1465. CHRIST RISING FROM THE TOMB.
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.