The Gospel according to Gaudenzio

“What artistic splendour radiates out from this unassuming church!”; this was the exclamation of a Wise Man – Jacob Burckhardt – when, during his travels up the rocky bed of the river Sesia, he first set foot in a chapel on the outskirts of Varallo and came face to face with a dazzling painted partition, where a local artist, an enfant du pays, had recounted the life of Christ, from Annunciation to Resurrection. His name was Gaudenzio Ferrari. He’d visited Rome while still young and glimpsed the glories of the Renaissance, but it was only after his return to the valley of his birth that his art had flourished. He worked for countryfolk, their cheeks reddened with the cold, devoting the same commitment to their commissions as he would have done to projects for the pope, but with deeper, more honest, shared emotion. Before embarking on the vast undertaking of the Sacro Monte, he had given irrefutable proof, super parietem, of all he had learned, and of his artistic greatness.