Abstract
The lakeside towns ringing northern Italy’s Lake Maggiore all bear the imprint of the noble Borromeo family: land, water, islands, gardens, architecture, castles, churches, even grand hotels. At the southern end of the lake in the port of Arona stands the thirty-five-meter (115 feet) tall copper statue of the family’s most famous member, Cardinal and Saint Carlo Borromeo. Erected in 1624, this huge hollow statue has interior stairs which lead the visitor to the very top. From there, one can look out through the saint’s eyes at a panorama of the countryside. This literal imposition of Borromeo’s gaze upon his domain reifies the power of his reforming vision which transformed the religious life of northern Italy following the Council of Trent.
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Notes
The nine Sacri Monti and the year each was begun are Sacro Monte di Varallo (1486), Sacro Monte di Crea (1589), Sacro Monte di Orta (1590), Sacro Monte di Varese (1604), Sacro Monte di Oropa (1617), Sacro Monte di Ossuccio (1635), Sacro Monte di Ghiffa (1591), Sacro Monte Calvario di Domodossola (1657), and Sacro Monte di Belmonte (1712). For background on Orta, see Elena De Filippis and Fiorella Mattioli Carcano, Guide to the Sacro Monte of Orta (Novara: Riserva Naturale Speciale Sacor Monte di Orta, 1991).
Dolev Nevet, “The Observant Believer as Participant Observer: ‘Ready—Mades’ avant la lettre at the Sacro Monte, Varallo, Sesia,” Assaph, Studies in Art History 2 (1996): 189 [175-93].
Robbe—Grillet is quoted in Susan Rubin Suleiman, Authoritarian Fictions: The Ideological Novel as a Literary Genre (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), p. 3.
S. J. Freedberg, Painting in Italy, 1500–1600 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), p. 393.
Alessandro Nova, “’Popular’ Art in Renaissance Italy: Early Response to the Holy Mountain at Varallo,” in Reframing the Renaissance, ed. Claire Farago (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), pp. 113–26
E.g., in July 1618 the Protestant party in the Valtellina murdered their Catholic opponents and cut the strategic communications between Milan and the Tyrol, but in another coup engineered by the Spanish governor in Milan, the Catholic Party there, in turn, rose and massacred Protestants in the so-called Sacro Macello. See Peter Cannon-Brookes, Lombard Paintings c1595–c1630: The Age of Federico Borromeo, (Birmingham, AL: City Museums and Art Gallery, 1974), p. 12.
Michael P. Carroll, Veiled Threats. The Logic of Popular Catholicism in Italy (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), p. 186
Roger Aubert, The Church in the Industrial Age (London: Crossroad, 1981), pp. 288–306
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Gilda Balass, “Taddeo Zuccaro’s Fresco,” Assaph 4 (2004): 107 [105-25].
Wietse de Boer, The Conquest of the Soul: Confession, Discipline, and Public Order in Counter-Reformation Milan (Leiden: Brill, 2001) p. ix.
Cecelia E. Voelker, “Borromeo’s Influence on Sacred Art and Architecture,” in John Headley and John Tomaro, eds., San Carlo Borromeo (Washington: Folger Books, 1988), p. 177 [172-187].
Giles Knox, “The Unified Church Interior in Baroque Italy: S. Maria Maggiore in Bergamo,” The Art Bulletin 82 (2000): 683–84 [679-701].
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David Leatherbarrow, Topographical Stories. Studies in Landscape and Architecture, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), p. 211.
For a very comprehensive discussion of the history of pilgrimage, see Dee Dyas, Pilgrimage in Medieval English Literature. 700–1500 (Woodbridge, UK; Rochester, NY: D.S. Brewer, 2001).
Stephen Jaeger, “Charismatic Body—Charismatic Text,” Exemplaria 9 (1997): 122 [117-127].
Hester Goodenough Gelber, “A Theater of Virtue: The Exemplary World of St. Francis of Assisi,” in John Stratton Hawley, ed., Saints and Virtues (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 15–34.
Meditations on the Life of Christ, An Illustrated Manuscript of the Fourteenth Century, trans. Isa Ragusa, Rosalie B. Green, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961); Nicholas Love, Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, A Critical Edition, ed. Michael G. Sargent (New York: Garland, 1992).
Francis Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1974).
Gabrielle Trivellin, “Fonti Francescane del Sacro Monte di Orta” in I Sacri Monti Raccontati, Atti Convegno di Studio (Orta: San Giulo, 1998), pp. 119–129.
De Conformitate became the object of humanist and reformation ridicule. Famous in this regard is the Alcoranus Franciscanorum of Erasmus Alberus (1542), which was translated into several languages. Carolly Erickson, “Bartholomew of Pisa, Francis exalted: De conformitate,” Mediaeval Studies 34 (1972): 25 [253-274].
Andre Vauchez, Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages, trans. Jean Birrell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 114.
Roland Bainton, “Durer and Luther as the Man of Sorrows,” The Art Bulletin 29 (1947): 269–72.
For a discussion of Moncalvo’s importance see Carl Brandon Strehlke, “Review of Moncalvo,” The Burlington Magazine, 140 (1998): 221–23.
G. Abate, La Casa Natale di S. Francescoe la Topografia di Assisi nella prima metà del secolo XIII, Bollettino della Deputazione di Storia Patria per l’Umbria 63 (1966): 5–110.
Arnaldo Fortini, Francis of Assisi, trans. Helen Moak (New York: Crossroad,1980), p. 54.
Johnnes Jorgensen, Francis of Assisi: A Biography, trans. T. O’Conor Sloane (London: Longmans, Green, 1912)
Fredrika Jacobs, The Living Image in Renaissance Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 18.
Auguste Racinet, The Costume History (Koln: Taschen, 2003), p. 309.
Penny Howell Jolly, “Learned Reading, Vernacular Seeing: Jacques Daret’s Presentation in the Temple,” The Art Bulletin 82 (2000): 428–52.
Critics who discuss this phenomenon in two different ways are Karl-Heinz Stierle, “Story as Exemplum—Exemplum as Story: On the Pragmatics and Poetics of Narrative Texts,” in Richard Amacher and Victor Lange, eds., New Perspectives in German Literary Criticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), pp. 75–93
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill & Wang, 1981), p. 88.
Lisa Kiser, “Animal Economies: The Lives of St. Francis in Their Medieval Contexts,” Isle: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 11 (2004): 126 [121-38].
David Salter, Holy and Noble Beasts. Encounters with Animals in Medieval Literature, (Woodbridge, UK; Rochester, NY: D. S. Brewer, 2001), p. 33.
Ryan Gregg, “The Sacro Monte of Varallo as a Physical Manifestation of the Spiritual Exercises,” Athenor 22 (2004): 49–55.
Nancy Ward Neilson, “Etched Transfiguration,” Burlington Magazine 118 (1977): p. 699.
David Morgan, Visual Piety (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), p. 8.
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© 2009 Cynthia Ho, Beth A. Mulvaney, and John K. Downey
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Ho, C. (2009). The Visual Piety of the Sacro Monte Di Orta. In: Ho, C., Mulvaney, B.A., Downey, J.K. (eds) Finding Saint Francis in Literature and Art. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230623736_8
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