The Certosa of Pavia

The Certosa of Pavia by Esther Singleton

The Certosa of Pavia* is Esther Singleton's sustained meditation on one of northern Italy's most opulent religious monuments — the Carthusian monastery outside Pavia — examined through its architecture, painting, sculpture, dynastic history, and atmospheric setting. Singleton opens by establishing the Certosa's overwhelming sensory character: a compound of lapis-lazuli, bronze, inlaid agates, and labyrinthine carving that defies casual tourism. The building presents an immediate structural paradox — a Gothic interior paired with a Renaissance facade — and she frames this duality not as a failure but as a defining feature, each mode perfect within its own logic. The facade, attributed in substantial part to Antonio Amadeo (master also of the Colleoni chapel at Bergamo), is analyzed with close attention: a wilderness of reliefs and statuary — angel faces, fluttering drapery, saints among acanthus and wild vine — but one ultimately subordinate to a clear rhythmic design. Singleton likens this subordination of ornamental caprice to structural harmony to the chant of Pergolesi or Stradella. Her sole architectural criticism is that the facade functions as a frontispiece with negligible structural relationship to the church behind it, a serious defect from a purist standpoint, though it diminishes nothing of its sculptural refinement. The sustained perfection of style across the whole monument Singleton attributes to the succession of great Lombard sculptor-architects who worked on it, preventing any single hand's exhaustion or repetition from degrading the whole. She identifies the Certosa as the supreme achievement of North Italian genius, possessing a tenderness and self-abandonment to inspiration absent from the severer Tuscan tradition. Ambrogio Borgognone dominates the interior's pictorial program. Singleton credits him with the richly varied roof paintings of nave and choir, the saints and martyrs worked in tarsia (inlaid wood) for the choir-stalls, and a body of frescoes of which some remain well preserved — notably a small Madonna in the south chapel. The work transitions from Borgognone's majesty into Bernardino Luini's quieter Christian grace and then to Andrea Solari's Assumption of the Madonna, left unfinished after the manner of works touched by the Leonardesque spirit. Singleton dwells on this Assumption with particular intensity, praising the landscape behind the grouped Apostles — broad, calm, unmeasurably pure — as an evocation of the North Italian plain between Alps and Lombardy, just as Raphael's or Perugino's backgrounds summon all Umbria in a twilight haze. The sculptural portraits of the Milanese dukes and their families form a dark counterweight to this aesthetic rapture. Singleton surveys the medallions, canopied effigies, and marble tomb figures with their folded hands, reading in them a compressed chronicle of Visconti and Sforza violence: the iniquities of Gian Galeazzo, the blood-thirst of Gian Maria, Filippo's secret vices, Francesco Sforza's treason, and the vanities, lusts, murders, broken faith, and awful deaths by plague and assassination that defined the dynasty. Against this record of human restlessness, Singleton quotes Webster's lines for the Duchess of Malfi — "Much you had of land and rent; / Your length in clay's now competent" — as the appropriate epitaph for all of them, now stilled in marble. From the church the narrative escapes into the cloisters, which Singleton treats as the final triumph of Lombard terra-cotta work. Two cloisters, their arcades alive with cupids among grape-bunches, rows of angels ascending and descending Gothic curves, saints, cherubs, stars, acanthus, and courses of the repeated inscription Ave Maria — all in the warm red and purple shadow of brick that harmonizes perfectly with the solid blue Lombard sky above and summer grass below. The cloisters are characterized as a space of infinite invention and felicity, where memory itself fails before such sustained ornamental abundance. The work closes in a register of lyrical pastoral. Late afternoon light falls on the monastery grounds; the writer and a companion rest among willows and poplars by the monastery wall, watching the Certosa's pinnacles flame upward through grey-green spring foliage. The flooded rice-fields around shine like burnished gold in the level light near sundown. Frogs croak, water snakes move through the rich soil, nightingales attempt tentative April song. A companion from the Grisons breaks into an Alpine cowherd's yodel — a sound utterly incongruous against the centuries of Visconti magnificence and sorrow — and Singleton's closing question, whether such a tune ever echoed in Gian Galeazzo's convent before, encapsulates the work's governing tension between monumental historical weight and the irreducible lightness of the living present. Footnotes appended to the text address miscellaneous historical and ecclesiastical details, including relics discovered at a church of St. Stefano, medieval women's dress, a Latin inscription on the Virgin, the skullcap of Constance of Aragon, the founding of the archbishopric at Monreale, the distinctive color palettes of Italian cities, manuscript versions of a narrative in English and Lowland Scots, the origin legend of the Holy House of Loretto, a Gregorian procession commemorated at Ara Coeli and Santa Maria Maggiore, and several archival dates.

By Esther Singleton · First published 1903 · Genre: Art History, Architectural History, Travel Writing · 2,462 words

First lines

The Certosa of Pavia leaves upon the mind an impression of bewildering / sumptuousness: nowhere else are costly materials so combined with a / lavish expenditure of the rarest art. Those who have only once been / driven round together with the crew of sightseers can carry little / away but the memory of lapis-lazuli and bronze work, inlaid agates and / labyrinthine sculpture, cloisters tenantless in silence, fair painted / faces smiling from dark corners on the senseless crowd, trim gardens / with rows of pink primroses in Spring and bigonia in Autumn, blooming / beneath colonnades of glowing terra-cotta. The striking contrast / between the Gothic of the interior and the Renaissance facade, each / in its own kind perfect, will also be remembered; and thoughts of the / two great houses, Visconti and Sforza, to whose pride of power it is a / monument, may be blended with the recollection of art treasures alien / to their spirit.

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Renaissance architecture · Italian monastery · religious art · sculpture · frescoes · Gothic architecture · Carthusian order · decorative arts · religious building · architectural history · ornamental design · fresco painting

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