Skater's practice

Usage examples of figures.

They were still unpainted, the terra-cotta figures showing as terra-cotta and the plaster of Paris white.

Francis and Holy Sepulchre chapels, and probably the Presepio, Adoration of the Shepherds, and Circumcision chapels--though it may be doubted whether these last contained the figures that they now do--were in existence before the year 1500.

Sir Henry Layard does not appear to know that there are any figures in the Crucifixion Chapel of Gaudenzio, or indeed in any of the chapels for which Gaudenzio painted frescoes, and falls into a trap which seems almost laid on purpose for those who would write about Varallo without having been there, in supposing that Gaudenzio painted a Pieta on the Sacro Monte.

Before going through the various chapels seriatim, it may be well to give a short account of three out of the four most interesting figures among the numerous artists who worked on the Sacro Monte.

Nevertheless, in spite of the defect above referred to, it is impossible to deny that the sculptor of the Herod and Caiaphas figures was a man of very rare ability, nor can the general verdict which assigns him the third place among the workers on the Sacro Monte be reasonably disputed.

I should, however, have thought that the figures would have been baked upon the Sacro Monte itself and not in the town.

This, having regard to the terra-cotta figures alone, is by far the finest work on the Sacro Monte, and it is hardly too much to say that no one who has not seen it knows what sculpture can do.

We have already seen that this was the first chapel with figures in it on the Sacro Monte.

Journey to Calvary, which contains about forty figures rather larger than life, and nine horses,--is of such superlative excellence as regards composition and dramatic power, to say nothing of the many admirable individual figures comprised in it, that it is not too much to call it the most astounding work that has ever been achieved in sculpture.

Journey to Calvary, and that the fresco background still, in so far as it is not destroyed, treats this subject, while the modelled figures represent the Pieta.

Sacro Monte the tableaux are produced in perpetuity, only the figures are not living, they are terra-cotta statues painted and moulded in so life-like a way that you feel that, were a man of flesh and blood to get mixed up with the crowd behind the grating, you would have hard work to distinguish him from the figures that have never had life.

I have changed my mind through an increasing inability to resist the opinion of those who hold that the figures fall into two main groups, one by the man who did the signed figure, i.

Finding that Tabachetti returned to Varallo about 1610, I was able to understand two or three figures in the Ecce Homo chapel which I had long thought must be by Tabachetti, but had not ventured to ascribe to him, inasmuch as I believed him to have finally left Varallo some twenty years before the Ecce Homo chapel was made.

In the chapel by Gaudenzio, from which they were taken, the figures of Leonardo and Scotto probably stood side by side as they still do in the Crucifixion chapel.

I do not think there can be much doubt that the Vecchietto is also a portrait of Tabachetti done some thirty years later than 1610, nor yet do I doubt, now I know that he returned to Varallo in 1610, that the figures of Herod and of Caiaphas are by him.