Sacro Monte, Varallo compared to Song Dynasty Chinese Landscape Painting

"For a long while he sought in vain, and could find no place that was really like Jersusalem, but at last, towards the end of 1491, he came to Varallo alone, and hardly got there before he felt himself rapt into an ecstasy, in which he was drawn towards the Sacro Monte: when he got up to the plain on top of the mountain... perceiving at once its resemblance to Jerusalem, even to the existence of another mountain hard by which was like Calvary, he threw himself on the ground and thanked God in a transport of delight"

Samuel Butler's description of how Berbardino Caimi discovered the site for the Sacro Monte at Varallo (Ex Voto: An Account of the Sacro Monte or New Jerusalem at Varallo-Sesia)

Since the time of Constantine the holy sites had been the loci of "stational liturgy" during which the bishop would hold services at one shrine and then another at times and on days that were appropriate to the church calendar. This practice of modelling in space and in time inspired these places, or "stations" to be designed as the "stations of the Cross" built into Roman Catholic churches after the seventeenth century.

The Sacro Monte at Varallo presented New Jerusalem that would enable the pilgrim to imitate the original Way of the Cross. The ascent of the pilgrim relives Christ's exemplary journey. This mimetic reenactment connects historical time with the time of spiritual reflection, the distinctive sense of the presence of the past is experienced in the present. The body is in a state of retreat, the person engages in a self-imposed solitude for the fortification of the soul. The stations at Varollo display images from the life of Christ that are placed in unique buildings visited along a route up the mountain. In terms of the large-scale of the topographical enactment, the Sacro Monte was also a "theatre of memory" for spiritual exercise and meditation.

The techniques by which the spectator was brought into the scene were those of perspective and stage set design. Figures are clothed in the regional dress of the pilgrim's time, thus establishing a temporal bridge that enables the participating spectator cross between those events of the past and the situation immediate to now. Thus there is a meeting of the foreign, historical with the local and contemporary.

Between 900 and 1100, Chinese painters created landscapes that depicted the vastness and multiplicity of creation. Viewers of these works identify themselves with a human figure entering the painting, thus allowing them to mentally walk through, ramble or dwell in the landscape. In this landscape, lush forests suffused with mist identify the time as a midsummer evening. Moving from right to left, travelers make their way toward a temple retreat, where vacationers are seated together enjoying the view. Above the temple roofs the central mountain sits majestically, the climax in the world of the man. During the early Song Dynasty, visions of the natural hierarchy became metaphors for the well-regulated state. At the same time, images of the private retreat proliferated among a new class of scholar-officials. These men extolled the virtues of self-cultivation, asserting their identity as literati through poetry, calligraphy, and a new style of painting that employed calligraphic brushwork for self-expressive ends.

At Varallo the passage or transitory locomotion of the body, enacts through different postures and movements within the landscape. This movement in the landscape is complimented by the differing orders of alteration, the movement of the landscape. In that there is the presence of growth in plant life coupled to climate that brings natural forces to act upon the landscape, achieveing variations along with lighting conditions variations in the tracing out of a figure's full appearance.

In Chinese landscape paintings the scroll format and the use of multi-perspectives creates multiple sub-scenes that form a narratival space with multiple horizons and senses of cavities/recessions into the picture plane. There is no one fixed point of view, thus the sense of space is unbound from the forms of perspective projection.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LcO6XT25D0