Geoffrey Symcox’s history of the Sacro Monte of Varallo opens with a lively account of a potent encounter and ends with a rumination on the resulting consequences. In 1871, the English artist and author Samuel Butler was hiking the Italian Alps when he happened to pass through the Val Sesia--and was profoundly impacted by a shrine that occupied the crest of an alpine foothill. Initiated in 1486, the site had initially been conceived as a topomimetic simulacrum of Holy Land geography. Over the course of several centuries, however, repeated additions had created a string of more than 40 chapels that featured complex sculpted and painted tableaux depicting events from the Bible and from Christ’s life in vivid detail. To Butler, the shrine was a revelation: a pure expression of regional spirituality, and an affecting antidote to what he viewed as the stilted aridity of academic classicism. Over the next twenty years he returned repeatedly, developing a deep network of friends and eventually authoring what Symcox admiringly calls two “path-breaking works that first made the outside world aware of the Val Sesia’s unique artistic heritage” (267).

In recent years, that heritage has been the focus of a gradually escalating attention. The Sacro Monte of Varallo has repeatedly attracted more than 100,000 visitors in a single year, and since 2003 has been recognized, along with a chain of related nearby shrines, as a UNESCO World Heritage site. It is now possible, too, to point to a rich and diverse body of scholarship on the shrines. In addition to the fundamental contributions of local Italian historians, several art historians have analyzed the sacri monti using phenomenological and performative models, and the leading textbook on Italian Renaissance art now pairs a substantial discussion of Varallo with a massive photograph of one of the chapel interiors. [1] Clearly, the outside world is indeed aware of the intriguing patrimony of the Val Sesia. But that raises, in turn, a question for any author interested in the subject: how, at this point, can our understanding of the site be further enriched?

Symcox’s book, while cleanly written and consistently reliable, answers that question only partially and implicitly. Drawing on extant Italian scholarship and his own original archival research, Symcox offers a detailed diachronic history of the shrine at Varallo. (He also sketches, near the end of the book, brief histories of ten later and lesser-known sacri monti in the region, including those at Orta and Crea.) In the process, he works to relate, in a generally compelling manner, the evolution of Varallo to a complex and evolving landscape of conflicting individual and organizational interests. But the lack of a clear central argument is disorienting and slightly frustrating, and an introduction or conclusion could help considerably in offering a path through the dense thicket of facts assembled here. Moreover, his discussions of the sculptural programs at Varallo can feel incomplete or partial; oddly, several important art historical analyses of the sculptures are never invoked (see below and notes). Nevertheless, in synthesizing a range of sources and in making a body of material accessible to those unable to read Italian, this book does provide a useful service, and will presumably serve as an important resource in future writings on the shrines.

At its heart, this is a closely rendered institutional history. As a historian who spent much of his career studying early modern geopolitics and Savoyard statecraft, Symcox is especially skilled at recreating the diverse motivations of the local elites who underwrote much of the construction, the Franciscans and local officials who jostled for control of the shrine, and the well-placed churchmen who stepped in to settle disputes. He notes, too, the importance of more general patterns, from the seasonal migration of local craftsmen to the intensifying dogma of the Counter-Reformation and the military conflicts that began to engulf the region. But he also grants space, where possible, to the stories of individuals such as Bernardino Caimi, an Observant Franciscan who initially catalyzed the project, and Gaudenzio Ferrari, a versatile artist who designed a number of the chapels, figures and paintings at Varallo in the early 1500s. An archivist by nature, Symcox flatly acknowledges that the surviving sources are sometimes limited. Still, he manages to craft a rich and sensitive account of the various factors that contributed to the shrine’s current form.

And that form is undeniably quite striking. The life-size figures in the tableaux, some dressed in contemporary local clothing and others wearing contorted facial expressions, were seen by many early art historians as unrefined and naïve. Walter Pater dismissed them as coarse, and other early art historians were unimpressed by the raucous intermingling of artistic genres, the overt emotionalism, and the overly material approach to piety. To be sure, we are far, here, from the practiced gestures and the glassy composure celebrated in the courts of Renaissance Florence and Mantua. But much as the world of contemporary art has come to embrace theatricality as an idiom, recent art historical scholarship has energetically explored how late medieval and early modern works of art frequently engaged their viewers in transitive and multisensory modes. Symcox thus gestures to the writings of scholars such as John Shearman and David Freedberg, and embraces the idea that the installations at Varallo were designed to effect a sense of immediacy and to inspire compassio. Led through the dense, melodramatic installations by friars who offered a running commentary, pilgrims to Varallo were both implicitly and explicitly encouraged to imagine the depicted events as unfolding before them, and around them.

But one could, and should, go further here. In a 2014 article, for instance, Allie Terry-Fritsch made a provocative case that the experiences of early pilgrims to Varallo should be considered from a somaesthetic point of view. [2] Similarly, a 2017 essay by D. Medina Lasansky emphasized the shrine’s use of acoustically sensitive spaces and hapticity to create a complex atmosphere. [3] Neither author is mentioned in Symcox’s extensive bibliography. Neither, curiously, is William Hood’s seminal 1984 essay on Varallo, which played a galvanizing role in focusing recent scholarly attention on the site. [4] From an art historical point of view, then, this book feels only partially engaged: a trait that is also discernible in occasionally generic phrasings. It may be true, in a very loose sense, that Gaudenzio’s installations were “intended to mount a full-scale assault on the spectators’ senses” (96). But other scholars have shown that a more nuanced and exacting analysis of that effect is possible, and even more rewarding.

Certainly, though, there is no doubting Symcox’s deep fondness for the sacri monti. In the preface, he describes his first visit to Varallo in terms that loosely recall the breathless excitement of Butler. “I was mystified and captivated,” he remembers. “This was unlike any religious art I had ever encountered” (xi). And indeed, as he began to research and photograph the site in detail (most of the photographs in the book were taken by Symcox himself), some of his friends playfully asked if he meant to become a second Samuel Butler. Not quite: instead, Symcox’s primary contribution lies in his assiduous archival work and deep familiarity with Savoyard policy, both of which extend our understanding of the evolution of the shrine at Varallo. Thus, while his book can feel slightly limited from an art historical perspective, its combination of responsible scholarship and openly enthusiastic curiosity do make it a notable addition to the growing scholarly literature on a fascinating episode in early modern Italian spirituality.

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Notes

1. Stephen J. Campbell and Michael W. Cole, Italian Renaissance Art, 2nd ed., vol. 2: 1490-1600 (London: Thames & Hudson, 2017), 617.

2. Allie Terry-Fritsch, “Performing the Renaissance Body and Mind: Somaesthetic Style and Devotional Practice at the Sacro Monte di Varallo,” Open Arts Journal 4 (Winter 2014-15), 111-132.

3. D. Medina Lasansky, “The ‘Catholic Grotesque’ at the Sacro Monte of Varallo: the Protestant aversion to a graphic space during the late 19th and early 20th centuries,” The Senses and Society12, no. 3 (Sept. 2017), 317-332.

4. William Hood, “The Sacro Monte of Varallo: Renaissance Art and Popular Religion,” inMonasticism and the Arts, ed. Timothy Verdon (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1984), 291-313.