Toscana
Pietro Giarrè in the Charterhouse of Calci: a continuous dialogue between painting, sculpture and architecture
In the second half of the 18th century the Charterhouse of Calci, near Pisa, was affected by profound architectural and artistic rethinking, where Pietro Giarrè played a leading role: here are his works.
By Jacopo Suggi | 27/02/2025 20:51
The Carthusian Monastery of Calci, also known as "Certosa di Pisa," is a former Carthusian monastery with a sumptuous structure located in the Val Graziosa, a plain lying between the Pisan mountains. The building owes itself to continuous remodeling that occurred of its long centuries of history, and particularly with the imprint it took on between the 17th and 18th centuries. Precisely in the eighteenth century, the fame of the Charterhouse also established itself in tourism, becoming not only a destination for princes and rulers, attracted by the magnificence of the place and the salubriousness of the air, as well as by the spiritual activity that took place there, but it also became a draw for artists and travelers on the Grand Tour, who recorded in their notebooks and travel diaries, sketches, annotations and drawings of the place. The famous Antoine Quatremère de Quincy counted it among the "principal" ones in Italy, and this judgment is continually found in the thinking of many other scholars as well.
Art historian Francesco Fontani wrote of the Carthusian Monastery, that "anyone who admires the sumptuous magnificence of this vast and well-distributed factory" cannot help but "be surprised, while it is common opinion that should one except the Charterhouse of Pavia, this is the most considerable in Italy," and so even the Roman Gaetano Moroni, a writer and papal dignitary in his Dictionary of historical-ecclesiastical erudition recalled how the Pisan monument "looks more like a royal residence than a monastery of cenobites" thanks to the "magnificence and vastness of this Carthusian monastery makes it the most beautiful in Italy, after that of Pavia." In much more recent times, the much lamented scholar Maria Teresa Lazzarini, who was also director of the Carthusian Monastery, considered it "one of the most beautiful Carthusian monasteries in Italy, both for its geographical position and for the richness of its decorations and artistic heritage; it is a museum of itself." This list of quotations, which makes no claim to be exhaustive, because still very long would be the list of expressions of appreciation for the Certosa of Pisa, is a demonstration of the common and extensive admiration that has always enjoyed this place, a crossroads of history, masterpieces of art and nature.
In particular, it is the very rich decorative apparatus that has generally garnered awe-inspiring acclaim, although it is not stylistically homogeneous because it has sedimented over the centuries, and it also consists of such prestigious names as Bernardino Poccetti, Baldassarre Franceschini known as the Volterrano, Antonio and Giuseppe Rolli, Giovan Battista Tempesti and Giuseppe Maria Terreni just to name a few. Among the most artistically successful seasons for the Carthusian Monastery one can safely point to the thirty years in which Giuseppe Alfonso Maria Maggi held the position of prior. In this long period from 1764 to 1797 Maggi gave life to a lively phase that in fact made the Carthusian monastery an ever-active building site, in which the most diverse personalities worked side by side. In his desires there was not only to rethink scenographically the architecture and the organization of spaces, but also to bring a decorative program of great symbolic complexity, capable of ensuring the correspondence between the precepts of the Rule and the different artistic forms. Maggi did not limit his role to that of a mere client, but supervised all phases of the work, drawing up the iconographic program, not infrequently supplying drawings, and procuring materials. Among the many personalities found working in the Charterhouse during that period, the painter Pietro Giarrè (Florence, 1736 - post 1791) was involved for eleven years (1770 - 1781) within the imposing factory, lending his work in various rooms of the Charterhouse.
Giarrè was then a "celebrated Florentine painter" as recorded in the Monastery's records, although Aristo Manghi, the author to whom we owe one of the most comprehensive publications on the history of the Charterhouse, published in 1911, highlighted the problem of reconstructing the artist's life and curriculum. Today, although biographical information about the painter, whose date and place of death are not even known precisely, is still rather scarce, it is possible to reconstruct some of his events, which see him active in the first decades of the 18th century perhaps in the family workshop, while between 1760 and 1762 he appears to have attended the Florentine Academy of Drawing.
Apart from a minor intervention in the church of Sant'Angelo di Legnaia near Florence, his involvement around 1766 in the decoration of the Florentine sacristy of the church of Santissima Annunziata is known. It was probably this intervention that secured him a fair amount of fame and got him the commission for the numerous interventions inside the Certosa di Calci, which would later become for its vastness and quality the work of his life. During his eleven years in Maggi's service, Giarrè, who did not work exclusively, departed from the Pisan monastery on several occasions to fulfill other commitments, including the creation of some decorations inside a Medici Villa in Buti and in the Archbishop's Palace in Pisa. As has recently been shown by Professor Antonella Gioli, Giarrè's assignment to Calci can be divided into four phases, corresponding to different time frames, arrangements and tasks.
The first is situated between 1770 and 1772 and sees Giarrè engaged in making the wall paintings adorning the Foresteria nobile or granducale, in homage to Grand Duke Pietro Leopoldo. Arriving at the Carthusian Monastery on May 27, Giarrè began his work as early as the following day, having "the stage made for his genius," that is, the scaffolding, from which on May 29 he began the design of the vault, dividing the surfaces of the perspective breakthrough and transferring the drawings with the use of preparatory cartoons, which in all probability must have already been approved. Assisted also by the Pisan quadraturist Luigi Pochini, Giarrè made some allegorical representations for the guest quarters intended to house the grand ducal family, which, according to Lazzerini, are a sort of re-proposition of the compositional scheme and stylistic typology he had adopted in the sacristy of Santissima Annunziata.
On the vault of the entrance room, within an architectural breakthrough circumscribed by a balustrade with mixtilinear frames of a pale pink color, there is a blue sky where theAllegory of Vigilance floats on a cloud, dressed in yellow and white and holding a reed, keeping her company with two putti, one of which is equipped with an oil lamp, while a third deviates from the group by flying higher. Not dissimilar in organization is the vault of the bedroom, with theallegory of Sleep represented by a sleeping putto above a cloud.
Quite different in scope, however, is the decoration of the middle room, where Giarrè does the painting on the vault and walls, responding to the wishes of Maggi, who, as Manghi recalled, "wanted to propose as much decoration as possible in those rooms." The room is regurgitant with a faux stucco motif that occupies much of the space, marked to feed that continuous ambiguity between sculpture, painting and architecture, a recurring element within the Certosa, and of which Giarrè is perhaps one of the greatest interpreters. The walls, treated almost entirely in white monochrome, are a horror vacui of corbels, military trophies and niches, where allegories in the form of colossal painted statues of Peace, Piety, Solitude, Chastity, Penance,Oration and Contempt of the World are placed inside, while the cardinal virtues are represented in the corner medallions. Completing the register are two ovals with paintings of Grand Duke Pietro Leopoldo and his consort Maria Luisa, purchased by Maggi in Florence, which Giarrè places in complex painted frames.
But it is in the vault that yet another breakthrough is powerfully unfolded: this time, however, the figuration is crowded and agitated, in a swirling sky of clouds, the allegories of Faith, Hope and Charity appear in flight , accompanied by an audience of angels and cherubs flaunting symbols and flowers. The coloristic treatment dominated by hints of purplish pink, white and ivory is enlivened by the limpid color of the fluttering robes, green, yellow and blue. Curious and unusual, however, is the scene that takes place in the doorposts between the living room and the bedroom, in which the painter animates a conversation through inscriptions between Poetry, represented as a statue crowned with laurel, and Painting with a compass. Painting holds court by complaining that "everyone wants to give rule in my profession," giving rise to a dialogue that seems to lament the pressures artists receive on a daily basis in the performance of their work from people who have little or no understanding of the craft. Is this perhaps an outburst by the painter against the oppressive patron?
In the adjoining cloister, Giarrè painted Saint Bruno and the Madonna: the fresco of the founder of the Carthusian order, created in October 1770, was detached from its location in the 1770s for conservation reasons and recently exhumed, albeit in poor condition, in the prior's rooms. The work was intended to celebrate the competition of the Charterhouse of Pisa, along with other monasteries of the Order, in the commission of the marble statue of the saint made for St. Peter's in Rome by the Flemish sculptor Renè Michel Slodz in 1744, to which the fresco refers.
The second phase of Giarrè's commission developed throughout most of 1772, and saw the artist engaged in decorating the rooms of the Foresteria della Madonna or Laica, a space deputed to receive the most illustrious guests, including royalty, ambassadors and dignitaries. Here, he was responsible for painting "the drawing room, and for it, and all the Sopraports, and window frames of the other four rooms."
For the vault of the first room he made another breakthrough, where the architectural motif accompanied as usual by corbels and cornices is a hemispherical coffered dome with an opening in the center, clearly drawing inspiration from that of the Roman Pantheon. In the oculus takes place the scene of The Woman Pointing the Wayfarer to the Charterhouse, an explicit tribute of the hospitality guaranteed to pilgrims by the monks.
If in the works up to this point the tone held by the Florentine for his decorations was celebratory and mundane, in the later ones, to accompany the intended use of the spaces, he holds different registers.
Between late 1772 and mid-1774, Giarrè was involved in the repainting of several rooms, again assisted by Pochini. In the great corridor, perhaps the one that shows the greatest inventive freedom, he realizes architectural and naturalistic themes, with structures and ruins immersed in the landscape, marked by a strong naturalism that reverberates in the flowers and birds, and which already shows a temperament heralding a pre-Romantic taste, while it is evidently more didactic on the vault dominated by the fresco of St. Bruno in glory.
On the walls of the corridor connecting the guest quarters to the vestibule of the church he executes instead, within illusionistic niches, statues of the founders and benefactors of the convent accompanied by coats of arms and attributes. The lesser freedom Giarrè had to enjoy in painting religious themes is evident, certainly to be related to the demands of the patron whom Lazzerini describes as "demanding and authoritarian." So much so that when Giarrè, in 1773, devoted himself to the decorative apparatus of the monumental staircase, it was Maggi himself who provided him with a specially purchased print with the theme Jacob's Staircase, to be used as inspiration for the creation of the fresco of Jacob's vision, with God appearing to him and ordering him to go to Egypt.
The work carried out from 1776 to 1781 is certainly the most challenging, both because of the length of time required for vast environments and because of the importance of the decorations, which are not in places of passage, but instead nodal to life in the Carthusian Monastery, namely the paintings of the refectory and the Chapter Chapel. The refectory is the place where monks and converts gathered in strict silence to eat lunch on Sundays and feast days, and throughout the history of the Charterhouse it was enlarged several times to respond to the increase in the number of brothers. It was also decorated by the painter Bernardino Poccetti in 1597. In the late eighteenth century the care of Prior Maggi was also directed on the refectory, who decided to make some interventions in the architecture, opening five new windows and having a new pictorial program carried out, again entrusted to Giarrè. While on the short side it was decided to preserve the fresco with theLast Supper by Poccetti, on the rest of the surfaces an iconographic cycle evidently conceived by the prior unfolds today, with scenes alluding to the table taken from the Holy Scriptures, to emphasize the traditional frugality that was linked to the Carthusian Rule.
The illustrated convivial episodes chosen from the Old and New Testaments are Herod's Boarding House, Supper in the House of Levi, Wedding at Cana, and Banquet for the Prodigal Son, while two scenes can be traced back to accounts of Carthusian life: Catherine de Medici serving the monks of the Carthusian monastery in Paris at the table, and Cosimo III sitting at the table with the Carthusian monks of Calci. The latter episode in particular recalled the Grand Duke's visit, during which the monks had received the dispensation of silence from the prior, but had not availed themselves of it, arousing astonishment and admiration on the part of the ruler. In the background of the scene set in the refectory, Giarrè replicated Poccetti'sLast Supper . The depictions were then partitioned with mock statues of the Months and their products arranged in niches, and medallions with Doctors of the Church, raised by cherubs.
The cycle then concludes with the historization on the vault of three allegorical paintings indebted to Cesare Ripa's well-known treatise Iconologia. Temperance depicted as a young woman watering down wine and also connoted by the presence of a mirror, was perhaps an invitation to the superiors of the Order to stimulate their own virtues, while in the center the indication was addressed to the friars with the representation ofObedience, and finally the last, representing Work with a young woman carrying a yoke aided in the task by an angel, was addressed to the converts. The formative function of the cycle, conducted with didactic attitude was then reinforced by the presence of cartouches. Finally, a trompe d'oeil painting with a butterfly flying away from the books of the Holy Scriptures is an allusion to spiritual freedom obtained through wisdom.
Giarrè's last major work inside the Carthusian Monastery was the decorative cycle of the Chapter Chapel, in which the Florentine created a vast decorative apparatus. On the vault he frescoed inside a mock dome the Triumph of Saint Gorgonius with the Holy Spirit, a work of Cortonesque taste, where the angelic hosts that carry the saint to heaven develop, while in the center in the glowing golden light sit Christ and God, together with the Holy Spirit. In the faux pendentives take their places the evangelists, while on the wall statues and the usual unfailing architectural elements, such as a faux apse, return. On the painted chancels on the walls emerge today the veiled silhouettes of the figures of some jubilant musicians, who once looked out from the balustrades, but were covered at a later date, probably because they were disliked by the prior.
Pietro Giarrè was also involved in other lesser tasks, such as the design provided for some statues placed on the facade of the church, or the coloring of some bas-reliefs. Having completed all the work in 1781 and collected his fee, Giarrè returned to the Charterhouse only ten years later to sign the last known work of his production, and at the same time the last testimony about his life, namely a fresco on the outer wall of the convent, now lost, depicting St. Hugh bishop of Grenoble leading St. Bruno to the site of the Charterhouse. In this monumental building site is inscribed the entire experience of the painter Pietro Giarrè, an artist who knew how to move among late Baroque reminiscences, neoclassical yearnings, and Romantic anticipations.
