reserve he
has shown in accepting any of the foregoing stories, “take it in whatever
way you will, the inception of the place was obviously miraculous.”