The Iconography of the Fall of Man

At intervals along the path up the Sacre Monte at Varallo Sesia are forty-three chapels, constructed and embellished at various times from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. They tell, by means of life-size wood and plaster figures standing on their floors and frescoes painted on their walls, the story of the life and death of Christ, beginning with the Annunciation and culminating in the Last Judgement in the cupola of the basilica at the summit. The first of the chapels, however, does not belong to the New Testament at all: it portrays the Fall of Man, so that the