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Updated: June 4, 2025
To the Certosa to see the old Carthusian Convent founded in 1396; cloisters, gardens, and twenty-four little dwellings, with chapel, bedroom, parlour, and yard for each monk, who is never to speak, and comes out but once a week. A nice way for lazy men to spend their lives when there is so much work to be done for the Lord and his poor!
The long colonnades of low round arches went back to Romanesque days and the times of the first Visconti lords of Pavia; the Gothic windows of the banqueting-hall and upper stories had been finished in the reign of the great Giangaleazzo, and were enriched with slender marble shafts and exquisite terra-cotta mouldings similar to those that we admire to-day in the cloisters of the Certosa.
This happened first in the Certosa di Pavia whither they had gone one afternoon from Milan. That was quite soon after they were married.
Whilst Don Silverio was still hesitating as to what seemed to him this momentous and painful journey to Rome his mind was made up by a second letter received from the Superior of the Certosa at San Beda, the friend to whom he had confided the task of inquiring as to the project for the Edera. This letter was long, and in Latin.
But the work in which strangers were the most opposed was the chapel of S. Gennaro, which a committee had assigned to the Cav. d'Arpino, as soon as he should finish painting the choir of the Certosa.
When I said just now that the Certosa in Val d'Ema gives you a glimpse of old Italy I was thinking of this great pillared quadrangle, lying half in sun and half in shade, of its tangled garden-growth in the centre, surrounding the ancient customary well, and of the intense blue sky bending above it, to say nothing of the indispensable old white-robed monk who pokes about among the lettuce and parsley.
And to-day, when so many of his noblest creations have perished, when the glorious pile of the Castello of Milan, with its stately towers and frescoed halls, rich decorations and vast gardens, has been defaced and battered by the hands of barbarian invaders, when Leonardo's fresco is a wreck and the tomb of Beatrice broken to pieces, when Vigevano and Cussago are in ruins, and the matchless library of Pavia has been scattered to the winds, we rejoice to think that the Certosa remains to show us how splendid were the dreams and how rare the skill of artists in the days when Lodovico Sforza reigned over Milan.
We know not how far it was completed before 1499, when his labours as chief architect of the cathedrals of Milan and Pavia compelled him to give up his post at the Certosa; but in much of the ornamental detail in the angels that adorn its branches of the candelabra between the windows, in the profusion of carved trophies, armorial bearings, burning censers, cherub-heads, leaf-mouldings, flowers and fruit that has been lavished on every portion of the west front we recognize his handiwork.
Above in the pediment are a Virgin and Child with kneeling angels. Besides the innovation of the enlarged frieze, which reminds one of a door in the Certosa near Pavia, the clumsiness of the mouldings and the comparative poorness of the sculpture, though the figures are much better than any previously worked by native artists, suggest that the designer and workmen were Portuguese.
Duke Ercole had reached Pavia on the 4th of August, and had paid a visit to the Certosa with his son-in-law, after which he returned to Ferrara, where his presence was required, owing to urgent affairs of State connected with the Pope's death. Now he once more joined his daughters, accompanied by his son Alfonso and a troop of actors and pages skilled in singing and reciting poetry.
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