A WAR " SACRO-MONTE " FOR WALES. T HE foothills of
the Italian Alps possess a form of uational monument conspicuous for beauty even in the land which possesses beauty as a dower—the Sacro-Monte, or Holy Hill. The Sacro-Monte is some comparatively low isolated hill or spur of mountain, set as a rule in view of the spacious plain of Piedmont on the one side and of the Alpine range on the other, dedicated, through the medium of the figurative arts, to religious uses and religious memories. The Italians of Piedmont, fired with that passion for deco- rating the world which possessed all Italy in the past and still inspires her, were not content to construct spacious cathedrals and churches, and every other type of building majestic and delicate, to carve or cast glorious statues, or to set men's hearts ablaze with the painter's brush on canvas or on the plastered wall. These people of the hills devised a scheme by which, in the most exquisite of natural surroundings, the arts of the sculptor, of the painter, of the landscape gardener, and even of the grouper and marshaller of the stage, should each and all be called on to contribute to" the glory of God" and the beautifying of a noble countryside. In the Sacro- Monte every form of art is employed, and yet all are sub- ordinated to form one perfect whole. The spirit of the Italian is never, like that of the Northerner, satisfied with a piece of beautiful work in isolation. He yearns for, and searches to set forth, an ordered and balanced composition.
The men who designed the Sacri-Monti of Piedmont had the vault of Heaven for the theatre in which to set their scenes. Let us take the Soero-Monte at Orta as an example. It is not as great or as magnificent, from the point of view of sculpture, painting, or architecture, as that at Varallo, but it is more easily described. On a spur of the hills over- looking an exquisite mountain lake the builders of the Sacro-Monte presented their offering to God. They carved out of their native woodlands a scheme of green and winding glades oy.ershadowed by tall chestnuts and stately pines and beeches—never too many or too few, but exhibiting the happiest mixture of Nature and of Art. And, always between leaves and branches, even in the height of summer, the pilgrims of the Hill catch glimpses of the blue lake and its island town, or of the bluer sky and the widespread plain. Through this hill park wander broad and sinuous roads, or wide paths, sometimes wholly of grass, and sometimes of stone. The stone-pitched paths have those broad, shallow steps which decorate all the hills of Italy, whether in the Alps or Apennines —a heritage from the Roman roa.dmakers. Bordering these roads are het, with an artful innocence of design that defies analysis, a series of exquisite Chapels built in mountain stone and hard plaster. The Orta Chapels are the perfection of that garden architecture which is Italy's singular prerogative. The little olassie,a1 buildings which delight one in the back- grounds of primitive pictures, but which one never sees in bricks and mortar in the towns, are scattered with a lavish hand throughout the sylvan solitudes of the Orta hillside. One can best describe the Orta Chapels, with the delicate wan Italian grass growing up to the short flights of steps which lead to the little platforms on which they stand, as a mixture of a summer-house and a shrine. The Chapels of the Sacro-Monte at Orta are not merely the usual Stations of the Cross, but illustrate the life of St. Francis of Assisi, and are inspired by the legend or belief that the saint went through, in his own person, the various stages of his Master's life. St. Francis's life story is not left to men's imaginations. Each Chapel contains its figurative record, and not, as generally in Italian shrines, by paintings on the wall, but by groups of life-sized terracotta figures, moulded and painted, as if they were dressed in real silks, cottons, and brocades. The groups are in the foreground, and fade in the background into fresco work. The arts-of the theatre are here freely employed. Just as in the foreground of a great stage set one has the real men and women, and in the sides and background painted cloths, so in each Chapel of the Sacro-Monte the story is told by a dramatic mechanism. It is like an elaborate stage scene in a Miracle Play in which all the actors have suddenly been petrified. Perhaps in the full blaze of sunlight the effect may sometimes seem a little too theatrical, a little too much like a giant peep-show. But as a rule this disillusionment is only momentary, and while it lasts one has only got to turn one's eyes to the waving boughs of the chestnut or the beech, and to the divine garden, which one feels was quite as much in the minds of those who laid out the Sacro-Monte as were the Chapels and their contents.
But we must not waste any more time on Orta, for our prime object is not to describe its beauties, but to make a suggestion which could not be made without first giving our readers who have not lingered in Piedmont an idea of what we mean by a Sacro-Monte in Wales as a war memorial to those of her sons who have fought and fallen for the good cause. It happens that in North Wales the configuration, we had almost said the geology, of the hills gives very much the same conditions as those of Piedmont, or at any rate condi- tions eminently suitable for the construction of a Sacro-Monte. Though his experience of North Wales is hot very wide, the present writer knows of half-a-dozen hills in any one of which, given an artist with the true inspiration, a Sacro-Monte could. he made, as beautiful, as dignified, and as appropriate as those bf Northern Italy. One in particular may serve as an example. There are green glades, exquisitely grouped oak groves, and grey granite rocks. Nature's own kind and cunning hand has indeed already laid out the landscape essentials for a Sacro-Monte. All that is wanting is the Chapels and their inspiration. The exquisite dwarf oaks of the Welsh mountains provide exactly the amount of woodland required. Beneath their boughs there is no tangled under- growth, but the grass is short and sweet, and the glades are diversified with stately rocks covered with lichens. Nothing would be easier without the slightest defacement of Nature, but rather with its enhancement, than to trace paths, sometimes flat, sometimes rising in shallow steps, and to place an ascending series—never formal, yet never haphazard or unmotived—of architectural Shrines or Chapels.
Our specific suggestion is, then, that one of the lower spurs of Snowdon, or of the country between Snowdon and C'ader Idris, should be turned into a HolyMountain for Wales and dedicated as a national monument to the men of the Welsh Battalions and of the Welsh Guards who have fallen in the war. Crowning the Sacro-Monte should be a Chapel specially dedicated to worship, but this must be no huge pile of bricks and mortar. The worshippers should sit or stand on the grass beneath the trees and not be shut in between stone walls. The Chapels set in the glades of the mountain should be dedicated, some of them, to the various regiments that have won honour in the war—one to the Welsh Guards, one to the Welsh Fusiliers, one to the South Wales Borderers, one to the Welsh Regiment, one to the Welshmen who have . fallen in the Navy, and another to those who perished in the Merchant Service. But in a land of memories and of song such as Wales there should be a Chapel of the Bards and sweet singers of the Cwmri ; another dedicated to the his- torical heroes of the Principality ; while yet another might call to mind Arthur and the three Queens, for not only was Morgan le Fay, and the Queen of North Gaelis, Welsh, but also, we may be sure, the Lady of the Waste Lands.
We admit that to many readers the whole idea will sound fantastic. Yet those who know and love North Wales, and who remember many such natural Sacri-Monti as we have described, will, if they only take the trouble to search their memories, see that there is nothing impossible or inappro- priate in what is here proposed. Still more, if they will look about them on their next Welsh holiday, they will find plenty of support for our visions. Of course the thing might be done by public subscription, but could not some Welshman of large means, who desires to do honour to the land of his birth, take the matter in hand and himself dedicate the Sacro-Monte ? That there are landowners who would give a spur of mountain for nothing we cannot doubt, and in land which yields such beautiful stone as that of Wales the first expenses need not be very great. For remember once more that the Chapels we suggest are not elaborate Gothic buildings, but, as we have said, something of a mixture between a summer-house and a shrine. A sum of between fifteen and twenty thousand pounds should be amply sufficient for what is wanted, and that is not a huge expenditure. One would, of course, like to see modern sculptors and painters and scenic; artists trying to rival the creators of the stone and terra- cotta wonders of Varallo and Orta and Varese, but this could come later. For a time the Mountain Shrines might remain vacant, and the shadows of the oaks and beeches, the wild flowers in the grass, and the lichens on the grey rocks would provide a sufficient endowment of grace and beauty. North Wales is, without question, pictorially the most beautiful part of the British Islands. The geological formation of the mountains, the fact that they rise in so many places so close to the sea, and something perhaps in the atmosphere, give to the scenery of North Wales a character for magnificence in little which is only to be matched in the hills which surround Athens and shut in the Bay of Eleusis. The mountains of North Wales are not merely beautiful for Britain, but have an exquisiteness which entitles them to the admiration of the whole world. After all, a miniature, if a painter has got the true spirit, may be as magnificent as a canvas measured by yards rather than by inches.
IGNOTUS.
Should any lovers of the Sacri.Monti of Piedmont posses. photographs showing the architecture of the chapels at Orta, Varallo, Varese, or elsewhere, would they be kind enough to lend them to the present writer, who would return them ? They should be addressed :— " lgnotua," "Spectator" Office, 1 Wellington Street, Strand, London, W.C. 2.
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