This chapel is given as completed in the 1586 edition of Caccia, so that Bordiga and Cusa are wrong in dating it 1598. In the poetical part of Caccia it is described as recently made and “ben ritratto.” The woman of Samaria is a fine buxom figure, but the paint has peeled off so badly both from her and from the Christ that it is hardly fair to judge the work at all. I should think it was very possibly an early work by Tabachetti, but should be sorry to hazard a decided opinion. The frescoes are without interest. The graces at this chapel were chiefly for women who wanted to abandon some evil practice, and for rain when the country was suffering from long drought. This last is because Christ said to the woman of Samaria “Give me to drink.”
Chapel No. 15. The Paralytic.
The chapel alone was completed by 1586 and 1590, so that we may be certain Tabachetti had no hand in it. The statues are said to be by D’Enrico, whom we meet here for the first time. Bordiga praises them very highly, but neither Jones nor I liked the composition as much as we should have wished to have done. Some of the individual figures are good, especially a man with his arm in a sling, and two men conversing on the left of the composition, but there is too little concerted and united action, and too much attempt to show off every figure to the best advantage, to the sacrifice of more important considerations. They probably date from 1620–1624, in which last year Bordiga says that the frescoes were completed. These are chiefly, if not entirely, by Cristoforo Martinolo, a Valsesian artist and pupil of Morazzone, who, according to Bordiga, though little known, has here shown himself no common artist. Again neither Jones nor I admired them as much as we should have been glad to do. “All infirmities of fever, and paralysis,” says Fassola, “if recommended to the Great Saviour at this place will be dissipated, as may be gathered from the many voti here exhibited.”
Chapel No. 16. The Widow’s Son at Nain.
Of this chapel the walls are alone mentioned as completed in 1590. So that Bordiga and Cusa are again wrong in saying that the frescoes were painted about 1580. It is not good. The walls were probably raised soon after 1580. Donna Mathilde di Savoia, Marchesa di Pianezza, a natural daughter of Carlo Emmanuele I., was among the principal contributors. The graces were “for those who had had bad falls or any accidents whereby they had been rendered speechless, stupid, senseless, and apparently dead.”
It will be observed on referring to the plan facing p. 68, that this chapel is given as on the ground now occupied by Christ taken before Annas, and faces the Herod chapel on the Piazza dei Tribunali. This may be a mere error in the plan, but the plan is generally accurate, and it is very likely that a change was made in the middle of the last century when the Annas chapel was built.
Chapel No. 17. The Transfiguration.
This is on the highest ground of the Sacro Monte, the Transfiguration being supposed to have happened on Mount Sinai. Inside the chapel they have made Mount Sinai, but Fassola says that it was originally quite too high, and the Fabbricieri had ordered it to be made lower, “so as to render it more enjoyable by the eye.” It was begun at the end of the sixteenth century, but is mentioned as being only “founded” in the 1586 and 1590 editions of Caccia, and the work seems to have got little further than the foundations, until in 1660 it was resumed; Fassola, writing in 1671, says that the chapel was “levata in alto da terra l’anno del mille, sei cento e sessanta,” or about ten years before his book appeared; it was still in great part unpainted, and he makes an appeal to his readers to contribute towards its completion. From both Fassola and Torrotti it would appear that only the group of figures on the mountain was in existence when they wrote. They both of them make the extraordinary statement that these figures are by Giovanni D’Enrico, whom they must have perfectly well known to have been dead more than a quarter of a century before Fassola wrote, and many years before the figures could possibly have been placed where they now are. It is much as though I, writing now, were to ascribe Boehm’s statue of Mr. Darwin, in the Natural History Museum at South Kensington, to Chantrey. The figures on the mountain are among the worst on the Sacro Monte. I see that Cusa ascribes the figures of Peter, James, and John only to D’Enrico, but the ascription is very difficult to understand.
Bordiga does not say who did the figures of Peter, James, and John, but he gives the Christ, Moses, and Elias to Pietro Francesco Petera of Varallo. The fourteen figures at the foot of the mountain he assigns to Gaudenzio Soldo of Camasco, a pupil of the sculptor Dionigi Bussola. In 1665 Giuseppe and Stefano Danedi, called Montalti, and pupils of Morazzone, “painted the cupola of the chapel with innumerable angels great and small exhibiting the most varied movements.” Giuseppe had the greater share in this work, in which may be seen, according to Bordiga, signs of the influence of Guido, under whom Giuseppe had studied.
Among the figures below the mountain there is a blind man, and a boy with a bad foot leading him—both good—and a contemptuous father telling the Apostles that they cannot cure his son, and that he had told them so from the first, but the paint is peeling off the figures so much that the work can hardly be judged fairly. When photographed they look much better, and Signor Pizetta tells me he was last year commissioned to photograph the boy, who is in a fit of hystero-epilepsy, for a medical work that was being published in France, so it is probably very true to nature.