Chapter 4

BERNARDINO CAIMI, AND FASSOLA.

In geographical position Varallo is the most western city of North Italy in which painting and sculpture were endemic. Turin, Novara, Vercelli, Casale, Ivrea, Biella, Alessandria, and Aosta have no endemic art comparable to that of the cities east of Milan. Bergamo, Brescia, Verona, Vicenza, Padua, not to mention Venice and the cities of the Friuli, not only produced artists who have made themselves permanently famous, but are themselves, in their architecture and external features generally, works of art as impressive as any they contain; they are stamped with the widely-spread instinctive feeling for beauty with which the age and people that reared them must assuredly have been inspired. The eastern cities have perhaps suffered more from war, nevertheless it is hard to think that the beauty so characteristic of the eastern Lombardic cities should fail so conspicuously, at least by comparison, in the western, if the genius of the places had been the same. All cities are symptomatic of the men who built them, towns no less than bodily organisation being that unknown something which we call mind or spirit made manifest in material form. Englishmen, Frenchmen, Germans, and Italians--to name them in alphabetical order, are not more distinct in their several faults and virtues than are London, Paris, Berlin, and Rome, in the impression they leave on those who see them. How closely in each case does the appearance of the city correspond with the genius of the nation of which it is the capital. The same holds good more or less with the provincial cities of any country. They have each in a minor degree their distinctive evidences of character, and it will hardly be denied that while the North Italian genius is indebted to the cities of Piedmont for perhaps its more robust and vigorous elements, it owes its command of beauty whether of form or colour to Lombardy rather than to Piedmont. It seems to have been ordained that an endemic interest in art should not cross the Po northward to the west of the Ticino, and to this rule Varallo is only partially an exception; the reasons which led to its being an exception at all will be considered presently. I know, of course, that Novara, and still more Vercelli, contain masterpieces by Gaudenzio Ferrari, but in each case the art was exotic, and with the not very noteworthy exceptions of Lanini, Difendente Ferrari di Chivasso, and Macrino d'Alba, I do not at the moment call to mind the name of a single even high second-class painter or sculptor who has hailed from west of the Valsesia.

The exceptional position of Varallo as regards North Italian art must be referred mainly to its selection by Bernardino Caimi as the site for the New Jerusalem which he founded there at the end of the fifteenth century; a few words, therefore, concerning him will not be out of place here; I learn from Torrotti that he was a "Frate Minore Osservante di S. Francesco," and