Gaudenzio Ferrari

Above the town of Varallo, in the hills of northern Italy, there is a wooded hill covered with small chapels, a Sacred Mountain built so that pilgrims who could not travel to Jerusalem could walk the story of Christ instead. From about 1517 Gaudenzio Ferrari was put in charge of filling several of those chapels, and what he made there is hard to categorise. He modelled the figures in painted terracotta, life-size and standing in the round, then painted the walls behind them so the crowd seemed to continue into the distance. Step into his Crucifixion chapel and you are inside the scene, among dozens of clay figures, some of them fitted with real hair.

Ferrari came from nearby Valduggia and trained in the Lombard tradition, close enough to Leonardo's world to have absorbed its softness and its interest in ordinary faces. He carried that into everything: the Passion frescoes he painted at Santa Maria delle Grazie in Varallo are packed with small, specific human detail, grief that looks observed rather than staged.

He worked across Piedmont and Lombardy for decades — Vercelli, Novara, finally Milan — mostly on religious commissions for towns off the main routes, which is part of why his name travelled less than his talent. On the dome of the sanctuary at Saronno he painted a swirling concert of angels, more than 100 of them, playing instruments you can still identify one by one.