Pinacoteca di Varallo

The Pinacoteca di Varallo is the museum key to the town: founded in 1886 and now housed in the Palazzo dei Musei, it gathers panels by Gaudenzio Ferrari and his pupils, the intense early-Baroque work of Tanzio da Varallo, later Valsesian painting and a distinguished maiolica collection — the movable counterpart to the town's great frescoed walls.

Why it matters

Varallo's greatest art divides between walls — the Sacro Monte chapels, the Parete Gaudenziana — and movable panels, and the Pinacoteca is where the panels live. Born in 1886 from the nucleus of the 1885 Esposizione Artistica Valsesiana, held in honour of Gaudenzio Ferrari, it realised the aim that the Società per la Conservazione delle Opere d'Arte e dei Monumenti in Valsesia had declared in 1875; today it is run by the Società di Incoraggiamento allo Studio del Disegno e di Conservazione delle Opere d'Arte in Valsesia, an unusual case of a nineteenth-century civic society operating a museum into the present. Its rooms follow the local school chronologically: Ferrari and the Renaissance in the core rooms, Tanzio da Varallo and the early seventeenth century, the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with the Francesco Franchi maiolica collection and the Remogna collection as dedicated sections.

What to notice

The Gaudenzio Ferrari rooms The gallery concentrates panels by the master and his circle, including works by Bernardino Lanino, his most accomplished Valsesian follower, so the visit lets you compare altarpiece logic with the fresco manner you will have seen in Santa Maria delle Grazie and on the mount. The Tanzio da Varallo section is the second anchor: Antonio d'Enrico, called il Tanzio, absorbed Caravaggesque drama during years in Lombardy and Rome, and his early-seventeenth-century painting is among the sharpest produced in Piedmont — the museum devotes a dedicated salon to him, renewed in 2002. The Franchi collection the maiolica assembled by Francesco Franchi documents a ceramic culture specific to this corner of the Alps-Po plain contact zone, and the Remogna rooms extend the picture into later collecting.

Context and history

The Società d'Incoraggiamento allo Studio del Disegno, founded in 1831 to run the drawing school created in 1778, and the Società per la Conservazione delle Opere d'Arte e dei Monumenti in Valsesia, established in 1875 with the declared aim of instituting a pinacoteca, were the engines of nineteenth-century Valsesian cultural self-awareness; the 1886 gallery secured the valley's painting heritage at the moment of its greatest risk of dispersal. Under the painter Emilio Contini, the museum's first Conservator from 1939 to 1957, the holdings grew to fill more than twenty rooms, and the 1960 re-installation promoted by the Valsesian engineer Giorgio Rolandi renewed the display; the Ferrari and Renaissance rooms followed in 2005 and the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century spaces between 2009 and 2015. The gallery's seat is now the Palazzo dei Musei, which it shares with the Museo Calderini . Within the regional museum network MUVV it functions as the head record of the Varallo civic complex, and its holdings of works removed from local churches — including panels transferred from the walls of San Marco — make it the conservation endpoint of the town's artistic history.