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Moreover (for I may as well demolish this mischievous confusion between St. Joachim and his mother-in-law once and for all), the merest tyro in hagiology knows that St. Joachim was not at home when the Virgin was born. He had been hustled out of the temple for having no children, and had fled desolate and dismayed into the wilderness. It shows how silly people are, for all the time he was going, if they had only waited a little, to be the father of the most remarkable person of purely human origin who had ever been born, and such a parent as this should surely not be hurried. The story is told in the frescoes of the chapel of Loreto, only a quarter of an hour’s walk from Varallo, and no one can have known it better than D’Enrico. The frescoes are explained by written passages that tell us how, when Joachim was in the desert, an angel came to him in the guise of a fair, civil young gentleman, and told him the Virgin was to be born. Then, later on, the same young gentleman appeared to him again, and bade him “in God’s name be comforted, and turn again to his content,” for the Virgin had been actually born. On which St. Joachim, who seems to have been of opinion that marriage after all was rather a failure, said that, as things were going on so nicely without him, he would stay in the desert just a little longer, and offered up a lamb as a pretext to gain time. Perhaps he guessed about his mother-in-law, or he may have asked the angel. Of course, even in spite of such evidence as this I may be mistaken about the Virgin’s grandmother’s sex, and the sacristan may be right; but I can only say that if the lady sitting by St. Anne’s bedside at Montrigone is the Virgin’s father–well, in that case I must reconsider a good deal that I have been accustomed to believe was beyond question.

Taken singly, I suppose that none of the figures in the chapel, except the Virgin’s grandmother, should be rated very highly. The under-nurse is the next best figure, and might very well be Tabachetti’s, for neither Giovanni d’Enrico nor Giacomo Ferro was successful with his female characters. There is not a single really comfortable woman in any chapel by either of them on the Sacro Monte at Varallo. Tabachetti, on the other hand, delighted in women; if they were young he made them comely and engaging, if they were old he gave them dignity and individual character, and the under-nurse is much more in accordance with Tabachetti’s habitual mental attitude than with D’Enrico’s or Giacomo Ferro’s. Still there are only four figures out of the eleven that are mere otiose supers, and taking the work as a whole it leaves a pleasant impression as being throughout naive and homely, and sometimes, which is of less importance, technically excellent.

Allowance must, of course, be made for tawdry accessories and repeated coats of shiny oleaginous paint–very disagreeable where it has peeled off and almost more so where it has not. What work could stand against such treatment as the Valsesian terra-cotta figures have had to put up with? Take the Venus of Milo; let her be done in terra-cotta, and have run, not much, but still something, in the baking; paint her pink, two oils, all over, and then varnish her–it will help to preserve the paint; glue a lot of horsehair on to her pate, half of which shall have come off, leaving the glue still showing; scrape her, not too thoroughly, get the village drawing-master to paint her again, and the drawing-master in the next provincial town to put a forest background behind her with the brightest emerald-green leaves that he can do for the money; let this painting and scraping and repainting be repeated several times over; festoon her with pink and white flowers made of tissue paper; surround her with the cheapest German imitations of the cheapest decorations that Birmingham can produce; let the night air and winter fogs get at her for three hundred years, and how easy, I wonder, will it be to see the goddess who will be still in great part there? True, in the case of the Birth of the Virgin chapel at Montrigone, there is no real hair and no fresco background, but time has had abundant opportunities without these. I will conclude my notice of this chapel by saying that on the left, above the door through which the under-under-nurse’s drudge is about to pass, there is a good painted terra-cotta bust, said–but I believe on no authority–to be a portrait of Giovanni d’Enrico. Others say that the Virgin’s grandmother is Giovanni d’Enrico, but this is even more absurd than supposing her to be St. Joachim.