I have said there are analogies between this figure and others by Tabachetti which after all make it not very difficult to decide the question to whom it should be given. We do not, indeed, find another Vecchietto, but we shall find more than one figure that exhibits equal truth to nature, and equal freedom from exaggeration. It is not possible, for example, to have greater truth to nature than we find in the figures of Adam and Eve in the first chapel. There is not one trace either of too much or too little, of exaggeration or of shortcoming; the nude figure of a man and of a woman were wanted, and the nude figure of a man and of a woman are given, with neither more or less modelling than what would be most naturally seen in a young and comely couple. So again with the charming figure of the Virgin sewing in the First Vision of St. Joseph chapel. The Virgin and the Vecchietto are as unlike each other as two figures can be, but they are both stamped with the same freedom from affectation, and the same absolute and easy mastery over the means employed. The same applies to the sleeping St. Joseph, in which case there is a closer analogy between the two figures themselves. It applies also to a not inconsiderable extent to the man with a goitre who is leading Christ in the Calvary chapel. This figure is not done from life, being a repetition of one by Gaudenzio, but it is so living that we feel sure it would have been more living still if Tabachetti had had the model before him from which Gaudenzio in all probability actually worked. At Crea, there are other figures by Tabachetti to which I will call attention presently, and which present not inconsiderable analogies to the Vecchietto. I explain the fact that the analogies are not closer, by reflecting that this is the one of the few cases in which Tabachetti has left us a piece of portrait work, pure and simple, and that his treatment of the head and figure in pure portraiture, would naturally differ from that adopted in an ideal and imaginative work.
CHAPTER XV. THE PIETÀ AND REMAINING CHAPELS.
The remaining chapels are few in number, and, whatever they may once have been, unimportant in character. The first is
Chapel No. 40. The Pietà.
The three preceding chapels are supposed to be on Mount Calvary, and from them we descend by a flight of stone steps to the level of the piazza. Immediately on reaching this we come upon the Pietà. We have seen that this chapel originally contained Gaudenzio’s Journey to Calvary, and that the fresco background still, in so far as it is not destroyed, treats this subject, while the modelled figures represent the Pietà. Of Gaudenzio’s original work Caccia says:—
“Come fu Christo de’ panni spogliato,
Montando il Monte poi Calvario detto,
Nel mezzo a manigoldi mal trattato,
Contemplar possi con pietoso affetto,Seguito da Maria e da l’amato
Discepolo di lui, et è l’effetto
Sculto si bene e doitamente fatto
Che sembra vero e non del ver ritratto.”“Per una scala asceso al Sacro Monte
Si entra nel più d’ogn’ altro sacro tempio,” &c.
The words “montando il monte poi,” &c., must refer to a supposed ascent on the part of Christ Himself, for Gaudenzio’s work was on a level with Tabachetti’s present Journey to Calvary which Caccia has just described, and Caccia goes on to say that from Gaudenzio’s chapel (the present Pietà) one “ascends by a staircase to” the most sacred chapel of all—the Crucifixion—as one does at present. That the present Pietà and the adjacent Entombment chapels were once one chapel, may be seen by any one who examines the vaulting inside the first-named chapel. Signor Arienta pointed this out to me, and at the same time called my attention to the fact that Gaudenzio’s fresco on the wall facing the spectator does not turn the corner and join on with the subject that fills the left-hand wall. A flag and a horse are cut off, and the rest of them is not seen. I sometimes question whether the original wooden-figured entombment was in the chapel in which the present modern figures are seen, but it probably was so.
There was also a fainting Madonna mentioned in the prose part of Caccia as a work by itself and described as follows:—
“Come la Madonna è tramortita vedendo N.S. condotto à morte.”
This is not referred to in the poetical part, and must have been a mere cell occupied by a single figure. No doubt it was seen through the window that is still approached by two steps on the south side of the present Pietà, and the space it occupied has been thrown into the present work.