ABSTRACT
In the last decades of the fifteenth century, Franciscan friars decided to bring the Holy Land to Italy. The Franciscan founders of the Italian Renaissance holy lands acknowledged their pilgrimage sites’ clear differences from the actual Holy Land and used specific terminology to distinguish them. Building on the Franciscan belief that the power of Mary’s love for Christ was transformative, the friars at Sacro Monte di Varallo and San Vivaldo devised a devotional experience that offered the possibility for pilgrims to be similarly transformed through somaesthetic engagement in their holy places. The founders of both Varallo and San Vivaldo used the spatial disposition of the Christian devotional sites in Jerusalem as a model for the arrangement of their holy places. The artistic programs at San Vivaldo did not offer the mimetic realism of Varallo, but instead used terracotta reliefs to represent the events of Christ’s birth and death.
