Chapter 6

PRELIMINARY CONSIDERATIONS.

The foregoing outline of the history of the work must suffice for the present. I will reserve further remarks for the space which I will devote to each individual chapel. As regards the particular form the work took, I own that I have been at times inclined to wonder whether Leonardo da Vinci may not have had something to do with it.

Between 1481 and the end of 1499 he was in Milan, and during the later years of this period was the chief authority on all art matters. It is not easy to think that Caimi, who was a Milanese, would not consult him before embarking upon an art enterprise of the first magnitude; and certainly there is a something in the idea of turning the full strength of both painting and sculpture at once on to a single subject, which harmonises well with the magnificent rashness of which we know Leonardo to have been capable, and with the fact that he was both a painter and a sculptor himself. There is, however, not one scrap of evidence in support of this view, which is based solely on the fact that both the scheme and Leonardo were audacious, and that the first is little likely to have been undertaken without counsel from the second. The actual evidence points rather, as already indicated, in the direction of thinking that the frescoes began outside the chapels, got inside them for shelter, and ere long claimed the premises as belonging no less to themselves than to the statues. The idea of treating full-relief sculptured figures with a view to a pictorial rather than sculpturesque effect was in itself, as undertaken when Gaudenzio was too young to have had a voice in the matter, a daring innovation, even without the adjunct of a fresco background; and the idea of taking a mountain as though it were a book, and illustrating it with a number of such groups, was more daring still. To this extent we may perhaps suppose Caimi to have been indebted to Leonardo da Vinci: the rest is probably due to Gaudenzio, who evolved it in the course of those unforeseen developments of which design and judgment are never slow to take advantage.

To whomsoever the conception may be due, if it had only been carried out by such artists as Tabachetti and Gaudenzio Ferrari, or even Giovanni d'Enrico, to say nothing of Bargnola or Rossetti, (to whichever of the two the Massacre of the Innocents must be assigned,) works like those at Varallo might have been repeated, as indeed they sometimes were, thenceforward to the present day. Unfortunately the same thing was attempted at Orta, and later on at Varese, by greatly inferior men. It is true that some of the groups at Varese, especially the one in the Disputa Chapel, are exceedingly fine, and that there are few chapels even there in which no good or even admirable figures may be found. Still the prevailing spirit at Varese is stagey; the work belongs to an age when art of all kinds was held to consist mainly in exaggeration, and when freedom from