pontormo's passion cycle at the certosa del galluzzo

Pontormo's Passion Cycle at the Certosa del GalluzzoAuthor(s): Ignacio L. MorenoSource: The Art Bulletin, Vol. 63, No. 2 (Jun., 1981), pp. 308-312Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3050119 .

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RESURRECTION LAMENTATION

NAILING TO THE CROSS

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Note

Pontormo's Passion Cycle at the Certosa del Galluzzo

Ignacio L. Moreno

Pontormo's Passion Cycle at the Certosa del Galluzzo, painted between 1523 and 1525, has long been regarded as a landmark of early Mannerism.' Yet the meaning of the Passion Cycle in the context of its intended site, the great cloister of the Certosa del Galluzzo, and the original arrangement of the frescoes have never been adequately discussed.2

The Passion Cycle was commissioned by the Carthusian monks of the monastery of S. Lorenzo al Monte, near the town of Galluzzo, about three miles from Florence along the road to Siena. The cycle was to be part of a larger decorative project meant to complete the monastery that had been founded in 1341 by Niccolo Acciaioli, a wealthy Florentine.3 Pontormo completed five frescoes: the Agony in the Garden, Christ Before Pilate, the Way to Golgotha, the Lamentation, and the Resurrection. These have been relocated today to the museum of the Certosa. Only one set of documents survives for these frescoes: the record books of the Certosa show a series of payments for the Passion Cycle from February 4, 1523 to April 10, 1524.4 Other surviving documentation includes one composition drawing for a Nailing to the Cross, a sketch for a Deposition, and several studies for in- dividual figures.5

The original location of the frescoes gave them considerable prominence, because they dominated the view at each end of the great cloister, with its covered ambulatories and lawn between them.6 The five completed frescoes were arranged in the order of their sequence in the narrative of the Passion. The Agony in the Garden (at lower left in the diagram, Fig. 1) was painted on the north side of the west corner. Next to it, on the south side of the same corner (moving counterclockwise on the diagram), was the Christ Before Pilate. The Way to Golgotha was on the east side of the south corner, and the Lamentation was on the north side of the east corner. The Resurrection was painted on the end wall of a recessed vault in the north corner of the cloister.

In his description of the cycle, Vasari mentions that Pontormo had planned to paint a Crucifixion and a Deposition, but that he left them, intending to do them last.7 These scenes were never ex- ecuted, but Pontormo's intentions are confirmed in existing

I This note was read in an expanded form at the Middle Atlantic Sym- posium on the History of Art held at the University of Maryland on March and April, 1978. I would like to acknowledge an incalculable debt to Dr. Mary Garrard, American University, for her encouragement and helpful criticisms. I would also like to express my gratitude to Dr. Wolfgang Lotz, Director of the Biblioteca Hertziana, for making available indispensable research material and to Dr. Marilyn Aronberg Lavin for reviewing an earlier version of this note. I also want to thank Billie S. Fraleigh and Maura Caruso for their help in its preparation. 2 The site has been mentioned or partially discussed by F. M. Clapp (Jacopo Carucci da Pontormo, His Life and His Work, New Haven, 1916, 107-14), J. Cox-Rearick (The Drawings of Pontormo, Cambridge, 1964, 213ff), and K. W. Forster (Pontormo, Munich, 1966, 48ff, and 138-39), but they did not elaborate on the relation of the site to the meaning of the Passion Cycle.

3 A general history of the Certosa is found in the Carthusians' Maisons de l'ordre des Chartreux, Parkminster, Sussex, 1915, in, 57-58.

* These dates are based on the modern calendar. According to the Floren- tine calendar, as Cox-Rearick points out, 213, the first date was Feb. 4, 1522 (Clapp, App. ii, Doc. 16).

5 Cox-Rearick, Cat. Nos. 196-214.

6 The original location of these frescoes is firmly established by photographs taken of different views of the cloister before the frescoes were removed (Alinari Nos. 50418, 3426, 3427, 3228A, 3429; Brogi 4364). One of these photographs, which shows the Way to Golgotha in its original location on the east side of the south corner of the cloister, is reproduced in A. Marquand, Giovanni della Robbia, New York, 1972, 167, fig. 104.

7 G. Vasari, Le Vite de' piu eccelenti pittori..., ed. G. Milanesi, Florence, 1878-1885, vi, 269.



NOTE 309

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drawings. A drawing for a Deposition, now in the Uffizi, has been identified by Janet Cox-Rearick, in her monograph on Pon- tormo's drawings, as a discarded idea for the Deposition, which was replaced with the Lamentation, a very similar theme.8 Evidence to confirm Vasari's statement that a Crucifixion was planned is found in a sheet of drawings (Fig. 2) which contains a figure, in the upper right, that appears to be a tentative idea for a crucified Christ.9 The figures in the center of the sheet are a preliminary idea for a Deposition, and the woman in the lower right corresponds to a similar figure in the lower right of the Lamentation. Although Vasari did not mention that Pontormo had planned a Nailing to the Cross, a large composition drawing for the Nailing to the Cross (Fig. 3) and several studies for in- dividual figures have survived, including one for the Christ in the center of the composition.'0 The existence of these drawings raises a question that scholars have addressed: where did Pon- tormo intend to locate the Nailing to the Cross?

Cox-Rearick suggested that the Nailing to the Cross was planned for the east side of the south corner, next to the Way to Golgotha. She placed it there because she had assumed that the Way to Golgotha was originally located on the west side of the

4 Bay on the west side, south corner of the great cloister, Certosa del Galluzzo (photo: author)

5 Bay on the south side, east corner of the great cloister, Certosa del Galluzzo (photo: author)

8 The application here of the name Lamentation to Pontormo's fresco and the distinctions drawn between the Deposition and the Lamentation follow the formulation of G. Schiller, Iconography of Christian Art, trans. J. Seligman, Greenwich, Conn., 1972, 1i, 164-80.

9 Clapp, 113, first suggested that this figure was a preliminary idea for a crucified Christ. lo Cox-Rearick, Cat. Nos. 207-11.



310 THE ART BULLETIN JUNE 1981 VOLUME LXIII NUMBER 2

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south corner." But a photograph of the Way to Golgotha in situ shows that its original location was on the east side.12 As Kurt Forster has also pointed out, a doorway occupying the left half of the bay on the west side of the corner (Fig. 4), and a round vent in the center of the lunette above, apparently prevented Pon- tormo from using this space for one of his frescoes.'3 Further, the contour of the doorway to the lower right of the drawing for the Nailing to the Cross actually coincides, as Forster has observed,'4 with that of the doorway and painted lunette on the south side of the east corner (Fig. 5), in the wall space adjacent to the space on which the Lamentation was painted. But Forster apparently did not recognize that placing the Nailing to the Cross next to the Lamentation leaves no room for the Crucifixion,15 a subject nor- mally treated independently in a Passion Cycle.

Since Pontormo's idea for a Nailing to the Cross was fully developed, and it evidently was to be located next to the Lamentation, it seems clear that at an early stage in the planning of the frescoes for the east corner Pontormo decided to omit the

Crucifixion as well as the Deposition. But why should the

Crucifixion - the climactic event of Christ's Passion - be omit- ted from the cycle?

" Cox-Rearick, 216 and 221f. Cox-Rearick stated that the drawing was meant to be reversed and that this accounts for the outline of the doorway on the lower right of the drawing. However, even when reversed, the doorway indicated in the drawing does not coincide with the doorway adjacent to the space on which she suggested the Nailing to the Cross was to be painted. The frame of the doorway in that space overlapped by only a few centimeters the painted frame of the Way to Golgotha before it was removed (the cut-out shape of the portion of door frame that overlapped can still be seen in the painted frame of the fresco in the Museum of the Certosa). By contrast, the contour of the doorway and painted lunette in the Nailing to the Cross cuts out a sizable portion of the lower right of the composition. For a reproduction of the Way to Golgotha with a portion of the painted frame showing the indentation caused by the lintel of the doorway in the lower left, see Forster, 52, pl. iv.

12 See note 6 above.

13 Forster, 138-39.

'4 Ibid., 138.

15 There is one other bay on the southeast wall of the great cloister which

overlaps a small painted lunette and a doorway whose placement matches those indicated on the lower right of the composition drawing for the

Nailing to the Cross. This is the seventh bay from the east corner. However, there are several reasons why this location would have been an

unlikely choice for Pontormo's unexecuted fresco. One is its asymmetrical position in relation to the frescoes at the south and east corners of the cloister (there are eighteen bays in the southeast arcade, as on the northwest side; the northeast and southwest arcades each contain fifteen

bays). In order to explain such an unusual location for the Nailing to the Cross, one would also have to assume that use of the south side of the east corner was precluded by Pontormo's intention to use that space for another fresco, such as the Crucifixion. But if such an idea had been carried out, there would then have been three frescoes grouped somewhat awkwardly about the east corner, and there is no evidence that Pontormo planned other frescoes to balance such an arrangement, or that he favored an asymmetrical disposition of the frescoes.



NOTE 311

9 Well, center of the great cloister, Certosa del Galluzzo (photo: author)

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I would like to suggest that Pontormo's elimination of the Crucifixion may be explained by the presence of an earlier Crucifixion in the great cloister, a prominent image that could be easily connected by an observer with the narrative of the Passion at the four corners of the cloister.l6 Carthusian monasteries, as a rule, contained a large cross either in the center of the cloister or to one side, usually on or within the perimeter of the cemetery. Examples are the Certosa di Pavia and the Certosa di Padova, as shown in engravings (Fig. 6, 7). Occasionally, this cross was actually a Crucifixion, as at the Wiirzburg Charterhouse in Bavaria

(Fig. 8). The consistent appearance of a large cross in the great cloister of Carthusian monasteries relates to the Carthusian prac- tice of burying the dead in the cloister. It is probable, therefore, that there was also once a cross or a Crucifixion in the great cloister of the Certosa.

The record books of the Certosa suggest that the well at the center of the great cloister may have been the site of a

Crucifixion. The structure that one sees there today (Fig. 9), a circular stone parapet flanked by two columns, which support a

vegetal design in metal surmounted in turn by the symbol of the Eucharist, was not the original one. That appears to have been a circular marble chapel, decorated with several figures, as

Giuseppe Bacchi has pointed out.'7 One of the figures, as noted in the record books of the Certosa, was an Isaiah, now lost, by Giovanni della Robbia.'8 By the late sixteenth century, the original structure had fallen into ruin and was eventually replaced, at an undetermined date, by the present circular stone parapet flanked by the two columns. But in the nineteenth cen-

tury, as an engraving shows (Fig. 10), there was a cross over the well, which may also reflect a deliberate attempt to preserve a basic feature of the structure that was there in 1523.

The best known ensemble in which a cross appears over a well is also part of a Carthusian monastery: Claus Sluter's Well of Moses, of about 1395-1405, at the Chartreuse de Champmol, near Dijon. In the Well of Moses, which was built over a natural spring, Sluter managed to fuse two of the structures found most commonly in the great cloisters of Carthusian monasteries, the well and the cemetery cross, and to create a potent image full of religious symbolism.'9 Sluter transformed the large cross of the cemetery into a Calvary with the image of the crucified Christ, of which a fragment is preserved in the Museum of Dijon, flanked by the Virgin Mary, the Magdalen, and Saint John. He then placed this group over an elaborately carved base with figures of the six prophets - Moses, David, Jeremiah, Zachariah, Daniel, and Isaiah - who foretold Christ's Passion. Thus the prophets

16 A precedent that Pontormo may have known in Florence of a fresco cycle incorporating a Crucifixion in a different medium is Agnolo Gaddi's Legend of the True Cross of ca. 1390 in the choir of S. Croce (H. van Straelen, Studien zur florentiner Glasmalerei, Wattenscheid, 1936, 16). 17 G. Bacchi, La Certosa di Fzrenze, Florence, 1930, 141-43.

18 Marquand, 173-74.

'9 For the symbolism of the Well of Moses, see A. Liebreich, Recherches sur Claus Sluter, Brussels, 1936, 78ff; H. David, Claus Sluter, Paris, 1951, 81ff.



312 THE ART BULLETIN JUNE 1981 VOLUME LXIII NUMBER 2

are the foundation, both literally and symbolically, for Christ's act of redemption through his sacrifice on the Cross.

The presence of an Isaiah at the well of the Certosa del Galluzzo strongly suggests that there may have been a cycle of prophets comparable to that of the Well of Moses. For a Carthu- sian monk making daily use of the cloister and of the water from the well, the Crucifixion would also have been a poignant remind- er of Christ's victory over death, since the cemetery in which the monks were buried - that is, where their mortal remains were deposited - was nearby.20

A decision by Pontormo to invoke the presence of the Crucifixion at the well would explain the early elimination of the Crucifixion from the fresco cycle, as well as the later decision to omit the Nailing to the Cross.21 In the final arrangement of the frescoes, the scenes that preceded the Crucifixion were on the south side of the cloister, while those that followed were to the north. The location originally planned for the Nailing to the Cross would have disrupted that sequence.

These findings indicate that the meaning of Pontormo's Pas- sion Cycle is inseparable from its site. By connecting the Passion Cycle across the intervening space to the Crucifixion at the well, Pontormo did not simply avoid a duplication of the subject. In integrating the total environment of the cloister into the viewer's experience, Pontormo was able to enhance the viewer's (i.e., the monk's) sense of being a participant in the Lord's Passion, a goal of the monastic life, as he moved along the ambulatories.

[University of Maryland College Park, MD 20742]

20 David, 82. 21 A factor that may have contributed to Pontormo's decision to give the Crucifixion at the well a central place in his fresco cycle is the importance accorded the cross in the coat-of-arms of the Certosa (C. Ugurgieri della Berardenga, Gli Acciaioli di Firenze, Florence, 1962, pl. x).

Letters Early Masaccio It was with great interest that I read James H. Stubblebine and Mary W. Gibbons, "Early Masaccio: A Hypothetical Lost Madonna and a Disattribution" (Art Bulletin, June 1980, 217- 225). If correct, the conclusions would indeed alter our image of painting in Florence in the 1420's. However, it is because I believe the argument to be based upon insufficient evidence that I write. In the first place, there are the documents that relate to Bicci di Lorenzo's altarpiece for Simone da Spicchio in Empoli, a work central to Stubblebine's argument. While it is true that this work was under way in December, 1423, when a "Bastiano di Johanni battiloro" was paid for gold leaf, it was only in 1426 that Bicci was paid "per la dipintura della tavola che and6 a Empoli." This means, of course, that although the design of the alterpiece may date from late 1423, there is no assurance that this was so, and we must allow that in its completed form it could well reflect works by Masaccio or other artists carried out prior to 1426. That this was indeed the case is suggested by the figure of Saint Leonard from one of the lateral panels. This figure apparently derives from Ghiberti's first project for the statue of Saint Stephen, commissioned in mid-1425: comparison of Bicci's figure with the Louvre drawing of Ghiberti's project, on the one hand, and with his own, quite different, depiction of Saint Leonard in the fresco from the Porta S. Giorgio of 1430, on the other, makes this quite clear.

And what of the central panel? Can it really reflect a lost work by Masaccio? To my eye the throne, with its narrow proportions, curved back, and the series of small arches along the upper moulding, derives not from Masaccio but from Ghiberti (e.g., his design for the stained-glass window of the cathedral showing Saint Lawrence or the panel of Saint John the Evangelist from the first bronze doors for the Baptistry). And it is Ghiberti who is the source for the delicately posed right hand of the Virgin, the turn of her head, and her elegantly draped cloak. Is it surprising that these same elements recur in works by such Ghibertesque artists as Rossello di Jacopo Franchi, the Master of the Borgo alla Collina Altarpiece (for he, not the Master of the Bambino Vispo, seems the more probable author of the Helsinki Madonna) and Arcangelo di Cola? (F. Zeri, incidentally, has given good reason for dating Arcangelo's Bibbiena painting around 1430, and he correctly notes that the design derives from Ghiberti: "Opere maggiori di Arcangelo di Cola," Antichiti viva, vii, 6, 1969, 5- 15.)

One is left, then, with the S. Giovenale triptych. One thing seems to me certain: it is not by the master of the so-called Madonna of the Grapes (for which see J. Pope-Hennessy, Fra Angelico, London, 1974, 226). Whatever awkwardness the S. Giovenale triptych presents, it still impresses me as a work by the young Masaccio.

KEITH CHRISTIANSEN

Metropolitan Museum of Art New York, NY 10028

With respect to the article "Early Masaccio," I would like to mention a possible source for the motif of the Christ Child press- ing his fingers into his mouth that may have been a prototype not only for Masaccio's hypothetic lost Madonna, but also for the S. Giovenale and Bibbiena Madonnas.

As pointed out in my Master's thesis "Arcangelo di Cola da Camerino" (University of Maryland, 1975, 35-36), a source for this iconographic motif and one (to the best of my knowledge)

Correction: Juvarra's Capitoline Hill

In the article by John Pinto (Art Bulletin, December, 1980), p. 611, note 52: all the ratios should read 1:2:7; p. 613, col. 2, line 25: correct to: "Carlo and Francesco Fontana"; p. 615, note 69, line 3: correct to: "segnarono nel capo della sala".



pontormo's passion cycle at the certosa del galluzzo

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