My second visit to the extraordinary Certosa di San Martino, which looks down across the Bay of Naples, was made last month in the company of my now grown-up nephew. We had decided to meet in Sicily, at Catania, and to then see Napoli together; I was particularly keen for him to experience the Certosa and so we went there one fine morning and passed several hours happily taking-in the wealth of visual stimulation housed in this de facto museum.
The Certosa di San Martino, as intimated, occupies the top of a high hill and, at certain points provides the unsuspecting visitor with a spectacular vista, in particular from the ex-Prior’s apartments. A massive, not quite 360 degree-view of the Bay, the city, the waterfront and Vesuvius takes one’s breath away and provides a much needed break from the Certosa's extensive collection of Baroque architecture, painting and sculpture; all of which is the result of the renewal of different areas of this Carthusian monastery, initiated towards the end of the 16th century.
Hoping not to exaggerate, I would say that probably the majority of the pictures is from the Baroque period even if the renovation of the structures began in the preceding Mannerist style and indeed continued into the subsequent Rococo period, with beautiful paintings by Francesco De Mura for example. But the original stimulus for visiting this place was its renowned collection of Baroque paintings, a personal late appreciation of which has developed over recent years, and especially after visiting Sicily and Naples (not to mention Rome, the undisputed centre of the Baroque).
Taking only one section of one room in one part of this very large complex, what we are going to consider today is some fresco work (around 1624) on the vault of this room - the Sala Capitolare - and some oil pictures in the lunettes below. The frescos were painted by the Greek-Italian artist Belisario Corenzio (1558-1646), a student of Tintoretto and the master of Massimo Stanzione (another important Baroque painter, see Note 2). In the section visible in the photograph below there are four frescos, each representing or personifying a ‘virtue’: Prudence, Merit, Obedience and Honour. Leaving aside any discussion of these virtues as ethical or moral attributes, what appealed to me as a painter is the, I think, fairly obvious use of portraiture for the Merit and Honour images. Remembering that this is a Certosa, a kind of monastery, and at the time, the 16th and 17th centuries, full of monks of all ages, the ready supply of men willing to sit for a painting - or, at least a drawing - could hardly have been ignored.
Whereas the female figures in this group could have required models, which the painter might have found anywhere in the city, their somewhat more generic appearance, particularly of the figure of Obedience, suggests that, as in many religious paintings, certain faces were adapted from a repertoire of pre-existing sketches and drawings. This fact is interesting because the habit and necessity of working from drawings, especially for frescos, meant that certain ‘types’ evolved within a given artist’s oeuvre, particularly for ‘minor’ actors in large compositions; as remarked elsewhere, the existence of a true portrait in such images is immediately apparent as it differs noticeably from the more generic ‘types’ surrounding it. Here, the male faces on the other hand, especially as they represent members of the community’s order, would seem to be portraits, the more successful of the pair being that of Merit although, that said, both faces appear to be from the same model. Thus, as portrait studies, in fresco, in the Baroque period, they are a little unusual and, in this case, remarkably bright, straightforward and ‘modern’!
Now let's consider the lunette pictures (1624-25?) painted in oil on canvas below the frescos just described (a ‘lunette’ is a crescent moon-shape lying horizontally, often situated above doors and windows or filling-in that shape created, as here, by the architecture of the ceiling). These wonderful pictures were painted by Paolo Finoglio (?1590-1645) and exemplify the strong influence of Caravaggio (d. 1610) on many painters in both Naples and Rome, and elsewhere. The strong contrast of light and dark, or perhaps better, the powerful complimentary rapport between areas of strong light and deep vague and dark space, virtually throws the subject out of the fictive world of the painted image into our own physical one. This characteristic of much Baroque painting is most obvious in the left-hand lunette in our photo above, the one with the saint wearing the white habit of his order (this series is made up of images of founding fathers of religious orders), cradling and contemplating the book in his right hand (detail below).
Unlike the female virtues in the frescos above whom we seem to be regarding from below 1, Finoglio’s saints are seen as though we were looking at them from directly in front. These views, that is, an illusionistic one from below, looking up (dal sotto-in-su in Italian) and one as if seen from directly in front (‘quadri riportati’ if on ceilings) are commonly seen in Baroque painting - and in other periods; however, during the Baroque, the view from below, painted as if real, became very common, both in churches and in wealthy private homes (palazzi). Even though here we must look up to see these oil paintings on the walls (above eye level), the images are, as said, painted as though we were in front of the subject.
Needless to say I suppose, the drawing of these figures is completely confident and masterful, the poses appropriate to the confined area of the canvases and the expressiveness vibrant if contemplative, as would seem suitable for a religious house. In the image of this father in white (possibly San Romualdo), the light coming from the left fully illuminates the saint, specifically his white habit (and his accompanying cherub), as it glances across the objects on the table slightly further back - that is to say, a typically Caravaggesque treatment of the elements in a composition. Superfluous detail, even that describing the environment in which the action occurs - the setting - is reduced to a minimum, if suggested at all 2.
1 Looking at the first photo and the female Virtues, we notice that the corbels and the other architecture which surrounds them (their thrones) are seen from below; note also the 'carved' grotesque faces on the undersides of those corbels. Close scrutiny of the male Virtues also reveals that we are looking at them from below: notice for instance that we can see the underside of the book held by Meritum.
2 Just to point-up the importance of and interest in the colour white on the part of painters working at the Certosa, here is another painting in which white is a dominant theme: it was painted by Massimo Stanzione around 1633-37, as mentioned, a student of Finoglio. Of course, white seems to have been the colour of the habit of the Certosini, that is the members of that community and so it is natural, in paintings retelling the crucial events in the Order's history, that white would appear quite often; but the interest for a painter, or a student of painting, is the way that artists handled the white in their pictures.
