Free Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane by Andrew Graham-Dixon Page B

came together in a single carefully orchestrated experience.
    The earliest sacro monte came into being at the end of the fifteenth century when a Franciscan friar named Bernardino Caimi decided to re-create the sites of Christ’s life and passion – ranging from Bethlehem to Nazareth, from Gethsemane to Mount Sion – in the mountains above the town of Varallo, in what is today the Piedmont region. Caimi received papal permission and support for his plan, which involved the construction of numerous chapels linked by mountain paths. Each chapel was to contain polychrome figures acting out the stories of the Bible. Eventually a total of forty-five such chapels were built, allowing pilgrims who climbed up to them to travel even further in spirit – journeying all the way from Original Sin, where they would encounter Adam and Eve tempted by the serpent, to Golgotha, ‘the place of the skull’, where Christ was crucified. Carlo Borromeo spent the last days of his life on just such a pilgrimage, ascending the mountain at Varallo and praying day and night among its painted figures.
    Somewhat decayed, and much restored during the intervening centuries, these sculptures remain in situ today. Some of the figures are carved; others are formed from terracotta or stuffed fabric. The effect is inconsistent but full of lively touches of naturalism, somewhere between sculpture and waxwork theatre. The chapel of the Massacre of the Innocents is particularly vivid and gruesome, with its goitred executioner and grieving mothers, its floor strewn with dismembered babies. The sacro monte took the kind of interior, spiritual journey advocated for centuries in manuals of prayer and meditation, and turned it into an actual, physical itinerary, with suitably moving or horrifying scenes for the traveller moving up the mountain to witness at each new point of arrival. The sacred mountain gave a palpable form and structure to the instructions contained in devotional handbooks such as the fifteenth-century Venetian text The Garden of Prayer – books that, like the Franciscan prayer manuals before them and Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises afterwards, counselled the worshipper to summon up a chain of places and images as vividly as possible within the space of the mind:
    The better to impress the story of the Passion on your mind, and to memorize each action of it more easily, it is helpful and necessary to fix the places and people in your mind: a city, for example, which will be the city of Jerusalem – taking for this purpose a city that is well known to you. In this city find the principal places in which all the episodes of the Passion would have taken place – for instance, a palace with the supper-room where Christ had the Last Supper with the Disciples, and the house of Anne, and that of Caiaphas, with the place where Jesus was taken in the night, and the room where he was brought before Caiaphas and mocked and beaten . . . And then too you must shape in your mind some people, people well known to you, to represent for you the people involved in the Passion – the person of Jesus himself, the Virgin, Saint Peter, Saint John the Evangelist, Saint Mary Magdalen, Anne, Caiaphas, Pilate, Judas and the others, every one of which you will fashion in your mind. 32
    The sacred mountain was designed to ease the process of devotional visualization. The worshipper must make the physical effort of ascending from one chapel to another, but once inside each space he or she would find that the job of visualization had already been accomplished. The images at Varallo were begun by the artist Gau denzio Ferrari in the late fifteenth century, but they were ultimately des tined to be created, re-created and continually restored in a centuries-long collaborative process involving generations of sculp tors, craftsmen and architects. What those images did was, precisely, to re-create scenes from the Bible as if enacted by ‘people well known to you’.
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