The reader may need to be reminded that Oropa is among the somewhat infrequent sanctuaries at which the Madonna and infant Christ are not white, but black.  I shall return to this peculiarity of Oropa later on, but will leave it for the present.  For the general characteristics of the place I must refer the reader to my book Alps and Sanctuaries.  I propose to confine myself here to the ten or a dozen chapels containing life-sized terra-cotta figures, painted up to nature, that form one of the main features of the place.  At a first glance, perhaps, all these chapels will seem uninteresting; I venture to think, however, that some, if not most of them, though falling a good deal short of the best work at Varallo and Crea, are still in their own way of considerable importance.  The first chapel with which we need concern ourselves is numbered 4, and shows the Conception of the Virgin Mary.  It represents St. Anne as kneeling before a terrific dragon or, as the Italians call it, “insect,” about the size of a Crystal Palace pleiosaur.  This “insect” is supposed to have just had its head badly crushed by St. Anne, who seems to be begging its pardon.  The text “Ipsa conteret caput tuum” is written outside the chapel.  The figures have no artistic interest.  As regards dragons being called insects, the reader may perhaps remember that the island of S. Giulio, in the Lago d’Orta, was infested with insetti, which S. Giulio destroyed, and which appear, in a fresco underneath the church on the island, to have been monstrous and ferocious dragons; but I cannot remember whether their bodies are divided into three sections, and whether or no they have exactly six legs—­without which, I am told, they cannot be true insects.

The fifth chapel represents the Birth of the Virgin.  Having obtained permission to go inside it, I found the date 1715 cut large and deep on the back of one figure before baking, and I imagine that this date covers the whole.  There is a Queen Anne feeling throughout the composition, and if we were told that the sculptor and Francis Bird, sculptor of the statue in front of St. Paul’s Cathedral, had studied under the same master, we could very well believe it.  The apartment in which the Virgin was born is spacious, and in striking contrast to the one in which she herself gave birth to the Redeemer.  St. Anne occupies the centre of the composition, in an enormous bed; on her right there is a lady of the George Cruikshank style of beauty, and on the left an older person.  Both are gesticulating and impressing upon St. Anne the enormous obligation she has just conferred upon mankind; they seem also to be imploring her not to overtax her strength, but, strange to say, they are giving her neither flowers nor anything to eat and drink.  I know no other birth of the Virgin in which St. Anne wants so little keeping up.