The wizened hermit saint is portrayed kneeling in prayer in front
According to legend, the hermit Saint Onuphrius lived a life of
of a rudimentary hut in a wild landscape. A livid, stormy sky sets
abstinence, physical deprivation, and total silence in the Egyptian
off the dense landscape in which we see Saint Onuphrius. The
desert around Thebes during the fourth century of the Christian
acid-green foliage, painted in thick impasto includes palm trees,
era. Together with the other desert fathers of early Christianity,
presumably to indicate the location in North Africa. The crucial
Onuphrius’s isolation, selfless dedication to God, and desire
role played by the landscape points to the influence of Flemish
for human perfection laid the foundations for both Eastern and
artists such as Jan Brueghel the Elder and Paul Bril, whose works
Western monasticism. Like countless other hermits and ancho-
were greatly admired in Borromean Milan. More unexpectedly,
rites, Onuphrius was a pious monk who withdrew to a remote
the lush, almost tropical, vegetation recalls the actual landscape
and desolate site where he was miraculously nourished by date
of Tanzio’s native Varallo and the landscape and architecture of
trees, a spring, and an angel who occasionally delivered him
the nearby Sacro Monte (FIGS. 1, 2). Tanzio is best known for his
bread. Like the medieval wild man, he grew hair all over his body
depictions of male Biblical figures, such as the young David or
and covered his loins with plaited foliage. He lived sixty years in
Saint John the Baptist who dramatically force their way out of a
solitude before he was discovered by Paphnutius, the Bishop of
compressed picture plane. This canvas shares the agitated brush-
Thebes, who was making his own spiritual voyage in the desert.
work of these paintings but now the composition has become
Paphnutius’s record of their encounter, which was the basis of the
more open and the figure less dominant.
Onuphrius legend as recounted in the important later collections of saint’s lives such as the Vitae patrum, the Legenda aurea, and Der Heiligen Leben, informed the visual depiction of Onuphrius for centuries to come: Then suddenly I saw a man coming to me who looked like a wild beast. He was frightening in appearance, hairy over all of his body, with a skirt of leaves. As he approached me I was seized with terror and feared he might kill me. I ran to the top of a hill, but he went to its base, crouched down, looked up to me, and said, ‘Come down to me, most holy man, for I am a man living like you in this desolate solitude for the love of God.’ 1
Likely executed in the last years of the artist’s life, the present FIG. 1
Sacro Monte, Varallo
picture of Saint Onuphrius demonstrates Tanzio da Varallo’s accomplishment as a painter of private devotional images and cabinet pictures. It also reveals his interest in the Northern landscape tradition. The composition of Saint Onuphrius is based on an undated series of engravings depicting hermit saints by Jan and Raphael Sadeler after drawings by Marten de Vos, entitled Solitudo sive vitae partum, 2 and it cleverly combines motifs found throughout the prints in the series. Specifically, the date palm is taken from the engraving of Saint Onuphrius (FIG. 4), the pose of the saint from Saint Hilarion, his visage and attire from Saint Paul, the hut from Saint Abraham, the cross from Saint John the Evangelist, and so on. These prints were interpreted by a number of artists active in Italy, Spain, and Northern Europe in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, among them Brueghel and Bril in hermit landscape paintings created for Cardinal Federico Borromeo and displayed in his Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, estab-
FIG. 2
Sacro Monte, Varallo
105
lished in 1618.3 Tanzio would have seen these paintings when he was in Milan around 1630, working on frescoes in two churches,
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