Il Sacro Monte di Varallo Sesia dopo Galeazzo Alessi: i disegni per la Chiesa Nuova (1572-1573)

This article examines a group of recently discovered drawings related to the construction of a new church in the Sacro Monte of Varallo. Over the last forty years, scholars have paid particular attention to the history of the Sacro Monte in the second half of the Sixteenth Century, especially on the leading role played by the Archbishop Carlo Borromeo, who visited the pilgrimage site four times between 1568 and 1584, and Galeazzo Alessi, entrusted with the job of redesigning the entire complex in 1565, a project described in a manuscript volume of architectural drawings known as Libro dei Misteri. Scholars, however, have never deepened the history of the Sacro Monte in the two decades after the conclusion of the Libro dei Misteri. The group of unpublished drawings previously mentioned was realized in 1572-1573 and shed new light on the history of the Sacro Monte after Alessi’s departure from Milan (1569). These documents describe the project of a new church commissioned by Giacomo d’Adda, patron of the Libro dei Misteri, in place of the Church of the Assumption, one of the most important and ancient buildings of the complex. The result is a new modern ecclesiastical building, in line with the most advanced architectural researches in the Borromean Milan and fully conformed to the Counter-Reformation ideas. As argued in this article, the design of the church offers an original solution to the ‘practical, liturgical and theological considerations’ emerged after the Council of Trent and set out in Carlo Borromeo’s Instructionum Fabricae Ecclesiasticae a few years later.